A Brevard County Almanac
Your Place - part 2 of first chapter
I hope to show how my experiences getting to know this place have led to a particular type of sea ethic. You’ll see that I engage later with A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, and I unashamedly borrow this book’s title to suggest that that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Like Leopold’s book, I hope it’s inspirational for others to see how I’ve attempted to get to know my place, to love my place, to understand it, and let it connect with who I am and to shape me. The final chapter is more explicitly moving towards developing a sea ethic. There is a lot of writing specifically about our activities that are harming the ocean. That’s not the intention for this book. It am writing about why we might want to care for the ocean, and what are some of the motivations, values, and ideas that will guide us in how to make those decisions. Science can point the way to what the problems are - just look at the plastic.
I’m looking right now at that red plastic bottle, walking over to it, the sun is now illuminating it very clearly. It’s ugly. There’s all this beautiful sand, little shorebirds wandering about. Unless you really look closely, which I do, and see all the microplastics, the beach looks very clean and beautiful, and we would say natural. So, we can say, yeah, this is out of place and ugly. But why does it make me feel that way? How will it impact the creatures here? And we can figure out where it comes from and how to reduce its impact. Science can tell us the bad stuff that this bottle will do as it breaks down. But the question remains, well, why? What does it really matter? Does beauty matter? Is it out of place? Why is it out of place? What does that even mean? So, I hope to dwell on some of those types of questions in the final chapter. I want you to get to know the habitats and species first.
Then, in an epilogue, I give you some questions to be able to think about your own place. Maybe you are in Brevard County and you can literally go out to Canaveral National Seashore to parking lot number nine and watch the sunrise like I did this morning. Hopefully, a different plastic bottle won’t have replaced the one I picked up. But perhaps you’re in another place, maybe even far from the ocean. Maybe it’s near a lake or near a stream. Or perhaps you don’t have water nearby at all. How can you learn to love your place? How do you get to know the species and habitats near you? What might it mean for you? And so, the Epilogue is a series of questions and a short paragraph or two, trying to help you reflect on your place and give you a few thoughts on how you might move forward to be able to understand it.
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