One Place Understood: Local Biology

So here’s one to end the blog-week: an unknown item of natural origin that many folks will have never come across.

Who will be the first to identify it correctly?

One notion that has occurred to me (when the Do-More devil is on my shoulder) is that I could pretty easily put together a “slide show” consisting of some number of familiar and unfamiliar objects from nature. A hundred  would not be beyond reach if beyond an audience’s sitting tolerance; 40 to 50 images with their attendant stories might be about right.

The reach could include wildflowers, ferns, mosses, trees, insects, spiders, and lots of somewhat odd details like this shot above. If you’re a regular here you have seen dozens of such shots and each is a story.

Beautiful (and other) Biology of the Blue Ridge: a photographic excursion into the bounty of living things from Floyd County, Virginia. Something like that.

This would be different than the “visual essays” I’ve offered over the past few years. I think such a program would be entertaining but also pleasantly educational. Not sure yet who the audience would be but probably the same civic orgs and friends of various libraries and maybe churches and PTAs?

The ultimate message would not stray far from my long-held conviction that if we are indifferent to the details of nature near home; if we cannot call our fellow inhabitants by name and appreciate their stories–then we will tend to be happily ignorant of and indifferent to the state of the natural world in our own back yards and around the world.

“One place, understood, helps us know all places better” said Eudora Welty.