Home is an Adventure

Eight years ago, shortly after establishing and while trying to explain this new blog, I wrote:

"That dream is no longer real for me, somehow, though the landscape [of the northeast] still has a certain hold."

Fortuitous of me, setting up a new blog, because recently the dream has become not just real, but concrete. We are establishing a new home base in the landscape of my childhood. And boy is that weird! Truly, I never thought to leave Colorado, but we are in full transition mode. We may not get there permanently for a while yet, but we are homeward, eastward bound.

Colorado itself has changed, and is now changing more rapidly than ever. My Foothills Fancies are changing so fast I can barely keep up. And now that the move is decided and retirement has come, I'm suddenly losing any motivation to keep up with the new version of my foothills environment.

Yes, I realize nothing is immune to change, not home territories and certainly not my personal self. I've weathered many changes, including some associated with the inevitable aging process, since last I blogged here (or anywhere). So it goes...

But as my circumboreal longings of eight years ago are poised to be realized after all, perhaps this is the place to record the new landscapes of life and, we hope, our adaptation to them.

Changing Places

For the last couple of weeks, I've been exploring plant distributions and climate, past and present, revisiting old insights and formulating new ones, some of which I'll be sharing here in time. We know that change is inevitable, but global natural change perceptible within the short scale of human lifetimes is an unusual, though not unique, phenomenon. We are likely in or on the very brink of something unprecedented in human history.

Anna Mills, at On Nature Writing, challenges nature writers to address this concern, and wonders where our best known of them stand on this issue. She also says "We need a nature literature by and for the laity," so the rest of us can help too, on a smaller scale:

Personal essays create a sense of intimacy and make space for irreverent, exploratory, self-critical, humorous reflection, even on a topic as nauseating as the cooking of the biosphere.

This week at Natural Patriot, Emmett Duffy addresses climate change during human history, at least the last few centuries, providing links to original research that suggests some of the side effects we can expect. I'm also particularly fond of his post from last year on The Nature of Natural, which discusses shifting baselines, a critical and generational component of this issue.

This week, I'm reading James Lovelock's book, The Revenge of Gaia, in which he warns us that although humanity will likely survive Gaia's fever, the extinction of civilization could well result from the changes ahead of us. Gaia can operate at a different steady state; life on Earth will survive, but it will be a different life. He shares some of his thoughts in this article.

On the immediate human scale, as our climates shift, what will become of our attachment to place? Will our loyalties shift with the ecological settings we recognize, or will we remain geographically attached to locations that grow increasingly unfamiliar around us? Will we come to care, as a society, even less than we do today?

Colorado now hosts a diverse assortment of ecosystems and habitats. Though its east and west portions are quite different, the mountainous center of the state is part of a southward intrusion of northern environments, a long discontinuous peninsula or island chain of boreal forests and alpine tundra. It's a fascinating place to be an ecologist or plant enthusiast because of this lateral and altitudinal diversity. Instead of going north to find trees and tundra, we go west (or east).

This year, I'll find remnant boreal forests just a few thousand feet higher and a dozen miles west of where I sit today. How far will we have to go in the years to come?

The Heart of the Matter

Some time ago the Husband shared a theory or viewpoint about the geographic location of home, relative to going there before you die and being there after you die. Where you came from is where you should return, he said; in some sense you owe that place the "stuff" of life once given you.

We both grew up in New York (me the state, he the city), far apart and unknowing. Over the years we've talked of moving back East, of the pull of family and friends and the environments that spell home. That dream is no longer real for me, somehow, though the landscape still has a certain hold. We've now lived in this one spot, one house, longer than all the years we spent in New York. You might say we're no longer adapted to life in that environment or climate or ... something. At this point, most of my component "stuff" is pretty far removed from that early source.

I think the dream died when I went back, years ago, and suddenly realized it all felt foreign, not familiar or home. The green hurt my eyes; how can it be SO green? You couldn't see ten feet in front of your face; the trees made a green tunnel out of the roads; how could you tell where you were or where you were headed? Montana doesn't monopolize "big sky;" I've grown used to being able to see... for miles.

But there is an undeniable tug.

Why CircumBoreality?

Why another new blog? Is this just another sign of inner psychic fragmentation? I can hardly tell you how much I admire those who have gone about blogging in holistic fashion, one central blog serving most needs or desires for expression. I have, thanks to Blogger's generosity, chosen another path, and blogs seem to proliferate at will every time a new enthusiasm arises. Here is one more.

As I see it, my "home blog" at Foothills Fancies is the nuts and bolts of exploration and interpretation of what I see and experience here in the nature of the Colorado Front Range. Romantic Naturalist, recently revived, tackles whys and hows of being/becoming this odd creature, the "naturalist." The natural world is central to me, and these three blogs revolve around that core.

Thanks to today's insight, CircumBoreality will take a different tack, still another angle on life and experience. Here we can expect more historical and personal conversation about the central issues of home and place, and how we are shaped by them. It stems, especially, from the sudden realization that circumboreal forests are my home territory, a realization that came from the struggle to write about a special place here in the Colorado foothills.

Someone, a writer, said "I write to find out what I'm thinking." For some of us, writing is a way to process and shape ideas, and that's basically what I need to do here.

Our "Fern Gulch" was different and unusual, but many places and ecological situations have pushed that button before. My years in Arizona left me loving the desert, but do I have a lasting attachment to the living beings of the Sonoran ecosystem? I've worked in the sagebrush steppes of Wyoming, the uplands and canyons of the Colorado plateau, the high alpine tundra and the tallgrass prairies and mesas of the lower Front Range. Many of the sights and sounds and smells of Colorado still resonate with me, but I was captivated by that one little gulch.

So what explains my excitement and enthusiasm for that particular spot? It triggered a sensation of home. Places where I grew up, and my ancestors grew up. A certain type of landscape is, apparently, built into me, and that's what I hope to explore here at Circumboreality.

Insights into the Nature of Things

One of the great things about being human is that you have the opportunity to keep learning about yourself, and even better, other creatures. A revelation about my basic nature cropped up today while I was working on a post for my primary blog, Foothills Fancies: I have a deep affiliation for circumboreal ecosystems.

Okay, that probably shouldn't be a surprise. Many plants and other animals have ranges restricted to certain of these larger global patterns—why shouldn't humans display similar preferences? Of course we do!

E.O. Wilson has defined biophilia as our innate tendency to be drawn toward living systems. It's perhaps possible, though challenging, to be evenly attracted to the entire range of life, from tube worms in deep sea vents to cryptogamic crusts on the desert floor, from polar bears to microscopic pond algae. Some of us are even attracted to life in fantastic or mythological forms, else why are dragons so popular?

But we all have a center we revolve around, and perhaps I've found mine today. I'll be back when I've completed that other post! And I promise I'll explain what this new blog is about, and why.