The Science on the Path

A weed plucked at the side of the path might have found its way to the New World in a seventeenth century sailing ship. Scratches on a rocky ledge evoke colossal mountain-building events on the other side of the world millions of years ago that modified the planet's climate and caused glaciers to creep across New England. The oxygen atoms I suck into my lungs were forged in stars that lived and died long before the Earth was born. It is something of a cliche to say that everything is connected to everything else, but when you know one place well�not just intellectually but with the deep-gut knowledge that enters through the soles of your feet�connections just keep popping up. A character in Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces says: "If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another." Having learned to know and love my path in all of its local abundance, the light-years and the eons no longer seem quite so forbidding, tropical rain forests and droughty deserts seem not so far away. A minute lived attentively can contain a millennium; an adequate step can span the planet.

Notes:

A brief summary of the scientific concepts to be considered on a nature walk.

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The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Raymo , Chet (2003-03-01), The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, Walker & Company, Retrieved on 2011-06-08

Folksonomies: science naturalism