Often it is the little achievements in life, the baby steps towards the goal, that really make our life beautiful. I for one am a great dreamer: I want to do everything and change the world! And so dull things like weeds seem like small change. Then I attend a talk like Dr. Georgina Montgomery’s “‘The Charm of Oxford:’ Wytham Woods as a Scientific Site and Source of ‘Mental and Spiritual Refreshment’”, and I remember that the little things do matter.
Dr. Montgomery’s talk emphasized the “aesthetic of the commonplace”. In America, we have great wild sweeps of massive mountains and broad plains. Wytham Woods, a 1000-acre woodland in Oxford, England, is a backyard garden in comparison. Montgomery explained, however, that this backyard garden can be just as much a source of beauty and inspiration as the Grand Canyon. In fact, it is the very ordinariness of the area that makes it so valuable to researchers and poets. Oxford scientists can study the ecosystem of their own ‘merrie ol’ England’. Poets value the home-like feel of the woods. The point of Dr. Mongomery’s talk, however, was not the importance of the aesthetic of the commonplace, though it does play an important role in the argument. Her goal was to begin studying the “affect”: how the world affects us and how we affect the world. For instance, how does a scientist’s personal relationship with his study area affect his scientific studies?
I find this question incredibly compelling, and I think there are many examples of the coincidence of science and aesthetics. Charles Elton, whom Dr. Montgomery mentioned in her talk, is a great example. He spent years studying voles and mice in Wytham Woods. His wife E.J. Scovell, a poet, often accompanied him. Elton went on to study and write a book about invasive species, calling our attention to threatened native areas and species. At the end, he calls for us to value our native natural landscape. A picture of the rolling hills of Hertfordshire is accompanied by these words: “This landscape supports abundant wild life, both plant and animal; many of the species are local and interesting and beautiful; the farming and forestry are healthy and well-managed. Shall we leave this for posterity-of all species?” (Image 50, pg. 144) This scientist ends his ecological book with an aesthetic appeal, quoting John Muir: “ ‘To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be.’ Will we be able to talk like this in fifty years’ time…?” (pg. 159) Elton was clearly moved by his little backyard woods to strive to preserve them, not just because they were ecologically useful, but because they were beautiful and they were home.
So, what can Wytham Woods and Charles Elton teach us as students of the liberal arts and of the environment? First of all, we are reminded that the science and the humanities can and do live side by side, and that as advocates for the natural world, we have all the power of both beauty and truth behind us. Beauty, because the appeal of aesthetics, even the aesthetics of the Wytham Woods badger and the roadside wildflower, touch the human heart. And truth, because science provides us with hard facts which are hard to ignore. But even more than that, we know that beauty and truth are working together. The power of beauty is not just in its strange inherent ability to engage our emotions, but also in its manner of pointing us to truth. As students of this magical intersection of beauty and truth, we have powerful allies indeed!
And there’s more! There’s another lesson we can learn here: we don’t have to stop ocean acidification or end world hunger in order to change the world. Beauty dwells and works in the small things, and when we work with it, we take the little steps that will make a difference. Preserving one garden will help agriculture. And it gives us the same aesthetic satisfaction, a satisfaction from not only emotional pleasure, but intellectual joy. We have the knowledge of the environment in which we work, and the knowledge of goodness and growth within us. In the end, changing the world is going to involve changing ourselves: conforming ourselves closer and closer to the beauty and truth we discover. I am encouraged realizing the beginning of that change is the commonplace of my own little life as a graduate student in Oregon. Charles Elton, the father of ecology, found satisfaction, beauty, and inspiration in a 1000 acres of ordinary English woodland. Where is your Wytham Woods?
Credits:
Picture: https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/Image5.jpg
Elton, Charles. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. University of Chicago Press: 2000. Print.
