Postcards from Morningside Heights
A mist hangs over the City, giving the air a clammy chill. Nevertheless, the daffodils here are in full glory, the ornamental magnolias have their pink blush, and even the red maples have their namesake buds. Traveling here from Boston is like time traveling for a botanist, zooming forward a few weeks floristically.
On my walk up here through Central Park, I meditated on the wisdom of Frederick Law Olmstead’s design, the beautiful ponds and waterfalls, the ballfields and tennis courts, the bridle path with honest-to-god anachronisitic horses. There is a grace to the constant gentl curve of the paths- it feels good to the landscape ecologist to see the contours of topography obeyed- and yet they are almost overdone. The crowds seem to most use the long linear plaza that runs south of Loeb Boathouse, where the lines of impossibly craggy trees are breathtaking in the fog.
I work now in the department at Harvard that, in a sense, Olmstead spawned, and so I hope to learn something from him. To an ecologist, Central Park is not so interesting, for its flora and fauna are rather common, its role in protecting biodiversity rather minimal. And yet its role in providing a recreational sanctuary is profound, which is important for protected areas near cities.
I’ve been pondering recently a quote from M.N. Pokrovsky, who said triumphantely that “… nature will become soft wax in [man’s] hands, which he will be able to cast in whatever form he chooses.” To ecologists this transformation has seemed horrible, “the end of Nature” as Bill McKibben called it. Yet that is the world we have moved into, where the structure and function of the natural world will be what mankind wishes them to be, or accidentially makes them. What else can we ecologists do, except advise on the wisest way to shape the wax? And yet what arrogance, to think we know enough not to make some mistakes!
On my walk up here through Central Park, I meditated on the wisdom of Frederick Law Olmstead’s design, the beautiful ponds and waterfalls, the ballfields and tennis courts, the bridle path with honest-to-god anachronisitic horses. There is a grace to the constant gentl curve of the paths- it feels good to the landscape ecologist to see the contours of topography obeyed- and yet they are almost overdone. The crowds seem to most use the long linear plaza that runs south of Loeb Boathouse, where the lines of impossibly craggy trees are breathtaking in the fog.
I work now in the department at Harvard that, in a sense, Olmstead spawned, and so I hope to learn something from him. To an ecologist, Central Park is not so interesting, for its flora and fauna are rather common, its role in protecting biodiversity rather minimal. And yet its role in providing a recreational sanctuary is profound, which is important for protected areas near cities.
I’ve been pondering recently a quote from M.N. Pokrovsky, who said triumphantely that “… nature will become soft wax in [man’s] hands, which he will be able to cast in whatever form he chooses.” To ecologists this transformation has seemed horrible, “the end of Nature” as Bill McKibben called it. Yet that is the world we have moved into, where the structure and function of the natural world will be what mankind wishes them to be, or accidentially makes them. What else can we ecologists do, except advise on the wisest way to shape the wax? And yet what arrogance, to think we know enough not to make some mistakes!
