Thursday, December 01, 2005
Leftover spaces
Remembering the retrieval of the piece of granite curbstone from the weeds behind the parking lot - actually the end of a very small wood - prompted me to renew an online quest I've had in mind for some time. All over the place, in our urban and suburban areas, are small little bits of semi-wilderness that lie in between built places: unbuildable areas between railroad tracks and roads, bits of wetland between the parking lots of suburban office parks, isolated areas cut off by highway exit ramps, and so on. And surely, I thought, in this great nation of ours, somebody is studying the ecology of places like this.
Bingo! Kevin Anderson, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Texas and Coordinator of the City of Austin Center for Environmental Research, is the first one I found. Check out what he has to say about the area around sewage treatment ponds in Austin.
Bingo! Kevin Anderson, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Texas and Coordinator of the City of Austin Center for Environmental Research, is the first one I found. Check out what he has to say about the area around sewage treatment ponds in Austin.
That birds and birdwatchers are drawn to sewage ponds is a recognized phenomenon that appears consistently in the historical records of ornithological journals. Hornsby Bend is no exception and is the most popular birdwatching site in the Austin area. It was bird-loving geographers who introduced me to the site, but it was my own holistic inclinations, coupled with my boyhood experience of marginal nature, that led me to explore the broader ecological and social context of Hornsby Bend. I found a place of surprising ecological diversity. I found a place utilized by its low-income neighbors for fishing and hunting - a kind of American urban commons. I found a long history of usage of Hornsby Bend as an informal field trip site for area teachers. In short, I found a "place" rather than site labeled on the map, "sewage ponds".
