Some of my young friends play an online game called “Angry
Birds.” The logo features what I would
call an irate cardinal. This seems
incongruous to me, since my youthful memories include Cardinals being the
signature bird of my home state, Kentucky.
And on top of that, my maternal grandmother translated the call of this ubiquitous
summer resident as “Cheer, cheer! What cheer!”
Hardly the cry of an angry bird.
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| Baltimore Oriole by Jack Bartholmai |
While waiting to board the train home from sharing some of
the conceptual and empirical insights from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study at
Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, I had a clear view of the Baltimore
Orioles team logo displayed on the (backwards) cap of a fellow passenger a few
steps ahead of me in line. If you are
not familiar with the team logo, it is a smiling, becapped Baltimore oriole,
done up in the predominant colors of that bird -- orange and black. This cheerful image somehow seems to embody
something significant about Baltimore.
I have had the pleasure to work in Baltimore for something
like 15 years. Because I live in New
York State, my visits to Baltimore usually last a couple of days to about a
week. I have always regretted that I
have not been able to live in Baltimore for longer periods, or to have
something more than a pied a terre or a room in a familiar if frumpy hotel
downtown. But the smiling oriole represent
some truth about Baltimore that I have appreciated since the day that social
scientists Bill Burch and Morgan Grove introduced me to the city on a very hot
summer day. They had been working there
on social science research, community forestry, and neighborhood revitalization
for roughly a decade before my introduction.
Why Baltimore?
“Why Baltimore?” is a question that I have constantly been
asked since becoming the Director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Long-Term
Ecological Research project in 1997. Of
course, there is the big hurdle of having had to satisfy the rigors of the
review process at the National Science Foundation. Without meeting that standard, there would
not have been a Baltimore Ecosystem Study.
But there are other reasons that we chose to submit our proposal
focusing on Baltimore in the first place.
Social Networks
First, Baltimore is where Burch and Grove had developed an
impressive network of interactions with government agencies and
communities. Such an accomplishment
required intellectual understanding of social processes, building trusting
relationships with individuals and organizations, and the commitment of
personal time and energy. Burch and
Grove were willing to share their accumulated “social capital” with me and my
biological colleagues in order to build an ecological research program in
Baltimore. That was a precious resource
and a generous gift. Without that, no
ecological research of lasting duration and importance would have been
possible.
Urban Watersheds
Second, the idea of the watershed was already an important
tool in community action and government attention in Baltimore. Watersheds had been used for decades to
organize and motivate important, long-term ecological research outside of
cities. It was important for us to be
able to use a familiar and tested ecological tool to address the integrated “ecology
of the city” – something that was untried and unproven at the time we wrote the
proposal in 1997 (
Pickett et al. 1997). There were already watershed associations in
Baltimore, and the Department of Parks and Recreation’s management strategy
recognized the role of watersheds. This
gave us a shared idea and even real shared places in which to work.
Agency Partners
Then too, the agencies in the Baltimore region were anxious
to help us develop new knowledge and data that they could use in their policy
and management work. Some of these
people had been working in environmentally well informed ways for decades in
Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and they already had a lot of excellent
data. We were hardly starting from
scratch. We could help extend that
knowledge base and supply more shoulders against the wheel of unraveling
environmental processes and complexities in the Baltimore region. Admittedly, it took a while to relax into a
mutually comfortable dialog. It was a
matter of complementing the knowledge of the managers and policy makers in the
region rather than writing on a blank slate.
Feeling At Home
On a personal level, Baltimore reminded me culturally and
physically of Louisville, Kentucky, the town I grew up in. Baltimore was a water city, with its Harbor
and the Chesapeake Bay. Louisville was a
water city – the Falls of the Ohio, one of America’s first transportation nodes
on the aquatic route west. Baltimore had
a deep neighborhood history; so did Louisville.
Baltimore had the horse-drawn wagons of the “Arabers,” African-American
merchants of vegetables and fresh fruits in the old neighborhoods; I recalled
the cries of the street hawkers in Louisville melodiously announcing the availability
of watermelons, strawberries and other fresh commodities as they guided their
mule-carts down Chestnut Street in front of my house. Finally, Baltimore and Louisville were both
cities built of brick, and the glow of that earthy material in the early and
late light of the day made for an irresistible warmth.
Finally, there was that combination of charm and formality
characteristic of the Upper South. In
many places in Baltimore, I am called Mr. Steward – a title along with the
first name. A very southern and a very
Black hybrid of politeness and familiarity that I remembered from my youth in
Louisville.
So the smiling Oriole of Baltimore’s home baseball team
encapsulates a lot of “why Baltimore?” for me.
It is a wonderful place to do ecological research, a town that is both knowledgeable
about environment and hungry for more and better ecological information, and a
place where one can feel at home.
Publications and Background
For More on “Why Baltimore?” see this new publication:
Grove, J.M., S.T.A. Pickett, A. Whitmer, and M.L.
Cadenasso. 2013. Building an Urban
LTSER: The Case of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and the D.C. / B.C. ULTRA-Ex
Project. Pages 369-408. In: Singh, S.J.;
Haberl, H.; Chertow, M.; Mirtl, M.; Schmid, M. (eds.), Studies in
Society:Nature Interactions Across Spatial and Temporal Scales. Springer, New York.
Partner organizations are also key to Why Baltimore:
http://parksandpeople.org/
http://www.baltimoresustainability.org/
http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/Agencies/environment/sustainability/index.html
Reference Cited:
