Extending the Senses: Loren Eiseley's "The Flow of the River" and the Platte Basin Timelapse Project

Extending the Senses: Loren Eiseley's "The Flow of the River" and the Platte Basin Timelapse Project

Tom Lynch University of Nebraska, Lincoln ASLE-UKI Conference Cambridge, Sept. 2015

Photo Mike Forsberg

Watershed Consciousness

"... the imagination is key to making watershed consciousness a potent force . . . --Lawrence Buell

Fractal Watersheds"Watersheds can be tricky to interpret on a map, and - like any good fractal - they exist at multiple scales. Jonathan Wolfe, Fractal Foundation

Self-similar river network from the Shaanxi province in China. Scale is 300 km across. Colors represent elevation.Image Bruce D. Malamud, Kings College London.

Platte Basin Timelapse

Central Platte Timelapse(click on arrows for both speaker icons to see timelapse and hear narration at the same time)

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

What I call "narrative reinhabitation" is a cultural-educational practice that consists of restoring the ecological imagination of place by working with place-based stories.

Visualizing the ecological connection of people and place through place-based stories is a way to remember a dismembered unity, to enliven our cultural and ecological potentialities--to reanimate the world. --Serenella Iovino

Many years ago, in the course of some scientific investigations in a remote western county . . .

You have probably never experienced in yourself the meandering roots of a whole watershed or felt your outstretched fingers touching, by some kind of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-line glaciers at the same time that you were flowing toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of worndown mountains.

Timelapse of Platte junction with Missouri River