I’m working on making finished written products out of this material and the ongoing thoughts that stem from it. It’s a slow process, because school demands most of my time.
So far, there are three finished pieces and the draft of a fourth.
“Past, Present, and Future on the Little River.” An article published (summer 2008) in the newsletter of the Belmont Citizens Forum, a nonprofit group concerned with environment and infrastructure. It’s about the history of the Fresh Pond Marshes and reflections deriving therefrom.
“Mind Is Part of the Ecosystem.” A talk delivered at a conference on “Evolution, the Environment, and Responsible Knowledge,”at the University of Central Florida, January 2009. This is an attempt to synthesize some of the major ideas I’ve been dealing with — from Robert Rosen, Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Robert Ulanowicz, Gregory Bateson — into a single lecture.
“From Laplace’s Demon to a New Consensus.” A talk delivered at Simmons College, February 2009. A ruthlessly concise version of the above, boiled down into a reduction, with a different emphasis, this time on language.
I’ve been working on an essay about the “restoration” of the Salton Sea, water in the West, the American agrarian dream, and the stream running through Bangor Mall. The current title is “The River Owns Itself.” I feel it’s ready to submit, so I’m sending it to Ecotone, a literary journal that published my memoir “Fox on the Shore,” much of which is about our land on the shore of Prince Edward Island, Canada. (“Fox on the Shore” can be found on my other site, http://www.lowrypei.com)
My major goal at this point is to write a short book (ca. 100 pages), for the general educated reader, synthesizing the ideas I’ve been developing here. This book would have endnotes citing sources for those who want to dig deeper, but no other academic apparatus. I currently have an incomplete manuscript of about 37,000 words, and not enough time to work on it. I’ve gotten insightful feedback from several readers and am eager to keep working on this project when I have more than a few hours to devote to it. It requires the kind of thinking that can only be done successfully in large blocks of time.
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