Introduction

Introduction to the book: A Field Guide to Fieldston

 

This field guide is my senior project, created in the spring of 2013. My advisor to the project is Fieldston’s Green Dean and biology teacher Howie Waldman, who has an amazing knowledge of our campus and loves it deeply. My basic goal has been to begin to catalog and describe the biodiversity of the Riverdale campus. I have done this through research, photography, and exploration, all of which went into the book, as well as a website that will continue to grow and, I hope, become a valuable resource to the Fieldston community.

As a senior, and a student at Fieldston since Pre-K, this is my gift to the school. I hope that this field guide will make the Fieldston community a little more appreciative of the nature that is around them every day. I also hope that this field guide is just the beginning and that the community, for years to come, will add to it and adapt it as the campus evolves and we learn more about the natural history and ecology of our school.

 

What is a field guide, anyway? A simple definition is that it’s a book designed to help identify flora (plants) and fauna (animals) or other naturally occurring features such as rocks and minerals. It’s useful because it connects people to the place they inhabit and encourages them to enjoy the natural world around them.

 

Why a field guide of Fieldston? Because we have such a beautiful campus, that is teeming with life! There is so much here that informs our daily lives and experiences. And environmental education and place-based education are, by nature, progressive education. Our Fieldston education cannot be truly progressive if it is not grounded in both our place and our environment. My own education here has led me into explorations of so much natural history: trees and seeds and Indian Pond in pre-K, Monarch Butterflies in Kindergarten, the House Sparrow and so many other birds in 1st grade, the Puffer fish in 2nd grade, the Weasel and natural history lore of Native Americans in 3rd grade, and more, through all my years at Fieldston.

The Riverdale campus of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, was once a woodland, sitting on rock that is hundreds of millions of years old. Felix Adler’s vision turned this high point on the east side of the Hudson River in a part-wild, part-rural area at the northern edge of New York City, into a school that would serve the community for generations upon generations.

This land has evolved over the years, but despite the inevitable changes, the campus remains a fragment of woodland inhabited by countless species co-existing with a busy human community bound together by the ethical concerns of their founder.

 

There is one major drawback to traditional field guides. They tend to fragment nature into page-by-page presentations of species, which gives a misleading picture. Nature is much richer and more complex than that, existing as webs of interrelationships. When any part of that web is damaged, the whole is damaged.

 

This feeds into the most important idea that I hope the reader can come away with, despite the traditional structure of this field guide: the fact that nature, including the nature of the Fieldston campus, consists of complex webs of interrelationships, rather than simply discrete, unconnected species. Scientists at The Welikia Project, based at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx, are seeking to reconstruct the pre-European natural history of New York City, and chart a greener future. They coined the term “Muir Web” to describe their efforts to make visible the dense networks of ecological relationships that characterize nature.

 

The Welikia scientists named their webs of interrelated species for naturalist John Muir (1838-1914), who was part of the same progressive movement as Felix Adler. In Muir’s own words: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” Fieldston Lower School music teacher Colleen Garnevicus mirrored this truth in the lyrics for the FL school song: “I discover in nature there’s a kinship all creatures share…”

 

I hope this field guide not only helps the reader to be more aware of the amazing species we have around us every day, but also to appreciate the many webs of which we ourselves are a part.

~ Julia Worcester, Fieldston Class of 2013

 

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