Dynamism & Flow: Ecological and Cultural Explorations of the Hudson River
September’s intensive session saw the return of the field course The Hudson River Watershed: Nature & Culture of a Changing Landscape. Following the river from its headwaters in the Adirondacks, through the farms and industry of the valley, to the depositional zone at the end of Manhattan, Farley Brown, Carol Dickson, and seven students experienced the Hudson waters through wading, kayaking, canoeing, by sailboat, and by ferry. As they traveled, they studied various aspects of the river, including its natural history, its ecological health, its cultural and economic histories, as well as the legacy of aesthetic representations. The course was as dynamic as the river itself!
Kayaking on the Hudson with Hudson River Expeditions, near Cold Spring
On the final evening of the field component of the course, Farley and Carol asked students to share one or two memorable moments from the previous ten days. Responses pinballed around the dinner table: the Calamity Brook hike up a mountain tributary of the river, telling stories over our first night’s campfire, kayaking near so-called World’s End and the deepest part of the Hudson, meeting diamondback terrapins and learning about estuary ecology at the Pier 40 Wetlab in New York City, singing in harmony while weeding carrots at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, listening to indigenous voices through the Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape art exhibit, canoeing and looking for macroinvertebrates on the uppermost stretch of the Hudson…. The air filled with memories and laughter.
Students pose for a group photo during a day of service at Lake Harris State Park during a trip to explore the Hudson River
The diversity of these remembered experiences reflected the breadth of unique opportunities this course afforded: the opportunity to pull mayfly nymphs from a rock and examine them with a hand lens; the opportunity to see nineteenth-century paintings by Hudson River School artists and to interpret the landscape themselves through watercolors; the opportunity to work together with staff of Lake Harris State Park, providing a glimpse into how state parks are managed; the opportunity to collect water quality data and compare them with data from other scientific organizations. All enabled the class not simply to study the Hudson River and its region, but to immerse themselves in it, figuratively and literally.
The richness and depth of student learning was perhaps most vividly illustrated through the presentations of final projects upon returning to campus. Shelby Shartzer’s “Animals of the Hudson River Estuary” introduced marine fauna through word and watercolor; Izzy Kapitulik’s “Addressing Food Insecurity in the Hudson Valley” brought a three-part framework to bear on an assessment of Poughkeepsie Farm Project’s food justice work; Karsen Ponzer pressed a series of native plants in her study of “Botany within the Hudson Watershed”; through “Public to Private: The Privatization of New York City Parks,” Blake Lyons analyzed the growing phenomenon of public-private partnerships and their consequences for city parks; Lu Marion-Rouleau challenged natural/human dichotomies through through photographic diptychs of echoed shapes in “Taking Shape in a Dichotomous Landscape”; Sarah Tutt’s “Rewilding the Hudson” examined case studies of projects working to restore ecological functions; and Blue Orner created “Patchwork Hudson,” an evocative film that uses images of light, motion, and superimposition to consider various cultural and ecological dynamics of the river.