Thoughts About The Second Week Readings

The readings for this week were very different and appealing. Some like John Agnew and James Parson essay’s left me with a little confusion about what they were trying to say. I actually ended up looking up more words and researching some of the themes then actually enjoying the readings. In the Professional Geographer, James Parson who I really enjoy a lot of his work, had written a piece about “Bioregionalism” and “Watershed Consciousness”. I really had known idea what the true meaning of bioregionalism meant. What I got of what bioregionalism it is a rapidly developing new movement in the geography world. Peter Berg defined bioregion in the article as a, “geographical province of marked ecological and often cultural unity, its subdivisions, at least ideally, often delimited by watersheds (water divides) of major streams”. I’m not sure what to think about bioregionalism. The whole article really set no true answer about what this concept means to the geography world. I really enjoyed Parson’s last paragraph when he states, “Bioregionalism clearly does not mean one thing. It is not so much a fixed ideology as a diverse set of notions informed above all by sense of place. Most often it seems to fall somewhere between the reformist “shallow ecology” of the conventional environmentalists and the long-range “deep ecology” movement represented by the new breed of eco-philosophers….”(Parson, 5). I’m really interested in seeing what other people’s thoughts and ideas about bioregionalism or if anyone agrees with James Parson. If anyone is interested in this notion or idea let me know what you think.
I also really enjoyed the article “Where the South Begins: The Northern Limit of The CIS-Appalachian South in Terms of Settlement Landscape” by Wilbur Zelinsky. I thought Zelinsky was very helpful in terms of getting a thought process started for our project in this class. I couldn’t relate to him on what he was saying or classifying in what makes the South because I have never been there, but he did do a good job of explaining the Southern traits. He gave me a lot of ideas of how we can start are project in looking at house traits or identifying certain ideas and traditions that characterized on are location we choose. Also the maps were very interesting in terms of where the south starts like the mule and horse ratio map seemed to over the border where the South line starts.