On this 5-week road trip (post to follow), I’ve been inspired to research and write an extended essay on how water has greatly shaped how our earth and culture and selves have developed. Devastating, powerful, life-giving, heck even holy rituals such as baptisms often take place in water.
What interests me is researching whether where, how, and with what power water flows has played as strong a role in shaping how things have developed as guns, germs, and steel, as argued by Jared Diamond in his now classic study.
I’ve begun to outline some thoughts on my nascent wiki at inverspace.com, which will eventually migrate over to this site. What I’d really like to play with is mapping the earth’s watersheds. If you know of any sites that provide this already, please mail me. Here is the start of an interesting site out of Carleton that provides a tutorial on exploring your watersheds (sorry, only applies to those in the continental U.S.).
And to think, all of this from a simple walk in the woods, where I pondered the direction of a stream’s unexpected transit under a canopy of verdant maples. I expected the flow to move toward the murky pond in the middle of a farm field downhill from the stream, but it flows away from the field before ending up in a nearby lake.
I dunno; the pursuit of this ambitious endeavor might mean going after a history, geography, or geology degree next. I mean, linguistics can’t be the end of the academic road, can it? That would be tragic.