Autumnal tides are called “great, king, or super tides” because they are more active and sometimes even violently forceful, pounding the shore! This is because during equinoxes, the sun exerts a greater pull on the Earth. The last few days I have been walking on beaches littered with unusual patterns of rocks and driftwood, and the pounding waves are thick with pungent froth—the decay of once vibrant kelp beds.
Autumnal myths often surround the great turning of things, the ripening of harvest to be consumed before it rots, the burnishing of leaves before falling into mulchy piles. Autumnal mythologies, stories, symbolism, and seasonal realities, all denote this time of transition from spring’s sunlit bloom, and summer’s abundance, to the softer brown-yellow-reds of passing into another part of life’s cycle.
I have always loved the autumn, full of shadows, spider-webs, early twilight with crows gathering into roosts once again.
This equinoctial time is essential for anything to grow again. The leaves become mulch, the crows and many other birds have fledged their young and return to their territories to forage and connect with community.
In my own life, this time has often held palpable mulchy stuff to churn into something new. Right now, that is certainly the case, as my own newly empty nest full of bittersweet contemplation, also offers the road forward into a new beginning. My last decade has been spent studying philosophy, ecology, and birds—how all those things fit together. If you haven’t read my dissertation…you can do so here for free. Now, my postdoc work turns, like a great tide rising, toward a new venture, pointing toward the water.
In my doctoral work on crow-human relations I noticed a unifying factor when considering successful multispecies placemaking, what exactly that will mean in the future. That unifying element was water.
All places, even deserts, need water. Urban spaces of the future will need to be built cooler than they currently are, and more resilient. Multispecies cities, ecosystems thriving, systems of resilience, will come down to an understanding of multispecies relationships, water conservation, reclamation, and regeneration, and creative collaborations toward these applications.
In my transdisciplinary doctoral research, I heard from several experts from various fields that one key to change is in changing narratives; we need new stories to guide the creation of resilient multispecies cities. We need new creative collaborations to design cities with many species in mind. Just as the tide now froths and pounds, and the trees slowly brighten into autumnal hues, all this is a turning to the decay, the mulch, the mud that holds fertile ground for life. The wetland, watersheds, spongy mud, and connected species that flourish with the life of water—hold a recipe for places of the future. In this season of turning, I am turning my research lens toward storytelling about the creation of resilient multispecies cities and suburbs.
Multispecies Media, my new nonprofit media company, will dedicate itself to the telling of these stories of turning, co-creating futures with other creatures and many cultures, and to generating new adventures in shared placemaking.