Natural thoughts: Choas between your fingertips

The Chicago skyline, as seen from Promontory Point Park along Lake Michigan.  September 9, 2014.  Click on image to enlarge.  
Besides being common places for young couples to smooch, I believe urban skyline overlooks like the one pictured above are popular for another reason:  their perspective.  When we spend time in a big city, we forget about the world around us.  In fact, the rush of traffic, the shadows of tall high rises, anxious corporate executives blabbing on their cell phones, homeless bums shaking a cup for money, a loose bag of trash spilling out onto the street, sooty puddles filling potholes on the road, and the roar of helicopters overhead provide a perfect storm of congestion and stress that some of us come to believe is the world.

Yet when we look at all of this from a distance, we can start to put things in perspective.  All of the chaos of urban life seems to fit between our fingertips as we gaze across a green and blue landscape with the skyline miles away.  A scenic overlook of a city skyline can allow us to see the big picture of where we live, how we live, and the fact that we are a part of a much larger world that extends well beyond our steely urban ghettos.  In fact, one of the principles of comprehending ecology, or the study of the interactions among living and nonliving things, is to not just understand a working part, but to understand how that working part fits into the big picture of things; to understand the gestalt of how life support systems function.

For the next several years or more and almost everyday, I will commute to a forest preserve nestled in the quieter south suburbs of Chicago where I will surround myself with big Bur Oak trees (Quercus macrocarpa) at a small nature center.  Yet much like the adamant city slicker who purposefully surrounds him or herself with the hustle and bustle of a concrete metropolis, I am also putting things out of perspective when I confine myself to spending all of my time in the woods and prairie.  If I don't attempt to lay my eyes upon the big picture, I could forget that the urban landscape has direct consequences on the health and vitality of the naturalized landscape and vise versa.

Perhaps I could climb a really tall oak tree and see if I can get a peek at the Sears Tower, miles away as I gaze upon its rigid and metallic structure while I'm surrounded by the tranquility of a lush forest...  

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