I've always had a thing for liminal spaces. It started in college when I first heard the phrase in a Gender and Women's Studies course and was curious about its meaning. I came to understand a liminal space as a doorway - an in between that marks a boundary between one world and another. In college, I used this understanding to discuss gender outside of binary terms and my mind was opened to the wide variety of expressions that our culture tries so hard to squeeze into only two cramped boxes. Later, I applied my conception of a liminal space to the region between human and non-human communities. Ecology became my focus and I was curious about the root of human separation from the rest of the Earth's creatures. Is there an in-between, I wondered? A place where humanity blends into "nature" and the division between the two ceases to exist? What does this place look like?
During my second round in AmeriCorps NCCC, liminality caught up with me again. In a guest lecture on water conservation during our stay in San Luis Obispo, Regina Hirsch of the Sierra Watershed Progressive, proclaimed that "all life begins on an edge." She was talking about estuaries: places where salt water meets fresh water, encouraging biodiversity found no where else on Earth. This edge...this liminal space - between the salty seas and the freshwater streams - is integral to the life cycle of diverse species from amphibians to fish to algae and innumerable types of vegetation. These spaces are constantly in severe danger. Why?
Think of this, every drop of water humans waste is one less drop of water in the stream or the river or the aquifer. Every chemical that we spray, dump, excrete, etc. is one more chemical added to the soup already floating around in our seas. Every area of land drains into a body of water and every body of water is connected to every other through the cycle of evaporation and condensation. The world is linked by water. Condensation happens on an edge; rain forms when water molecules condense around the edges of heavier elements in the atmosphere. Rain falls and we send it to the ocean along with all of the eroded sediment picked up along the way. Into the estuary it goes. Into this liminal space, all of our junk - the chemicals (agricultural, pharmaceutical, industrial, etc), the waste, everything - leaving the land and entering the water where freshwater meets salt.
You may be asking yourself, "what the heck is the meaning of all this??"
And to that I say, "excellent question. I have absolutely no idea. But wait, I feel like there are answers here..."
So far, my answer is this: In the United States, we have very little respect for the in-between spaces. We are all about boundaries, but we value what's on our side of the fence 1,000 times more than whatever is on the other side. This threshold is a way of remaining ignorant and allowing environmental degradation without feeling personally responsible. "It's not on my land, why should I care?," We say. In Germany, storm water is not legally allowed to leave urban properties, whereas in the U.S we funnel storm water as quickly as possible off our land and into the ocean. This disallows infiltration (and facilitates future water scarcity by not letting water sink into the Earth to re-charge aquifers) and speeds up erosion, which decreases the fertility of the land. We worry about flooding in our basements more than we think about how to save the water for use in the dry season.
If only we could come to value the threshold - the estuary or the boundary between what we perceive as "our land" and the rest of the natural environment - then maybe we wouldn't be destroying the planet at quite as quick of a rate. If we valued the estuary for its life-giving power and thought of the entire Earth as our shared land where every individual action is connected like drops of water in the water cycle, then maybe we'd be less destructively imperialistic. Hmm...
This post hasn't told you much about my actual experience this round, but it tells you a lot about the lessons I've learned. On Catalina Island, my team planted native species to help restore habitats that have been destroyed by agriculture over the past century. Here, I learned that I'm very passionate about ecologically sustainable landscaping and want to turn every yard into a native-plant paradise. The second half of our round was in San Luis Obispo working with the California Conservation Corps on a variety of water conservation initiatives. I helped build a greywater system that diverts laundry water from the septic system to a residential yard for native plant irrigation. I also had the opportunity to learn about rain gardens and rain water catchment systems that "plant water" on site instead of funneling it somewhere else where it will be less useful at a local level. All of our work this round has helped me develop a goal to establish a sustainable landscaping non-profit that utilizes permaculture techniques and principles to produce food for people, conserve water, and reduce our negative impact on the Earth.
Okay, wrapping it up. My next round will be in Sheridan, Wyoming and my team will be working with Habitat for Humanity! I've never worked with Habitat before, but I'm very excited about the potential landscaping work that we might be completing this spring!
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading my rambling! I love you and you're beautiful.
P.S: If you've read this and want any landscaping done in your yard, get in touch! I'd love to help :)
