Geo H Melville

Entrou: 21 de ago. de 2016 Última vez ativo: 27 de mar. de 2024 iNaturalist

I am a passionate and seasoned observer of the natural world and have been blessed to live and work in the Tucson area since 1987. I have hiked and biked many miles in all directions and vigorously explored the many diverse habitats. As one who has just entered his sixth decade and wants to better understand the world, it strikes me as almost unconscionable, just plain wrong, that I am unable to name all but a few things I see on a frequent basis. Why is that? I have all the Field Guides and have carried them on far too many hikes but often have struggled mightily to positively identify things with them. Over time I grew disillusioned and perhaps sadly determined it just didn't matter what labels were assigned. This cognitive approach sometimes clashed with the sheer enjoyment of being out of doors.

Growing up in the leafy suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania wasn't without it's charms, and I loved exploring the woods near our home. However, it took an inspiring college course on the English Romantic Poets - Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Blake to wake me up. Their collective insights and passionate desire to understand and appreciate the world around them formed the basis for what we see now everywhere - a surging interest by our species to spend time in what had previously been considered wilderness fraught with danger and darkness. I followed my heart which led me to the American writers Thoreau, Muir, Carson, Lopez, Abbey, Bowden, Pollan, Leopold, McKibben. Their observations and insights into this world were profoundly influential on my development. I blossomed into an environmentalist who sought out the ecotopian Pacific Northwest and the promise of an ecology vastly different and pristine than what I grew up with. I worked with the finest non-profit groups wildly popular in the 70's and 80's. I valued my time in nature more than most anything else. These experiences helped keep me healthy, well balanced and adjusted, a nice contrast to the stressful software engineering jobs I had in later years.

I credit Bill Bryson's insightful A Short History of Nearly Everything as the catalyst to do something more engaging about my lack of understanding about the world. He possessed an intimate curiosity about things, and in particular, how science figured out so much about our natural world. He was left speechless at the sheer amount of his ignorance and set about learning as much as possible.

I have to ask, if not now, when will I regroup my efforts to focus on learning about Planet Earth? Through sheer coincidence, I ran into a friend up on the mountain who told me about this app, and I knew the idea of crowd sourcing subject matter experts to help identify species was brilliant.

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