[DOC] Pedagogy and Human Movement: Theory; Practice; Research (Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport) by Richard Tinning in Arts-Photography

Description

In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland; small woodlands; and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape; he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes; stone walls; and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreaus open countryside; shaped by ax and plough; divided by fences and laneways; become a forested landscape?Part ecological and historical puzzle; this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions; human and natural; offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us; through the vividly recorded details of daily life; a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian; using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change.Thoreaus journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape; Foster argues; that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today.From the journal:"I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history; and I read it as I am handling it; and; last of all; I remember my adventures in getting it; while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge; perchance; or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed; and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."--October 20; 1855