Cal Poly Land as resource

Using and caring for the land carries out Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing philosophy. Classes in crop and animal science, forestry and habitat restoration, irrigation and range management, agricultural and environmental engineering, work the land in harvest and cultivation, extraction and renewal. Methods and results of this activity are of interest to the whole community if made accessible and clearly presented.

Knowing and appreciating the land carries out Cal Poly’s other philosophy: learn by thinking. Classes in soil science, botany, ornithology, geology, geography, landscape architecture, archeology, as well as in painting, photography, philosophy and literature observe, interpret, analyze and contemplate the terrain of Cal Poly land for its embodiment of abstract principles and its wealth of concrete evidence. Our library houses a large array of faculty research and student projects about Cal Poly land hard to find and assess.

A faculty seminar focussed on Cal Poly Land brings together the widely divergent ways of acting and thinking represented in our colleges and departments. In the words of the Provost’s call for proposals, it illuminates "How different disciplinary lenses inform our understanding of a particular issue or topic," a step toward unifying a somewhat fragmented university community.

In recent years, "Place study" has emerged as a productive line of research, promoting collaboration and synergy by linking remote academic disciplines and crossing barriers between nature and culture, knowledge and feeling, theory and practice. Place study proceeds by acknowledging there are many ways to know a particular piece of land, each supplementing the others.

The concreteness of a topic defined by place and centered on the natural environment complements Cal Poly’s enthusiastic engagement with the "virtual reality" of computer technology. Tools like GIS and three-dimensional-modelling enhance knowledge and control of the material world, but walking a watershed or sitting in an oak grove can teach some things inaccessible through a monitor. Cal Poly Land balances teaching of computer literacy with environmental literacy.

In addition to combining many of the faculty’s strongest interests, a seminar on Cal Poly Land stimulates rewarding self-study at a crucial historical moment marked by the University’s centennial year. It draws attention to ways that Cal Poly’s land is central to its heritage and its future destiny.

As California’s population and economy continue to mushroom, these ten thousand acres come under increasing pressure for development generated by the desire for economic gain. At the same time, good land stewardship is increasingly valued and rewarded by government, foundations, and public opinion. Carefully assessing the threats to Cal Poly Land and the promises it holds--for teaching, research, recreation and preservation--will strengthen our motivation to become known as a Green University.

In a widely quoted essay first presented here at Cal Poly in 1989 as the plenary address to a conference called "Mapping American Culture," the cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan described the sense of place. "Place supports the human need to belong to a meaningful and reasonably stable world, and it does so at different levels of consciousness, from an almost organic sense of identity that is an effect of habituation…to a more conscious awareness of the values of middle scale places such as neighborhood, city and landscape, to an intellectual appreciation of the planet earth itself as home."* It’s fitting that our place in the world is where he presented that idea, since it is so rich and expansive. But this legacy also creates a responsibility for all who inherit it. As Wendell Berry warns, "Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed." ** The Cal Poly Land project studies, teaches and celebrates what this piece of earth can offer.

*Mapping American Culture, edited by Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner (University of Iowa Press, 1989) p. 44. **"The Regional Motive," in A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt 1972) pp. 68-9.