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My daily interactions with Davidson’s campus differ sharply from my experience of viewing the collection of blueprints and maps that the librarians displayed for our class last week. The blueprints and maps demonstrate the way the college has appropriated the environment to suit part of its purpose: to provide a liberal arts education to students in a residential community. Walking across campus necessitates either climbing or descending a hill and seeing trees and lawns, reminders of the natural environment we inhabit. The plans and maps of the campus, meanwhile, present a conflicting understanding of the campus. In this bird’s eye view, the campus acts as an inaccessible, tamed, and unnatural environment compared to the experience of walking across it, which fosters an appreciation of its natural elements. Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” explores the discontinuity between a city planner’s experience of a city versus a person who walks through the city’s streets. He addresses this in the context of a city, and I have tried to do the same for Davidson’s campus.
The seemingly natural parts of campus—Lake Campus and the Cross Country Trails—were manmade and planted by humans, respectively. Even though humans had a role in these two places and in the campus as a whole, those spaces are still natural environments. The inclusion of trees and lawns (however perfectly manicured) makes the campus a natural space. Human involvement in the process does not preclude a space from being natural, but it does alter the degree to which the space is natural. Old-growth forests and vast, uninhabited plains are certainly wilder and more natural. The college has necessarily tamed the natural environment of the campus but the campus can still be called natural (though not wild).
Despite these efforts at taming nature on campus, nature’s wildness has punctuated Davidson’s history. The librarian mentioned how the 1989 Hurricane Hugo destroyed many of Davidson’s trees, the president’s office corresponded with a landscaping company about the blight affecting the elm trees on campus during the early 1920s, and the green inchworms emerge every spring to threaten the ability of students to walk across campus without having worms attach to their hair. These examples demonstrate how natural events can bring unwelcome wildness to Davidson, acting beyond the ability of the college to control the environment.
The college has controlled the natural environment in the case of water. One of the blueprints showed a plan for a reflecting pool in front of Chambers. The librarian said there used to be a small lake on campus (as a result of a dammed creek). Now, there is a fountain with a small bit of water next to Sloane, but no large bodies of water remain on our main campus. I wonder if our everyday experiences on campus would be significantly different if we had a body of water on our main campus. Maybe it is not so easy to tame compared to trees and lawns.