Chorography of the Chattahoochee Hill Country

This blog is a chorography -- from two ancient Greek words, choros, meaning "place", and graphein, "to write". According to Ptolemy (as explained by E.V. Walter in Placeways: A Theory of the Human Envirionment), while the geographer studies the earth as a whole, the chorographer explores a small part of the earth, examining it meticulously, reading it deeply, and crafting maps from that study. What results is a "deep map" (as William Least Heat Moon would call it), a "bioregional vision" (in the words of Kirkpatrick Sale), or perhaps, more simply, "a sense of place". This blog is a fragment of my own quest for a sense of place, here at the crossroads of Goodes, City of Chattahoochee Hill Country, Palmetto Post Office, Southwest Fulton County, in the upper Piedmont Province of Georgia.

The latest steps in my journey have been taken in the company of others living nearby, participants in a year-long series of evening talks and weekend outings into the surrounding region. The workshop series is entitled, "Exploring a Sense of Place: The Chattahoochee Hill Country", and is inspired by a similar annual series of workshops in the San Francisco Bay area. Here in the Hill Country, our workshop series has been developed and organized, and is currently being administered, through the Southeast Institute of Place-Based Education, of which I am the Director. The Institute, in turn, is part of Hill Country Montessori School, also at the crossroads of Goodes, Georgia. Our series has been sponsored by The Serenbe Institute, which is part of Serenbe Community, a sustainable, environmentally conscious newly-designed settlement here in the Chattahoochee Hill Country.

The goals and general format of our workshop series are detailed at the institute's website, http://www.southeastpbe.org/. The vital concept is this: that learning about a place -- in the sense of a deep learning, one that recognizes the role of the senses and the emotions, one that is not limited to facts out of history books, one that is alive, participating in the oral tradition, immersed in story -- this kind of learning is a step toward caring, wonder, community, sense of place. The result is a deeper bond with where we live, a deeper concern for the fate of the land, our home place. There are many ways to come to know our places -- far too many for a single year to embrace them all. This first year of the workshop series, we are exploring the region's prehistory, Civil War history, geology, art, gardens, botany, lichenology, herpetology, ornithology, entomology, agriculture, rivers and creeks, ecology. Together, the participants in these workshops will learn new stories at the same time as we write our own together, through the journeys we will share, and the experts and elders who will guide us along the way.

This blog will serve as a record of that journey.