Anticipatory proximities

There are many many activities going on relating to environmental awareness, celebrating nature and trying to do little things to care for this planet.  Many of these activities criss-cross upon a landscape of our physical wanderings.  Many times we do not know who has crossed what points of our paths and trajectories.

There are many technological solutions to "place" information within physical space.  This has been going on long before the internet.  Geocaching has been happening for centuries - people placing boxes with messages in certain locations for others to happen upon.  Cabins in the wilderness have had log books where people write a bit about their situation, their reason for being in that place at the point in time they're there.  Along the way, people have started to anticipate discovering these logs, and it has become a game of sorts.

And there are activities of placement that it would be interesting to layer - to take the points of intersection and be able to "indicate" them on a map.

Take for instance The Whale Trail - it winds along the west coast shoreline pretty much in some of the same areas where Coastal Cleanup activities are happening- not always necessarily upon the exact same beaches our lookouts, but sometimes within walking distance, and sometimes within an anticipatory proximity - meaning that there is the possibility, the potential, for people who go whale watching to realize that there is also the possibility to clean up the beaches upon which they are walking if only because there is a placement of that awareness of cleanup activities right about in the same place as there is that awareness of the ability to watch whales.

And yes, it might be said that we should be cleaning up the beaches anyways - or rather, we should not be throwing things onto the beaches.  But a lot of what is on beaches has washed up, and sometimes people call cleanup beach combing.  But there is an element of raising awareness that there is the possibility to do that one little thing along the way - where you are anyways - to do something that can help make that space you're moving through a bit better, a bit healthier, a bit more beautiful for the long term.

Maybe there's some activity to have people share information about a particular location - ice formation, rain or other weather conditions, or maybe the emergence of plants in spring or maybe the data has already been collected for instance about the health of the apple you've brought with you.  No one can know the ultimate value of information when it is being collected - but the collection of information is a first step.  It might leads to surprising insights, new awareness about changes or no change, and maybe even provide background for policy decisions.

There is "value of observation in terms of our being able to
inform policy, to inform decisions and to reduce uncertainty, and the observations are a part of (our responsibility). You cannot make
weather forecasts without observing and monitoring the
weather. You certainly cannot make any predictions or
forecasts about the ocean without observing it in a sustained manner.”