Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Edge Effects

1/21/2019

4 Comments

 
In ecology, the term edge effects refers to phenomena at the boundary between two different habitats, such as woodland/meadow or pond/shore. I first learned about edge effects in work for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a meeting place of sand dunes, wetlands, prairie, forest, oak savanna, and Lake Michigan beach. More than a thousand plant species at IDNL range from orchids and prickly pear cactus to bearberry of the Arctic tundra.

Magic flourishes and sparks fly at the boundaries. How many folktales begin with a little old couple who live in a cottage by the edge of the forest or sea? How many human conflicts erupt at cultural borderlands? Some years back I explored edge effects between nomadic and settler cultures, where systems based on kinship clash with systems based on territory.

In my writing about polio eradication, the main story begins in the 1980s on the boundary between a private service organization (Rotary) and multinational agencies (World Health Organization, UNICEF). They took years to learn to work together and trust each other. Now polio eradication efforts in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria focus on the boundary between modern epidemiology and some of the world’s most traditional cultures.

​My historical fiction-in-progress is set on an eastern Mediterranean island on the border of Europe and Asia in the late fifteenth century, the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Edge effects among Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims create a breeding ground for tensions galore.
4 Comments
Rebecca link
1/21/2019 01:37:51 pm

The edge effect makes it sound natural, even expected. Although, it's easier for me to accept what happens when it is plants fighting it out rather than humans. Great when we humans can positively influence one another at the edges, rather than what happened between the Catholics and Jews in Spain in the 15th century! -R

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Sarah link
1/21/2019 04:49:03 pm

The positive influences (i.e. increasing diversity) are at least as natural as the negative (duking it out) influences, I believe, in the plant and animal worlds and the world of human cultures. In nature, that's where we find enormous diversity like that in the Indiana Dunes. Among humans, there's cross-cultural exchange such as you've written about between the hemispheres, which add so much variety to our diets. And don't many of the instruments etc. we think of as Spanish show the medieval Moorish influence/

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Rebecca link
1/25/2019 11:11:28 pm

Yes, good point. Lovely stringed instruments like guitars evolved at the crux of two cultures, Spanish and North African/Middle Eastern.

Sarah link
1/26/2019 09:01:14 am

Rebecca, I wonder if the reason international travel or study abroad can be so rich is that it places travelers/students at a personal borderland between their culture of origin and the culture in which they are newly immersing themselves..

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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