Choosing the correct observational scale requires abandoning human convenience categories

Evidence

Mosses don’t speak our language, they don’t experience the world the way we do. So in order to learn from them I chose to adopt a different pace, an experiment that would take years, not months. To me, a good experiment is like a good conversation. Each listener creates an opening for the other’s story to be told. So, to learn about how Tetraphis makes reproductive choices, I tried to listen to its story. I had understood Tetraphis colonies from the human perspective, as clumps in various stages of reproduction. And I had learned little by doing so. Rather than looking at the clump as an entity, I had to recognize that the clump was simply an arbitrary unit that was convenient for me, but had little meaning for the moss. Mosses experience the world as individual stems and to understand their lives I needed to make my observations at the same scale. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Scale choice as perceptual method connects to ch4’s claim that attention reveals the middle-scale world and to Reading the Landscape’s disturbance reading at every scale.
• APHORISMS: A good experiment is like a good conversation; each listener creates an opening for the other’s story — a durable method-aphorism for observation.