Relocating a remote catastrophe to familiar ground makes its scale visceral

Evidence

Imagine, advised the writer, a “similar outburst” centered in New York City. “In such a catastrophe all of Greater New York would be buried under ten to fifteen feet of ash and subjected to the unknown horrors from hot gases. The column of steam would be plainly visible beyond Albany… Philadelphia would be covered by a foot of gray ash and would grope in total darkness for sixty hours. Washington and Baltimore would receive a quarter of an inch… The sounds of the explosion would be heard as far as Atlanta and St. Louis. The fumes would be noticed as far as Denver, San Antonio and Jamaica.” — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 199

Categorization

• XREF: A transferable interpretive device for teaching the Columbia Basalt flows in the Pacific Northwest - identical to the scale-bridging moves fieldwork pedagogy needs. — connects to: Dates gain meaning only when grouped with the contemporaneous world — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 201; Impending catastrophe can register first as a bodily sense of wrong scale — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 283; Fictional clustering of scattered disasters counters the dissociation of dispersed slow violence — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 174

Broader Connections

• Impending catastrophe can register first as a bodily sense of wrong scale #expands (0.90) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 283
• Fictional clustering of scattered disasters counters the dissociation of dispersed slow violence #complicates (0.78) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 174