For the next few days I am staying in the small town of Monselice. The town is nestled between medieval ruins and the Bisatto Canal, part of the extensive system of canals the Venetians used to link their republic to the Adriatic Sea.
The days here are clear, crisp, and beautiful. Autumn is in the air. It arrived late one night while I was sleeping in a small hut in Val Grande National Park in the Italian Alps. At 2 in the morning the Fohn winds from Scandinavia came south and forced my Italian colleague and I to spend an extra day in the mountains. He and I had left a larger group--composed of wonderful people from Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, and the Netherlands--the day before to try for another summit on the edge of the largest wilderness area in the Italian Alps.
The view from our hut by day was of lakes and valleys to the south and the stone, snow, and glaciers of the Alps to the north. And by night the bright lights of Milano stretched out below and the Milky Way filled the sky overhead and around us.
On our last morning, with the temperatures low and the winds finally calming we raced down from the mountains to return to the city, he had a PHD thesis to finish and my first Watson report was due later that day.
Explorations in River Deltas and Coastal Wetlands.
About Me
For the next twelve months I will be traveling to river deltas around the world as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. I am a human ecologist who has worked with plants, law makers, loggers, stone flies, and rivers in Coastal Maine; children, salt marshes, fishermen, land trusts, and Quakers in Southern New Jersey; and tortoises in the Mojave desert. During my year abroad I will be combining these interests and experiences by living in and meeting researchers, managers, and community members in the Venetian lagoon, Mackenzie, Ganges/Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Colorado river deltas.
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