The San Diego Boat Channel is only a short walk from High Tech High.  Resting between our school’s residential neighborhood and the San Diego International Airport, the Boat Channel represents a sharp division between very different uses of the environment. It is a place of both ongoing natural beauty and extensive human industrial impact. The Boat Channel itself, once an outlet and estuary of the San Diego River, is now a concrete and rock lined embankment. This dichotomy represents The Two Sides of the Boat Channel.

Nature is not leaving this handiwork of man untouched, however.  The concrete pylons which tumble from the Boat Channel’s sides are crowding over with life. The waters of the former estuary now wave with plants and seaweed. Numerous birds, fish, and marine invertebrates are arriving from the sea.  The Boat Channel is an intricate mix of both human construction and nature’s slow, inevitable, and inexorable reclamation.

The questions the Boat Channel pose about our place within nature are meaningful ones. Is civilization inherently harmful to nature? Can we repair our broken relationship with our environment? Can we accept ourselves as part of nature? These questions are exactly the kind we need to ask in times of human population explosion, pollution and resulting environmental change. As such, the Boat Channel is the perfect site for naturalist and scientific observation. It is a place ideally suited for interdisciplinary investigation.

No single discipline or point of view can address the enormity and unpredictability of our influence upon the environment. America’s long tradition of naturalist writers have known this truth.  They have provided us with a framework for the understanding of our place within nature. Among the many, John Steinbeck, perhaps, addresses the problem most pointedly and clearly.  In The Log from the Sea of Cortez and Cannery Row, Steinbeck argues convincingly for “holism” a process in which we look upon ourselves and our place in the environment through the principles of complexity, connection, and compassion.

To accomplish this, each academic discipline represented in this Field Guide has an equally important role to play. From biology we learn of the great complexity within the organism and its connection to both living and the non-living components in its environment.  From mathematics we learn of organizations and chaos and we draw conclusion that take us from a cell to the universe.  With all this connection and complexity in mind, from the humanities we appreciate and stress the final essential element of compassion. As John Steinbeck, Jane Goodall, and others have shown over and over, only by having compassion, by showing care for our environment, do we save ourselves. 

- R. Buenviaje, T. Fehrenbacher, J. Vavra