SER 3.0

 I wasn't able to get into the late morning session on the relevance (or not) of reference sites, it was overflowing from the too-small room and would have been quite unpleasant even if there had been any tiny bit of space to squeeze into. Someone seriously underestimated the crowd when selecting session rooms. Apparently a lot of us will need to go back and read the abstracts.

The relevance of the topic should be obvious; at an event where we're talking a lot about novel ecosystems and climate change, is a reference site a reasonable analog of what we want to restore? Since there are few if any truly pristine reference sites left, we're working with best remaining examples, and some of those aren't very good. Choosing a site is important, yet there are few guidelines on what constitutes a suitable reference site. As with much else, a lot depends on the experience and the insight of the person making the choice.

So instead I went down the hall to a session on the post-industrial landscape, in a vast lecture hall sparsely populated by about 20 people. There, I heard a fascinating talk keyed from Nietzsche and including among other things some fascinating photos of the Duisburg Nord landscape park. This flowed into a postmodernist look at the landscape. The speakers were Euro and with a dramatically different sense of the landscape than what we Americans are accustomed to.