Welcome to Dog Parkology, a show that looks at the concept of dog parks through our relationship with dogs, with each other, and with the land. In the previous episode of the series, we explored how dog parks can build communities that are more tight knit, safer, and welcoming. The land we all share, our environment, is not always considered as much as it deserves to be. Many people seem to have lost their excitement and appreciation for nature. We take it for granted.
The constant pull of distractions from our devices has made it more of a challenge for people just to go outside. The digital age has presented endless ways to be tempted into virtual consumption. Whether it be social media, streaming services, online shopping, and more, the attention economy competes for every spare second. Even when we do go outside, it can be hard to focus on what's in front of us.
We still might be distracted by fear of missing out on what's happening elsewhere, or just feeling like we're not being productive with our time. As our world has changed, we as humans have grown disconnected from the natural world, but the non human species around us, like our dogs, don't share our blind spots. And in this way, we can take a lesson from our dogs.
I love being plugged into The communication of the natural world, the trees talking to the wind, and the wind talking to the birds, and the birds talking to my dog, and the dog talking to me. I'm part of that circle. This is outdoor writer Annette McGivney, who has found that dogs are a transformational key to unlocking our environment. Only for the most recent sliver of our species history have we been living indoors.
When I'm in nature, I'm actually plugging in epigenetically to what my body needs most and my nervous system needs most, even though we've forgotten about that. Humans, it seems like we're prone to disconnecting ourselves, even if we're in nature. You're not even noticing the beauty of where we are, you're just So in your head and totally caught up in talking to each other. So having a dog with me helps to remind me how to enjoy nature.
When you're with a dog, you're like, what is in those pine needles and look at that bird and that squirrel and what's over here. And so you're totally in the moment. I want to focus on the beauty and my dogs show me how to do that. When we are in nature with our dogs, We are the students and the dogs are the teachers. It's up to us to take the initiative to tap back into the natural world. For dog parkology, we are looking not only at officially designated dog parks, but a broader definition.
Anytime you step outside your home with your dog, you have an opportunity to find points of connection along the way. Whether you're going for hikes in the woods or running on a beach, we're not limited to the traditional fenced in areas as long as you're making sure to be responsible and respectful of others when having your dog off leash. These kinds of dog parkology moments can make you think about your surroundings in a new way. Even when you're living in a major city.
I think we have this concept of nature as being synonymous with grand, open, majestic spaces. You ask people to think of wilderness, and they think of Yosemite, and Yellowstone, and Zion. You don't think of your garden or like the street around your house. There's wilderness there too. This is Ed Young, a British American science journalist, whose coverage of the pandemic in the Atlantic won him a Pulitzer Prize.
Ed's recent book, An Immense World, examines the sensory realm of different animals. While writing the book, he got a new dog. The experience of having a canine companion helped Ed understand his work. My dog is a Corgi. His name is Typo. He's two years old. Whenever we go for walks, it's almost a sort of meditative experience. Typo likes to sniff. He likes to explore. Dogs use their nose to adventurously investigate the world around them.
Every creature perceives the world in its own unique way. And that way might be very, very different from what we humans experience. I think a lot of dog owners, because of our tendency to anthropomorphize, see in their dogs a reflection of themselves. And that's totally fine. But I think that misses something profound. I know that Typo's experience of the world is not my own. I know he senses things very differently. He thinks about the world in a very different way.
And I love leaning into that difference. It makes me constantly curious about what he's thinking or what he's perceiving. Typo enriches my life. It makes me think about the world in a more spiritual way. A lot of my work is informed by these values of curiosity and empathy. I think both of these are muscles that you can learn to flex and, you know, thinking about Typo and the way he senses the world allows me to flex both of them.
They think that through these informed imaginative leads, we can be closer to nature, even in our normal, everyday existence. While being out with Typo, who's able to recognize so many types of information through his nose with heightened perception, it has changed the way Ed looks at his environment.
And I think that's important because if we don't feel that connection to nature, if we only think of it as a remote and distant thing that we might tap into on a once in a lifetime vacation, then We don't feel the impetus to care for it if we don't feel a connection to something. I don't think we feel our responsibilities as stewards and guardians of it. And I hope that all of our interactions with the animals closest to us make us feel a little bit closer to the entire natural world.
Even in the smallest details and moments, among trees, among plants, other animals, we then develop a greater sense of place. If we can bridge this gap to the living world, we can open our lives in new and unexpected ways. When lockdown happened in 2020, there was this mass re evaluation, I think done by a lot of different people, about what is my relationship to this place?
This is Anjali Rao, who we met in our last episode, an architectural journalist and critic whose work explores connections to land. We saw people leaving cities. deciding that the relationship that they had to the city was one of amenities characterized by access to museums and concerts and theater and shopping and not necessarily by a relationship with the land itself. I did the re evaluation too, living in Chicago.
I had my trusty 100 year old dog moving through the world with her in a way that could be slower. We could take longer walks and it was a different way of experiencing what it was like to even have an animal to reevaluate our relationship amongst an increasingly wilding world. What I found was a connection like observing unusual flowers and weeds that so often just get mowed over but were neglected during the pandemic. Those types of things re enchanted me with living here.
It was Anjali who introduced us to the concept of re enchantment, which inspired the theme of this episode. Both Matthew Gandy and the essayist Jennifer Woolf write about this idea that through a different type of ecological relationship with land, we re enchant people with the city around them. People tend to see parkland as being productive when it's really well manicured, beautifully cultivated public gardens and parks.
The kind of Eurocentric understanding of, we go to the gardens to be flinners and to look at people. Oftentimes, landscape architects, city officials, they think of productive in terms of an anthropocentric lens, that we center human experiences. They are productive because they give kids a place to hang out and sit in the shade. They're productive because they host family reunions. But a lot of parks also encourage all types of ecological urban life.
They host wildlife like birds and foxes and possums. I bond with my neighbors when we see raccoons and skunks and everyone's screaming or running away or you're letting your little dog loose in this garden and chasing him around and letting him romp through the flowers. In Millennium Park in Chicago, there was a family of foxes that moved in. People were so excited. It was too cute, just heartbreakers, all of them.
We're so excited when this happens, and yet we do everything in our capacity to ensure that doesn't happen. And so when we think about the consequences of neglecting animals and the animal presence in our cities, there are so many benefits to thinking about dogs as being an intermediary between the more wild species. Dog parks can be a piece of public infrastructure that accommodates that idea of non human residents.
This can bring out our greater empathy for our ecosystems and all living things with which we share them. Designing for non human species can be one of several mechanisms that can upend our extractive relationship with land and property. It's a way of removing ourselves from the conventional ways of understanding what cities are for. It's actually reframing that completely. It's this way of reorienting yourself in the world, understanding you're a part of something much bigger.
It's a moment of clarity and a moment of connection for a lot of people. That isn't just like we need social spaces, but actually we need to have a totally different relationship with the land that houses us. Dog parks offer people a way to appreciate and connect with the reality of your ecosystem in a way that is more meaningful. All of these things re enchant us with the places that we live and beckon us to love them and beckon us to care for them.
We started this series with a historical mention of how the name of the first dog park in Berkeley paid tribute to the Ohlone tribe. who had been on the land originally. In Marion Schwartz's book, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas, she writes, Native Americans understood that even though dogs resided in the human camp, they had a close kinship with coyotes and wolves. Because of these relationships, dogs occupied and operated on several levels.
They connected the wild and the tame, and they joined nature and culture. Dogs have a magical ability to remind us that we are part of the natural world and should strive to protect it. Time with your dog at any type of dog park make us feel more connected to and accountable to the earth around us. Thank you for listening to this episode of Dog Parkology. I'm Jenna Blum, your narrator.
This show was created by As It Should Be Productions, the creators of Dog Save the People and Dog Walk Meditation podcasts, with executive producer Scott Benaglio. And producer and editor, Jack Summer. Be sure to check out the entire season of Dog Park Allergy by following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow us on social media at Dog Park and Dog Save the People. You can.
Visit our website, dog park college.com to learn more about the show and to buy custom designed merch like our T-shirts. If you know of any great dog parks in your area. or you've created your own dog parkology moment, you can email us at dogparkology at gmail dot com. We'd love to hear about your experience, and if you've enjoyed listening to this episode, please share it with a friend.
Enjoy a trip to a dog park today, or wherever you go with your dog, to appreciate nature, meet others, and make a better life together.