A trail signpost in the French countryside. Image Anthony Nelzin-Santos.
Pérouges (FR), 2022.09.

Where you at?

“Where you at?” That’s what i want to ask you for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival. It’s also the title of “a self-scoring test on basic environmental perception of place” that opened the Winter ’81 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, a small publication that was born out of the Whole Earth Catalog. The quiz’s twenty questions, compiled by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley, are as follows:

  1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
  2. How many days till the moon is full? (Slack of two days allowed.)
  3. What soil series are you standing on?
  4. What was the total rainfall in your area last year (July–June)? (Slack: 1″ for every 20″.)
  5. When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
  6. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you?
  7. Name five native edible plants in your region and their season(s) of availability.
  8. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?
  9. Where does your garbage go?
  10. How long is the growing season where you live?
  11. On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?
  12. When do the deer rut in your region, and when are the young born?
  13. Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?
  14. Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area.
  15. What is the land use history of where you live?
  16. What primary ecological event/process influenced the land form where you live? (Bonus special: what’s the evidence?)
  17. What species have become extinct in your area?
  18. What are the major plant associations in your region?
  19. From where you’re reading this, point north.
  20. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?

The authors trust you to answer honestly, though they note that if you “fudge, cheat, or elude”, you’ll learn something about where you’re at too. The scoring scale is cheekily blunt:

  • 0–3: You have your head up your ass.
  • 4–7: It’s hard to be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all.
  • 8–12: A fairly firm grasp of the obvious.
  • 13–16: You’re paying attention.
  • 17–19: You know where you’re at.
  • 20: You not only know where you’re at, you know where it’s at.

The questions are obviously US-biased, but the first time i tried to answer them, i was relieved to have “a fairly firm grasp of the obvious” about my little corner of the French countryside. Now? I might know the direction of the dominant winds1 and be able to point north, but i couldn’t tell you anything of substance about the city i’ve been living in for the last 18 years. “The quiz is culture bound”, the authors write, “favoring those people who live in the country over city dwellers”.

That’s precisely why i think “city dwellers” should pick a question and try to answer it as exhaustively as possible. And then another one. And another one. Some questions will feel foreign, but tracing your tap water back to its source and your rubbish wherever it ends up will teach you more about your city than any guidebook. And if you’re one of “those people who live in the country”, you’ll learn how many of the hedgerows someone planted and the pastures someone cleared.

Answer one question or all twenty, tweak them like Kevin Kelly did, or ditch them and write your own take on “Where you at?”. Go wild! To participate, simply publish a blog post on the topic before the end of November. Please share its link by e-mail, on Mastodon, on Bluesky or on Signal. I’ll list the submissions on this page as i receive them.