"In Amongst the Green Blades" Marguerite Holloway (bio) In his book Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (1984), biologist Edward O. Wilson reflects on a day spent in a rainforest in Surinam studying ants. Filled with excitement about how his day has gone, Wilson concludes, "That the naturalist's journey has only begun and for all intents and purposes will go on forever. That it is possible to spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree" (22). 1 That voyage around the trunk of a single tree gets at the heart of what I think is an important element of environmental imagination: an appreciation or awareness of scale. By scale, I mean here a progressive ordering of size. To me there seem to be three aspects of this sense of scale that can encourage environmental imagination. These three aspects are interrelated—perhaps even the same, ultimately—but I am going to separate them out so I can talk about them and explore them with you. 2 There is no doubt that children are obsessed with size, navigating as they do a world in which grown-ups tower above them and in which size often means authority. They want to know what the biggest thing is, the smallest thing—and they develop their own metrics. My son, Julian, has used our friend Bruno, who is about six foot two, as his unit. The heights of buildings, trees, elephants, and giraffes have been measured in Brunos. Two nights ago we were talking about how far a puma can jump: roughly three Brunos. Many children's books and fables deal with the very large and the very small: giants, fairies, elves, tomtens, gnomes, brownies, and dwarves. Often someone of child size comes into contact with these creatures: Jack, Snow White, Wendy and her brothers. What I would like to talk about today are some stories that are slightly different: those in which the reader is actively projected into differently scaled worlds through identification with the narrator or main character, and those in which the story centers around size—it is not incidental, or entwined with magical creatures, but rather [End Page 132] fantasy, whimsy, and magic are engaged with experiencing changing size or scale. The three elements of scale I would like to explore are projection, nesting, and simultaneity. By projection I mean imagining life as another, or from another perspective—and perhaps developing empathy and visualization skills as a result. A passage in The Borrowers (1952) by Mary Norton illustrates this kind of projection. Arrietty, the youngest Borrower, has finally been allowed upstairs and into the world of "human beans" by her father, Pod, and has ventured out of the house into the garden, where she wanders: A greenish beetle, shining in the sunlight, came toward her across the stones. She laid her fingers lightly on its shell and it stood still, waiting and watchful, and when she moved her hand the beetle went swiftly on. An ant came hurrying in a busy zig-zag. She danced in front of it to tease it and put out her foot. It stared at her, nonplussed, waving its antennae; then pettishly, as though put out, it swerved away. . . . Cautiously she moved towards the bank and climbed a little nervously in amongst the green blades . . . on she went, pulling herself up now and again by rooty stems into this jungle of moss and wood-violet and creeping leaves of clover. The sharp-seeming grass blades, waist-high, were tender to the touch and sprang back lightly behind her as she passed . . . [she] saw the cracks and furrows of the primrose leaves held crystal balls of dew. If she pressed the leaf, these rolled like marbles. (61-62) Arrietty goes on to meet, and strike with her new primrose parasol, a wood louse. And then, of course, she meets the Boy (the ten-year-old human bean), and the Clock Borrowers ultimately have to move. What this passage—and indeed the entire story—allows children to do is to imagine themselves tiny, to imagine what the world is down there, "in amongst the green blades"—which is just one...