Eco-Literacy 2014

View of Lake Delavan

House that looks similar to my old one

Delavan Lake Yacht Club where I attended camp

When I was first born my family bought a house up in Wisconsin along Lake Delavan. My family and I would drive the two hours from Chicago to Delavan and drive down narrow dirt roads until we finally reached the home. The house was considered to be located on the Island of Lake Delavan. The house was located in a somewhat secluded area with only 2 houses located in the block of land. Even though there weren’t many people around for me to play with I still enjoyed exploring the areas around my house and I still had my neighbors. My sister and I would visit our neighbors often because the family had a son who was roughly my age. We would either play in the house or go outside and explore.

 It is strange to realize that in my first essay for a course on Eco-literacy, an essay on home and belonging, I never once entertained the idea of the environment, or the ‘outdoors’, as home. I unearthed one of my homes, “the body as home”. However, the body as home is not just one home, but many different factors coming together to form a whole. Your body encompasses your physical being, your consciousness, your emotions, your memory, where you have been and where you are going. I suppose that nature is in intrinsic part of the whole of ones body, and how perhaps the body is not the only home. For there two things that are always with me: my body, and the environment.

Sunnyside, Houston, TX

When I was four, I started school and had to go to the afternoon session of Pre Kindergarten. Rather than spending my mornings watching PBS kids, I’d walk around my neighborhood with my grandma and our two-seat stroller looking into people’s trash bags, searching for aluminum cans. We’d carry big black trash bags in the stroller making it easier for us to walk around and keep piling on the cans inside the trash bags. If we had a good day, we’d fill two trash bags and come home to a rinse with the water hose and climb back into bed as we both watched the telenovela and had pan dulce with cola-cola for breakfast.

I started to explore my community and get to know the people around us by picking at people’s trash. I didn’t think there was anything bad with it. No one would point or stare. If anything, our friends around the neighborhood would already have separated the aluminum cans from the rest of the trash and saved us the time and effort. My grandmother wasn’t an American Citizen or Resident at the time, but she had to make money some way or another because my grandfather and her couldn’t support a house full of seven men and three daughters, plus a new granddaughter. 

I wished with all my heart that I could pee in the woods. Honestly, that was the only thing that ever made me feel jealous of boys when I was growing up, that they could pee in the woods easily while I could not, at least not as comfortably. I was proud of my girlhood from a young age, preferring feminine clothing (as in that made for female-bodied people), joining Girl Scouts, riding a bike without the bar from seat to handles, etc, but out in nature, camping and on long hikes and places generally free from the normal facilities and peeing in the woods was sometimes the only option, I wished I could be a boy, even if only for five minutes.

http://www.viralnova.com/beach-art/

This is really cool and it reminded me of Ava's art in it's impermanence and its connection to natural mediums/forms.

In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that "Fixation on place impedes a truly ecological view," that "we want ecology to be about location, location, location. In particular, location must be local: it must feel like home; we must recognize it and think it in terms of the here and now, not the there and then" [but that] "ecological collectivity decisively can’t be rooted in 'place'....'my place in the sun' marks the beginning of all usurpation. 'Place' contains too much “at-homeness,” too much finality, for the ecological thought. Localism, nationalism, and immersion in the ideological bath of the lifeworld, won’t cut it anymore…We need collectivity, not community….it must be a collectivity of weakness, vulnerability, and incompletion."

What do you think? Post here a paragraph of your initial reactions to Morton’s idea, reflecting, from the p.o.v. of an environmentalist, on your own investments in and search for home. We’ll start class on Wednesday with these thoughts….PLEASE USE THE ECO-LITERACY TAG  "English" on these postings.

I missed class on wednesday, so I took at look at the course notes and thought about some of the things I would have written/ would have said.

On Eli’s portrait:

*Kneeling but not quite… one foot poised as though ready to stand back up- reminiscent of movement, which characterizes Eli’s life and relationship to home/body/place/the environment ---> Movement also works w/ metaphor of taking the earth inside the self and letting it grow out; depicted by the tree which grows through Eli

The Posse Foundation Scholarship is NOT a minority or low income scholarship. It is a merit scholarship awarded to students who demonstrate leadership in all different ways. I am a Posse Scholar at Bryn Mawr College from Houston. My POSSE and I did not receive this scholarship because we're minorities or low income, we became Posse Scholars because of our hard work and leadership skills. 

Please share your support through the Bryn Mawr Community and also those back home to spread the word of what Posse really is.

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/16/262789593/white-house-seeks-ways-to-get-poor-kids-through-college