EcoLit 313

I finished this just now after reflecting on my pre/post hurricane visit to my sit spot and seeing my family this weekend.

This summer
and these leaves
have kissed goodbye.

I didn't go into the woods this Monday morning, when I was spending the time curled up cozily in my apartment in Center City, watching the news of the "Frankenstorm," the "monster" Sandy, puzzling over the disconnect between my "hurrication" and the media description of the disaster swirling around me. Ever since mturer put the problematics of representation back on the table (naming hurricanes to make them less threatening?), and froggies315 provided that  "awesome" windmap for comparison with the wierd music videos the Weather channel was using for their live coverage, I've been thinking about ecological literacy (okay, well, just thinking about it more pointedly), wondering what more responsible reporting might look-and-sound like.

I may have found one example in this morning's NYTimes: it's about the enormous oyster beds, built up over 7000 years and now entirely depleted, that once formed underwater reefs around the shores of New York, creating "undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration...this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure."

5 p.m. Sun, Oct 30: Choose one "thread" to pursue w/ your classmates: How might we revise the remainder of the semester to reflect our shared interests? How do you understand/what questions do you have about the intersection of gender and the environment? (Or: what questions did Spretnak's article on ecofeminism answer or raise for you?) And/or what further conversation would you like to have about our other recent, under-discussed readings (Pollan on weeds, White on working for a living, Carson on pesiticide use)? 

I found this floating around on facebook this morning. It's awesome.

wind map

So, obviously a lot of us are scrambling to prepare ourselves for the hurricane and adjusting our plans to fit its needs. I think this is relevant to our recent conversations and that unpacking this might be interesting.

I experienced this less when I lived in a tropical climate prone to hurricanes, but people around here are either extremely apprehensive or extremely excited about the idea of the hurricane hitting Bryn Mawr. Either way, we are reacting to something that we do not understand in very typical and very human ways. That is absolutely acceptable, but sometimes it looks like we are trying to comfort ourselves by turning the storms into something campy, familiar, and non-threatening, even though a lot of times they are a lot more damaging than the way they are portrayed. For instance, we give hurricanes names. This potentially dangerous and uncontrollable storm has been given the name "Sandy." 

Naming hurricanes has always bothered me. Giving something a gendered name to familiarize us with something we don't understand and to potentially decrease the feeling of a threat is unsettling. Does a hurricane need a name? Does a hurricane need a gender? Weather forecasters refer to hurricanes as "she" or "he" depending on their given name, and I have previously seen yet-unnamed tropical storms or depressions referred to as "she" as a default (I'm not even sure what this implies).

In terms of topics we could talk about in class for the rest of the semester I think we should try having conversations about how all the topics and readings might overlap with one another. A specific example of this would be Pollan’s article about weeds and Silent Spring’s talk of pesticide use. Both discuss a similar subject matter, plant life that is unwanted/undesired by humans, and the possible implications to dealing with them (ignoring them/letting them grow in specialized plots according to Pollan and drenching them in pesticide as Carson puts it). Seeing how both pieces address a similar topic, I think it would be useful to look at the overlap between Carson and Pollan and discuss/compare it with one another. From there class conversations could also look other similarities we can find among the other readings as well. It would also be nice to see how previous readings we have looked at might have some implications on the subject matters we are currently examining, as well as contemporary environmental and gender issues (since Silent Spring has started to make us talk about such issues in greater depth already). Revising the course to have more conversations like these would be helpful because it would let us put many of the readings in context with one another and also look at the much broader scope that each reading’s subject matter might hold on relevant issues.    

I was a little confused by the prompt for this posting.  Part of the prompt asked about the direction we want the class to head in for the remainder of the semester, but there was also stuff about gender and the environment.  I decided to reflect on the conversation we had this week on text vs. experience.

Finally decided I needed to walk past the fence and see the pond up close. What from far away seemed liked a mess of greenery in the pond, maybe some over growth of moss, up close was this pic below. The photo doesn't capture it completely, but these plants break the surface, but wind way down into the water. In the pic, one can see the leaves within the water; I reached to see how far down the stems went, and they just wouldn't end. There was so much complication and so much depth to these plants. Some had leaves that were pointed, others had smaller ones that fit like confetti in my fingers that had floated up off the plants to the top. These small leaves were also attached to the stems. From far away, these were a bunch of green plants that had compiled or gathered on the surface, and after stepping up to see them, I saw that it was a lot more complicated than that. There was a variety of stems and leaves just on these single plants, and they were rooted in the pond itself, not just gathered on the surface.