EcoLit 313

I’m finding it a little hard to concentrate this morning because they MOWED my spot. Mowed it! All the wildflowers (and all plants, minus the trees) are shorn to the ground. Devastation! I’m exaggerating, but it was slightly shocking after watching the spot grow for half the semester. It must have been mown yesterday with the rest of campus. Why do grounds mow campus so often?

I usually try to incorporate the readings, or whatever we talked about in class last time in my posting, but I’m finding it a little hard to do so today. I felt frustrated through much of class yesterday both because, though I could see the connections, I felt that feminism and environmentalism were very separate. I’ve always had trouble with both ideas, maybe just because they’re so expansive. I think that “environmental justice” is a clearer descriptor than “eco-feminism.”

But back to my site sit, since I was at a loss for words today I decided to represent my experience pictorially. Above are before and after pictures of my site, and below is a previous description of my site sit after I ran it through Wordle.com, which “reformatted” it. 

Today in class (out of class?) I was excited to see how enraptured we became in our discussion of eco-feminism. I wanted to respond to it some way, and poetry usually is the best wasy I can see to do that. Often another poet voices the exact thoughts that should come to my mind. I thought this one poem was highly relevant to our discussion and notions of overturning systems of patriarchal oppression and turning it into something useful. So I thought I'd share it.

VI

Let the old man lie in the earth
(he has troubled men's thought long enough)
let the old man die,
let the old man be of the earth
he is earth,
Father,
O beloved
you are the earth
he is the earth, Saturn, wisdom,
rock, (O his bones are hard, he is strong, that old man)
let him create a new earth,
and from the rocks of this re-birth
the whole word
must suffer
only we
who are free,
 
may foretell,
may prophesy,
he,
(it is he the old man
who will bring a new world to birth)
it is he,
it is he
who already has formed a new earth.

                ~H.D. "The Master"

Today I collected leaves. Now I have autumn in my room.

Most adventurous site sit. Didn't stay in one place. Trees around me aren't very diverse, I wanted more different leaves. You can't always get what you want. 

By Sunday @ 5: initiate, or choose a "thread" to follow 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 pesticide use)? What other ideas have arisen for you this week? (for example, see Sarah's invitation, below, to dance, for a possible new direction...). And/or what "ecologically imaginings" do you have re: Hurricane Sandy? You're welcome to post stand-alone comments, but also please consider writing in response to what a classmate has said....

This NYTimes article caught my eye, mostly for its assumptions about predictability (and human responsibility for geological events):
"Seven prominent Italian earthquake experts were convicted of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced to six years for failing to give adequate warning to the residents of a seismically active area in the months preceding a fatal earthquake that killed more than 300 people...."

This post is doubtless going to be a little scattered because I wanted to sum up some of the thoughts that I had at the end of class today. Firstly, I was thinking about the ideas of ecology and dystopia as interconnected literary genres. I read a book over the summer called The Age of Miracles (See link to the NPR review: http://www.npr.org/2012/07/02/155098886/the-age-of-miracles-considers-earths-fragility) This is a strange title for a book which is exclusively about the end of nature as we know it. The premise of the book is that our interference with the earth had affected gravity, and thus slowed the spinning of the earth, causing a myriad of problems. The genre of the novel is science fiction (as per our discussion a few weeks ago about representations of the ecological crisis.) But I also think that the book could fit into a new and emerging literary classification, ecological dystopia.

Anne had shared this piece earlier as a reply to Smacholdt's Thoreauvian (Labyrinth) walk but I just wanted to expose this a bit further and share once again - Jeanne-Rachel Salomon is the creator of the Labyrinth that sits next to the hill in front of Rhoads. She had an interest in Shamanism, cured herself of cancer (not suprisingly) and states, "If one has travelled long enough and the distance between the onset of the journey and the moment of reflection is sufficient, one gains understanding of the journey’s meaning." A frequent visitor of the labyrinth myself, I invite you all to "be and become" more in tune with your lives and take a few moments of reflection and journey through the labyrinth and through life with a renewed awareness.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/alumnae/bulletin/mcbride1.htm#salomon

Every week, I have tried to do something drastically different with my posting. This week, I feel like I have run out of something different to do. When I was talking to Sara about this, she said that maybe that was the point. To keep returning to our spots until we run out of ways to describe it, and have to innovate a new way. I'm not sure if I achieved this when I went out to just exist in the ourdoors, but it was something very different for me.