EcoLit ESem

            Economics is a patriarchal social science. It aspires to dominate society by imputing value on goods that it finds important or relevant, and therefore manipulates perceptions of social value, and controls social welfare. Because of this, there is an abrasive intersection arising between economics, ecology, and ecofeminism. Marilyn Waring, author of Counting for Nothing, believes that there is a need for value to be imputed on unpaid women’s labor, but believes a fiscal approach would be inefficient and “totally dysfunctional”. The core of her argument is that economics has been designed to economically repress women, and that excluding women’s unpaid domestic labor from calculating national income is harmful in addressing the progress of our economy. Because the patriarchal nature of economics does not allow for a true imputation of value on opportunity cost women’s domestic labor, it cannot be considered a true measure of national income, and if remained unaddressed, will be detrimental to modern day society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViZBwbzOcC8

                I don’t belong here; that was my first thought during our first discussion of Ecological Imaginings. Adopting certain superiority over our ecological curriculum, I found myself to be above our dialogue about our emotions and reactions to nature, and the ecological systems around us. I believed that there was far more knowledge to gain from a class about poverty and culture (Poverty, Affluence, and Culture was my top choice while choosing a writing seminar over the summer) than I would ever glean from a class about how plants feel. However, I was eventually seduced by the engaging authors and ideas from the texts we read throughout the course, and by the end of the semester, was pleasantly surprised by the realization of how much I actually absorbed from the class. At the end of the semester I realized that what I had been learning about ecological relationships was a multipurpose mask; yes, the course molded me into a more informed member of our ecosystem as a whole—but it also tricked me into becoming a stronger writer in the process.

I started at a pretty bad place. I did not even realize how little time I spend with nature and think ecologically until I attended Ecological Imaginings course. In choosing an on campus site, I was the only person in class to adopt an indoor site and intended to observe nature from afar through the window, which I later learned in Terry Tempest Williams book, is an unnatural thing to do. Since I had little memory of nature and was not used to ecological thinking, I even compared the natural scenery of the night sky with the scenes from man-made films. Worse still, as an international student whose first language is not English, I was overwhelmed by the readings and had a difficult time fully expressing myself in my essays. On top of these, I was also dealing with culture differences (that my essay is always not explicit enough), my procrastination and my homesickness.

I could talk little about the first few readings, not because I did not read them carefully because they are talking about those new ideas that were higher than my normal thinking horizon, for example Bohm confused me by comparing the usual method writing with quantum, because I think writing and physics are incomparable at that time. I could only turn in a somewhat beginning of a paper for my first paper, simply because I did not have the confidence to write a paper at that time. Nor have I been used to setting time to sitting alone on  grass thinking how dependable human are of plants and other ideas or refelctions.

This semester is about to end, but I’ve really loved taking my classes. It is still hard to believe that I’m in college, not to mention the fact that I have just finished a college semester. Ecological Imaginings has certainly gotten me up to speed on ecology, and importantly, the ecology of college. While not everything in the class has dramatically changed my life, my perceptions of college and of ecology have changed, and I have been pleasantly surprised by a lot of the course material.

            The two units of the class that have really changed my outlook are the ecofeminism and the ecocritique units. Both of them have made me a lot more critical of how I view the environment and how I think about how humans interact with the environment and what we could be doing better. The ecofeminism unit has also been making me think even more about how women are treated in our society, and the connections between women and the environment, especially the similarities between how women and the environment are treated. In between all of our very clearly environmentally-related work, I really enjoyed reading Fun Home, and because it wasn’t like anything else that we read in class, the discoveries I made about it and how ecological the book is impacted me even more.

Apparently my papers have not been quite up to par. This has been holding me back. However, even now when the course is through, I still do not know what is wrong with them as a whole. Are they uninteresting? Poorly written? These answers do not satisfy. My online posts on the other hand feel lively, free, and each sentence has special importance—none of them are space fillers, none of them are trying to meet a quota. I don’t need three pages to say something interesting, I require a few sentences.

            So then the problem is…what? Why do all my papers suck? I’ve been told that they are messy, which is fair enough; I write my papers how I think. But they are not poorly written aside from being loosely constructed. I do have a particular way of writing, and this has been successful in the past, so what can really be so different now? This has been exceedingly frustrating. I have learned to cope by excessive thinking and ruminating on the development of my ideas in my head. If this course were solely about learning to think ecologically and holistically, I’d say I’ve aced it. Just these pesky papers holding me back…

1. During the semester, I was a present part of the class discussions. Some days I talked more than others, but I always contributed to the large discussions we had as a class and the smaller group discussions as well. I gave my opinion and interpretations about the texts we read and also tried to give thoughtful responses to the comments of other students who were part of the discussion.

I also gave my thoughts to my partners during the discussions of our essays each week. Every time except for once I was able to read their papers before class so I could give advice about their writing or just tell them what I got out of their essays (if I wasn’t sure what advice to give). These one on one discussions about my writing and my partners writing during class were very helpful and reading their papers helped me be able to read my own papers better. I found that I am now more able to step back from my writing and analyze it from a more distant perspective.

As I return to school as a McBride Scholar, forty-plus years after breaking off my last bout of formal education, my learning goals and tasks are bound to be somewhat different from those of my freshman classmates. Part of my job in our Ecological Imaginings ESEM was to begin to discover a new identity, in this odd situation where my age is more than three times that of others in the class; and to figure out how to position myself in relation to (1) my own past and future, (2) the expectations of my teacher and of the college, and (3) my peers in the class, so similar to and so different from my own selves of long ago, and of now. I have found this rather a complicated dynamic, to put it mildly.

Eco Walk (parody of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop ft Ryan Lewis)
By Zoe Holman and Claire Johnson with special thanks to Roux

We’re gonna grab some leaves
Throw them up in the a-air
I-I-I’m searching looking for a meaning
We are eco walkers