EcoLit ESem

The non-human roles (green cards):

a squirrel from Elizabeth's site-sit

a baboon from the troop observed by Barbara Smuts

Max, Peter Singer's dog in "The Lives of Animals"

a Pachysandra plant in Morris Woods

a piece of Wissahickon Schist, now part of a Bryn Mawr College building

The human roles (orange cards):

Winona LaDuke

Henry David Thoreau

Peter Singer

David Bohm

Terry Tempest Williams

The blue cards looked something like this:

Each group included a red, a green, and a blue cardholder. The non-human character got to speak first.

I did not get a full record of who was in each group, but here are some of the memorable moments:

A baboon fell into the river and was in difficulties. The author in the group (Peter Singer) preferred to wax poetic than to rescue the baboon. The class member playing herself pointed out that the baboon could not appreciate poetry.

Squirrel: Elizabeth is an intruder in my house: Attack!

class member: do you not like humans?

David Bohm: intruding my house Elizabth is

Max the dog: I have worth but YOU do not get to decide what that worth is.

Thoreau: Learn to live on your own, dog. Undomesticate yourself. Then you will learn your true worth.

Here it is! Thank you all for participating in the reconstituted poem exercise we did together. Phrases from the peom were taken from Walt Whitmans Song of Myself in his larger collection entitled Leaves of Grass. I encourage all of you to keep reading more Walt Whitman! I know two minutes definitely wasn't enough time to get to know the poems I handed out, but they are definitely worth spending some time with. Thank you to everyone for your amazing presentations as well! It was a wonderful semester and I look forward to having classes with all of you over the next for years. 

Every Atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you… and every atom of my blood formed from this oil, this air

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes the shelves are full of perfumes I breath the fragrance myself and know it and like it

I know that the hand of god is the promise of my own and the spirit of Fod is brother of my own

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing

This is the meal equally set, this is the meal for natural hunger, it is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I will make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away

I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time

So it was really an amazing process of how we decided on the theme. We came up with two ideas (campus site revisit and the sky burial) and did not want to give up either of them. As we worked on the project, we found these two themes could well be connected (not just the hawk!). Over the semester, we have been having a journey. In much of the texts we have discussed, the horizon is limited by who the author are; yet not few of them indicated applying their theory to all other people. Personally, I believe that getting to know different cultures is crucial in an academic discussion of ecology. From campus (our culture) to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Tibet (an unfamiliar culture) is a major move that we should take after the course. That is why we named the project "Ecological Imaginings from Campus to the World".

 I really enjoyed the pictures and words collected for us to review. Sometimes rediscovering is even more delightful than seeing it for the first time. I myself actually regret that I did not take enough pictures of my site, so I sort of tried to make it up last Sunday. But...too late to record changes. I could tell those materials engaged the class a lot. (Yeah! Thanks to Shengjia for her sensibility, class!)

 Sky burial came up to my mind during the brainstorming, because when I first heard of it I found it striking and venerable. I wanted to present something that may provoke people to think.

Our group used a skit to demonstrate ideas about how we, as a society, can change the environment.  We collaborated on two ideas, one of which you saw in class.  Here is a script of our second skit.

I (Susan) am the leader of a protest against deforrestation.  Behind me are several of our classmates, representing other protesters from the same organization.  Sara is a woman who is chopping down trees on her property.  Rochelle is Mother Nature, who is ambling about coughing because Mother nature is sick.  

Susan:  Hello ma'am.  We are from the Americans for the Preservation of Forrests Association.  We would like to protest your chopping down of this forrest.

Sara(in a Southern accent):  This is my property I can do whatever I want to it!

Susan:  But you see, you are affecting more people than just yourself by destroying this tree.

Sara: No one lives within a mile of me!  I am affecting no one.

Susan: Ah, but you see, by killing more things than you need to, you are making Mother Nature sick (gestures to Rochelle).  Mother Nature is already sick as it is, but if you continue to chop down trees you will make her even more sick.  If she gets too sick, then she will destroy us all with extreme weather.

Sara: Ah, piss off.  I'm going inside my house and getting nice and warm. (Sara goes into her house, the group of protestors goes away dejectedly). Oh, it's so nice in this house!

Sitting behind Rhodes with the clouds looming overhead was an unfortunate way to end my sight sit postings. Watching flocks of geese fly south reminded me of how quickly time passes, and left me wishing that I had appreciated time more. When I say "appreciated time", I'm not referring to my first semester at Bryn Mawr specifically, but rather to the appreciation of time in general. I don't like that my first semester of college is nearly over, and it feels like it has been no time at all. I realize that it's not ideal to fixate on every moment in life, but I'm hardpressed to find a way to savor my time--especially as a college undergraduate. I don't want graduation to roll around and feel as disoriented as I do now, with finals looming ahead, wondering how I got here and feeling almost as foggy as the weather. I have a strong desire to validate my feelings of dissatisfaction with time's passing with my freshmen peers, but unlike the character Elizabeth Costello, I do not find myself having the power to "think" myself into another person. Therefore, I'm left with a lack of affirmation, and a lot of studying that will most likely make me feel hazy and exhuasted. Looking ahead to break has also been surprisingly disarming. Looking around right now, I don't know how I feel about leaving. This is my home, but don't I already have a home? I'm in limbo, and am hoping to find some much needed clarity during the next month. 

The hawk swooped past above my head, and settled on a high branch above the path ahead of me. I couldn't tell if it was the same hawk, or even the same species of hawk, as the one I spent quite a bit of time quite close to, not far from here, a month or two ago. This one looked bigger, but maybe because the feathers were fluffed up against the rain. I find hawks hard to identify because they never look anything like the pictures in the bird book. Anyway this one was too high up to have eye contact with today -- but the feeling I got was of an individual, a particular hawk personage, coping with this rainy day, rather than an emblematic hawk. This seems to be what interests me lately: the uniqueness of each individual, of species other than our own. They are just as different from each other as people are. (I read in the Scientific American about some research into the personalities of individual fruit flies! Some are more aggressive, some more cooperative. The researchers mark each one with a different colored dot of paint in order to tell them apart.)

Also I'm interested in the uniqueness of each moment, of each series of moments, of each story...