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EcoLit ESem
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POST YOUR THOUGHTS HERE
Welcome to the on-line conversation for Ecological Imaginings, an Emily Balch Seminar offered in Fall 2012 @ Bryn Mawr College, in which we are re-thinking the evolving nature of representation, with a focus on language as a link between natural and cultural ecosystems.
This is an interestingly different kind of place for writing, and may take some getting used to. The first thing to keep in mind is that it's not a site for "formal writing" or "finished thoughts." It's a place for thoughts-in-progress, for what you're thinking (whether you know it or not) on your way to what you think next. Imagine that you're just talking to some people you've met. This is a "conversation" place, a place to find out what you're thinking yourself, and what other people are thinking. The idea here is that your "thoughts in progress" can help others with their thinking, and theirs can help you with yours.
Who are you writing for? Primarily for yourself, and for others in our course. But also for the world. This is a "public" forum, so people anywhere on the web might look in. You're writing for yourself, for others in the class, AND for others you might or might not know. So, your thoughts in progress can contribute to the thoughts in progress of LOTS of people. The web is giving increasing reality to the idea that there can actually evolve a world community, and you're part of helping to bring that about. We're glad to have you along, and hope you come to both enjoy and value our shared explorations. Feel free to comment on any post below, or to POST YOUR THOUGHTS HERE.
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Rain..
Let's talk about rain. Rain is a beautiful thing. Water gets everywhere. I miss rain like rain we had today. I spend so much time in my head trying to equate this place, Bryn Mawr PA, to my "home" in Portland OR. It's frustrating because the two places really aren't that alike, and a big part of this is rain. But when it does rain, hail to the rain gods because this place makes my brain come alive with notions of home. The reason I put HOME in parentheses the first time I used it is because "home" is probably relative, as in relation to your close relatives (this might make no sense but I saw a pun and I used it). My family is not in Bryn Mawr, does that mean I'me not at home? Or should I take a more individual-centric world view and decree that wherever I'm living is my "home?" Thinking about these things, and looking at the rain today took me away from Goodheart, away from Bryn Mawr, and I had strong, possibly physical aches that I would probably chalk up to homesickness. I don't always like to admit that to myself (sometimes I operate under this fantasy that I am the strongest and most flexible human being in the world, therefore, can never be homesick) but it is undeniably true. I spoke these words out loud at my sit, but I will write them to the world now, putting my seal of authenticity on the statement. I AM HOMESICK. Does saying it outloud and writing it here validate this feeling and make it more real? I don't want it to.. I don't want to be homesick at all.
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Preparing to Hibernate
When I set out for my site sit today, some part of me is happy that this is my last one. It is Sunday morning and everything is grey, everything is cold, and everything is wet. I did not start out happy sitting under the bench near the labyrinth. The only thing that cheered me up is, "At least I don't have to do this any more. It's getting too cold for this." But then, of course, I realized what it really means that this is my last site sit. No more medatative hours just watching the world do its thing. No more little squirrels hopping about. No more labyrinth watching. So maybe while it's cold I will keep away from any site sitting, but when the world warms again for spring maybe I'll come out of hibernation and enjoy the peace that is a site sit.
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Questioning Wandering Learning
Questioning, Wandering, Learning
Why go to college? Why spent thousands of dollars and four years of youth for rigorous academic works? Conventional wisdom says attending colleges and universities is the key to a successful life. Young people can gain knowledge and skills they use for the rest of life. However, a recent survey by Pew Research Center show that 57% of Americans say colleges fail to provide students with good value for money spent. Herein is the problem I detected: when viewing higher education with narrow lens of cost effectiveness and monetary payoff, people are blinded from the real aim of higher education: to teach people to think ecologically, to see the conflicts within our ecosystem and to ponder the questions for the rest of their lives. I believe higher education is not limited to the several years of schooling but a life-long education, and higher education is not merely keys to successful lives but meaningful lives filled with curiosities, wanderings and new findings.
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Last One
The backyard of the English house was covered in a thin layer of fog, on Saturday morning. The majority of the trees were completely bare of their leaves. The small tree with shiny leaves still had all of its leaves, they seemed to be more green than ever in the midst of the grey fog and the brown branches that surrounded it. The vines that hugged some of the trees was still alive and green. This was my last site sit and everything was damp and sad. I was slightly saddened by the fact that this was to be my last site sit (although it did not have to be, I can go back to the Backyard of the English house anytime I please, really). I would like to think that everything behind the English House was saddened by this fact as well, and that they would miss semi-scheduled presence. Everything sure did look pretty sad back there. The grass was more droopy than usual, the trees hid themselves in fog, and everything was damp. But perhaps I’m just being self centered.
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Watch out and Enjoy
I did not expect such a dramatic, unpleasant yet amusing experience for the last site sit for our ESem. I planned on taking pictures from faraway and close up since most of the time I stayed just at the Labyrinth, which is a rather confined space. I wanted to step back and look at the Labyrinth, in hopes to see something new. I started from the Campus Center and then crossed the Senior Row and reached the Labyrinth. I have always had hard time to orient myself in the area around the Labyrinth. From looking far away, I realized actually it was a very small space. It was the trees and slopes disguised the Labyrinth, making it seem to be sophisticated and unapproachable. I was so absorbed in the walk. Even winter is the season for lives, I could perce the activities going on of the creatures around me.
Maybe I was not outdoorsy enough to manage taking photo and walking on the muddy ground at the same time in a rainy day. Yes I slipped over and fell to the ground when I walked downhill...Obviously I did not feel so well. But I was not frustrated by this little accident - that must be my closest moment to the nature during this semester's site sit! I sat on the ground, looked up to the trees and the sky ,and thought there must be no way to escape from the control of nature and my unpredictable life...
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The Vendetta Lost
Who am I? I have yet to figure that out. My role in the world, the universe, the environment, is still a question mark. Life is constantly changing, people die every day, and rarely do we think our family members will be the ones dying. Life adjustments need to be made as our lives plug further and further along. Rebecca Solnit proposes an answer to this question. In order to find oneself one needs to become lost. Where? When? And how does one go about doing this? Does a structured system such as a college allow us to openly search as Solnit suggests that one must do? Does Bryn Mawr College’s concrete, structured education provide room for what Solnit proposes in her Field Guide to Getting Lost. Which way is the best way to explore the self and can Solnit’s ideas coexist in a fixed college environment?
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Rainy sunday morning
This morning I woke up without a slightest want to get up. Tangled in the bed, I checked weather forecast on my phone. 43F with rain… Oh I could hear the sound of the rain and could feel the freezing wind sneaking through the window. But well it not the right time to be a lazy cat though, I told myself. So with a cup of hot coffee, I visited my site, for the last time it was still a “site-sit”! In comparison with the first time I was there, the scene has obviously changed. Seasonal change. September weather was hot and the surrounding was lively and colorful. But today it is raining. No sun. Less green. Less colorful. The trees lost their leaves and the grass does not look very “happy.” But perhaps September next year when I come back to the place things will return to the beginning state when I got to know them. Or maybe not. Perhaps my perception and impression of nature is also influenced by my own feelings and my own thoughts? Next year when I come back, September was not the September the first year at college with all the excitement. I wonder what Rhoads will be like to me then? And even years after that?
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Wonderland
Instead of shaking in the darkness, I watched the starry scene in front of me. It was six 'o clock, but the sky was already darkened. There were no stars, but there were lights from countless windows far away from me. What I saw didn't seem to be true.
When I first walked into Bryn Mawr, it was a Wonderland to me. Now it still is--the only difference is that I KNOW it is real. No matter during the day or at night, it looked like a place in fantasy. The flowers, trees, and old buildings--yes, those, at day time, not after the dawn.
How many people have sat on the bench, wondering--"why am I here, what do I see?"
The lights were glowing, shining as if they were showing off in the darkness. We still don't want to blend in the night, do we? We need artificial lights to feel safe--we just need that feeling.
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Gathering quotes for Tuesday's barometer
As you read over your classmates' papers, pull out one sentence you would like to discuss further, and BY MONDAY @ 5, ADD IT HERE AS A COMMENT. I will draw from these in constructing the game of "barometer," which we will play in class on Tuesday. Thanks!
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PLANS FOR OUR FINAL TEACH-IN
We have 8 presentations--so each one gets 10 minutes. I will be very strict about the time-keeping, since we want to give everyone an equal chance to share what they have learned. Here's the program:
11:25-11:35 Minh
11:35-11:45 Sarah C
11:45-11:55 Shengjia
11:55-12:05 Wanhong and Barbara
12:05-12:15 Susan, Rochelle and Sara
12:15-12:25 Alex and Hannah
12:25-12:35 Claire and Zoe
12:35-12:45 Maddie and Elizabeth
If you have technical needs, you need to get there early and get yourself set up (otherwise, setting up becomes part of your performance time, and we all get frustrated....)
I'll bring some treats--and am very much looking forward to this!
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The Gilted Fish Bowl
I thought going back to my site sit would be scary. I've walked past the tree a few times, and it's lost most of its leaves. Its silver branches and a some auburn, dead leaves (mostly on one side of the tree) are all that remain of the lush, green tent I used to sit in. I went to my site sit when it was dark, too, so I thought that I wouldn't feel very comfortable in the tree anymore. But, the only really unsettling thing about my site sit was that all of the leaves were gone. People could see inside and I could see them with remarkable clarity. The tree has changed it's physicality for the season, and its atmosphere has, too. The frightening mystery I first felt at the beginning of the semester would have been gone even if the tree had kept its green leaves. The tree and I are pretty "chill" now. I wouldn't say that we're going to be best friends any time soon, but I've gotten used to it, at least a few branches of it. I don't know what I'll do in the tree when the semester is over, but I think I'll visit from time to time to say hello.
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The Beauty of Subjectivity--For All Nature Writers
My Ecological Imaginings Class at Bryn College led me to an amazing adventure, rather than journey, to explore the concepts of nature and write about it. The most important thing that I have noticed, after writing essays and participating in class discussions, is that there should be no scale for writing nature when we are thinking ecologically. It is important for every nature writer to know that there is always an essential and unavoidable diversity in writings due to various personal background and beliefs, and what we should try to do is, rather than objecting other peoples’ opinions severely, developing new ideas based on them.
The author of almost every reading material for our class was trying to tell us how we “should” perceive the relationship between human and nature or what the standard of “good, natural” writing is, and it had taken me a long time before I realized that I could academically benefit from their seemingly judgmental ideas. In his introduction to The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry wrote that “we must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world about us” (<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Berry, Introduction XV). In Women Writing Nature—A Feminist View, Barbara J.
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Throwing Away Typical Environmentalist Assumptions
If you are a young urban denizen pursuing higher education that lives in the city and is up-to-date with the environmental news of this century, you have been fed information by a number of ecological writers, given “environmentally conscious” advice to get yourself out of your home and “experience nature.”
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Chaos left unanswered
It is very difficult for me to write the last site sit. The rain is seeking into my hair; my head is aching with reflections of how this semester had been for me. I couldn’t help to take retrospective examination of myself and my site. The exuberance beech trees I see from “Carpenter beach” have only a few leaves left now. People loved to lie on the beach at the beginning of the semester haven’t returned for a long time. The grass stayed relatively the same: well-trimmed. My mind is not well-trimmed but muddy and clustering like the fallen leaves in the corners and sides of the trials.
The voices of the ecologists were arguing in my head. Are human doomed by human’s encroaching the earth? Or is the environmental crisis just an imagination of some ecologists? How should we represent the world? Can we compose an understandable literature without human as a subject? Or is human an inseparable part of the ecology? What shaped the actions of human in the nature environment? Is it the fear of nature or the control of the landscape? How should we speak green? Radically or simply let it be and enjoy what we have now…
Many questions are still left unanswered. Many topics are still open in the untamed space of imaginations. Even though the class is coming to an end, I don’t think I can simply left the chaos of the different world views, opinions and imagination in the readings we have done. There is much I can ponder on for years.
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#PROVOCATIVETITLE
People of the world! We have problems, and these problems are as big as the earth itself. People of the world, we must solve these problems or perish. This is the discourse of every environmental theorist, writer, or scientist. We have come to a cross roads in our existence here on earth, one where we choose to live and save other species in the process, or one where we exterminate those around us, then die ourselves. Certainly bleak prospects. Either way, we shall be required to give something up, to change fundamentally, to stage a revolution, and accept that we are part of a larger ecological system.
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Abandoning Despair
Abandoning Despair
Picture this: A city where some houses stand in water that has risen to the windows of their second floor. Other houses do not stand at all but now only consist of a basement filled with the former first floor and a roof to cover it up. Cars are flipped onto their sides and crushed like cardboard boxes. There are fallen trees, scattered planks of wood, broken glass, and upturned furniture lining some streets, and slow moving rivers where other street used to be. There are no people. Everyone has left.
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To Bryn Mawr Women: a Report on EcoLit ESem
For Bryn Mawr women who want to have an impact on shaping what BMC is like, ecological thinking is a relevant field to explore. Ecology is literally “the study of home”. Do we really know much about our home? What elements did we miss out in our home? How could we make sustainable decisions for our home? These are all about ecological thinking, which essentially brings a difference when we approach to a problem.
Our Emily Balch Seminar, Ecological Imaginings, is an ongoing experiment about the development of ecological literacy. Here I am eager to share with other Bryn Mawr women about what our tight group has experienced so far and invite more people to think ecologically and give a hand to spread this awareness. Ecological literacy is not confined to academic discussion, but can be applied to bring about significant changes on the campus. How we shape Bryn Mawr College is up to each one of us.
Ecological literacy is the ability to understand the world from a holistic perspective. Consider the fluidity of the world when you see, feel and think. Recognizing the interaction process of each component of an action is essential to holism. I want to share some class experience, in hopes that it will be helpful for my fellow Bryn Mawr women to implement this ideology.
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A Necessary Evolution of Writing: An Appeal to the High School English Teacher
I have never considered myself to be a personable narrator, and before this semester, have never been encouraged to be one. My reluctance to write in the first person narrative stems from my own experience as a reader who has been berated and patronized by authors who are unable, or unwilling, to place themselves at my level of comprehension, and had been reinforced by my high school teachers who insisted that I write in the traditional third person narrative—my mother being one of them, might I add. As a result, I’ve developed into a writer who is hard pressed to find literary merit to a thesis based solely in opinion, let alone my own. However, throughout the semester of “Ecological Imaginings”, I have realized that there was a need for my writing to evolve, and I therefore made an effort to rediscover my personal voice in my writing. After analyzing the works of authors such as Terry Tempest Williams and those of my classmates, I’ve begun to be able to piece together the formula imperative to the successful implementation of the first person narrative, which I believe is imperative in the development of a writer who is able to write at the collegiate level. Although most college essays will generally be written in the third person narrative, teaching students to locate their own voice at the high school level sets a foundation of understanding that will translate to college.
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Intimacy and the Earth
From a distance, I could only see one color green when I approached this field. It wasn’t until I got up close when I realized there were flowers in the field and it took a while for me to count over a dozen different species of plants hidden in plane sight in a field I had walked by many times but only now stopped to lay in. During a course I took this semester called “ecological imaginings”, we read a number of texts discussing ecological and environmental issues. An idea that was brought up during our discussions and that I connected with and feel is important to share is the idea of intimacy with the land being the key to the health of our environment. Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger, Timothy Morton’s “Ecology without Nature”, and Thomas Berry’s “The Dream of the Earth” are texts we read during the course that touched on this concept each in their own unique way. Morton illustrates how we can be cognitively intimate with nature, Berry suggests ways in which we could be more intellectually intimate with the earth, and Williams shows us how becoming physically intimate with the land will fix our relationship with the environment.