EcoLit ESem

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.

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...

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? 

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!

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.

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.

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.

                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.