Small groups of people gather at the large coffee chain on the second floor of a Texas shopping center.1 Some are made up of teens and college students, some of older individuals, maybe groups of friends or coworkers, but no group seems to acknowledge the presence of any other. All of a sudden, twenty or so phones buzz or ring or chime and like clockwork, small groups of teens or students or coworkers all rise, make for the escalators, and walk quickly toward the corporate business interior of the complex. Someone gives a signal and the chanting begins: “No pipelines! No tar sands! No destruction of indigenous lands!” “Jobs at the [pipeline]? No lets can it! There are no jobs on a dead planet!” “What’s insane? This is insane! No eminent domain for private gain!” (Tar Sands Blockade). Within minutes protestors invade the offices of a corporate conglomerate working to construct a pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to Houston, a project that could and most likely will have devastating effects upon the natural environment not to mention the exacerbation of global climate change from increased anthropogenic carbon production–yet none of the messaging focuses on protecting “nature.” Rather, all of the chants engage with social issues: ignoring the land rights of first nation peoples, placing profit margins and the bottom line above health and safety, forcibly taking the property of people whose only crimes were living in an area a corporation suddenly decided in needs to own.

           The first time our Ecoliteracy 360 met was in December, in the English House lecture hall, where we talked about ourselves and our homes and where we were going to go throughout the next semester.  The second time we met, we piled into two blue Bryn Mawr vans and drove 30 minutes and what might have seemed a world to Camden, where we spent the first half of the day gardening and the second half touring Camden’s water treatment facility and some of Camden’s streets and ending in one of Camden’s parks, where our guide, Michael, pointed out the environmental threats and innovations that surrounded us.  This was our first 360 field trip, designed to help us learn about ecoliteracy, but even now I am hard pressed to say exactly what I learned that day.  I came in from the outside and began to reevaluate my assumptions about a city I’d only ever heard talked about as poor and crime-ridden but, even though I did learn some things about Camden that I hadn’t known before, I think that day really started my semester-long process of changing the way I see the world.  Perhaps the poet Rilke was describing something like this when he wrote:

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

looking at everything and never from!

It floods us. We arrange it.  It decays.

We arrange it again, and we decay.

Sara, Hayley and Sasha--
please write a self-evaluation of your prison work this semester.
General guidelines can be found in the self-evaluation that you did for
WWC 1 1/2 years ago: /exchange/courses/360/silence/f12/portfolio
--but here's the current version we'd like you to respond to:

This process invites you to "diffract" on all the work you have done in
our prison group and to contribute to and assist us with the evaluation of your work.  

In order to do this, be specific and descriptive, but also evaluative:
Review your participation in our group work before, during and after the sessions
we spend inside.  How present-and-contributing have you been during our preparation,
in our discussions inside, and during our debriefing sessions?

* Describe how you prepared for, and reflected on, the prison environment
and classroom experience outside of class.  In what ways did you push yourself
outside your comfort zone?

* Describe your critical, active engagement during our sessions in RCF:
How did you actively engage women in conversation and relationship?
Did you initiate or wait for someone to talk to you? To what degree
did you push yourself outside your comfort zone?

* Reflect, too, on your engagement with the reading and writing we assigned.

as we finish out the year, i find myself wanting an archive of the lesson plans

and homework we assigned. so: find attached.

as promised: attached find the script; the links to the BMC performance are @
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOFbIjXfBx0&list=PLURlCoT5iFbeubSDMRn3fSUd-bEmg9vfG

as the manual explains, this script differs from The Vagina Monologues,
which give voice to a mostly private aspect of women's lives: The Hijabi
Monologues take something public, which everyone seems to have an opinion about,
and give it a personal voice. The characters of each monologue wear the hijab,
but the hijab is not the focus of any story.

The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half wetted by the sea. (Ghosh 6)

The sari, an integral part of Indian culture, features prominently in Amitav Ghosh’s story of the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide. In the quote above, Ghosh uses traditional Indian garments as a metaphor to talk about the shape and geography of the tide country, but the role of such textiles and of clothing in general plays many other substantial roles throughout the course of the story. As humans, we tend to take clothing for granted and forget the space it takes up in our life. Clothing is one of the major factors that distinguish humans from animals, and in many cases we use it to protect ourselves against the elements, against nature. In a book that holds so much commentary and insight about the debate of humans vs. nature (humanism/environmentalism), Ghosh gives many examples of the importance of clothing for human connection, communication, and survival.