Is that a necessary dichotomy? Reading Steve Chase's Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies made me think a lot about my relationship with and confusion around social change and activism. I have this constant fight within myself about whether I'm being too radical or not radical enough - and then I worry that I'm being too wishy-washy, not fully committing to working with one faction or another and therefore feeling totally useless. I read Steve Chase's account of the Environmental Justice Workgroup's successful "collaborative and educational approach" to their fight to raise awareness and discourse about environmental justice at their school, and I experienced conflicting responses. On one hand, I was impressed and felt regretful that I haven't done more work like that at Bryn Mawr. And then immediately after that, I'm like, "no, my work isn't about helping a bunch of privileged white people see the truth about racism and oppression! I wanna smash the patriarchy! I want to destroy capitalism! I'm radical!" I don't deny that the change that Chase and his group accomplished was important and helpful, it just doesn't feel as necessary or exciting to me. And it's not just because of the hippie anarchist that lives in me and craves adrenalyn rush-style direct action and in-your-face lockdown blockades. I approach this from a "rational", academic standpoint as well.

The first half the book delved into the idea of creating a safe space to talk about potentially sensitive issues like homophobia. One sugesstion was to allow students to have the ability to writing in public private ways (41). I bellieve that this could have a very impactful effect on students as I've seen in in my praxis.

There are time where we will journal and share or just journal and look at the journals separately, but both are important to have students feel like their stories are important enough to be shared but not at the risk of their privacy. Sometimes hsaring can feel uncomfortable and intrusive. We don't know the sensitivity levels of everyone in the class. Giving the optin to share their insight or not is useful for building the kind of classroom that understand their is value in sharing but not to the extent that it is damaging to the student.

When I was younger, around the age of 10 my mother told me a lie that made me question my ability to make my own decisions and put constraints on me via my family identity. I was conversing with my mother and the topic of tattoos came up and I told her that I wanted one. Her immediate response was, “If you get a tattoo you won’t be allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Is that what you really want?” At the time I agreed with her and put the tattoo idea behind me. A few years later I decided to do a google search of “Can a person with a tattoo be buried in a Jewish cemetery?” The answer I saw wasn’t what I expected. The answer said that there is no such Jewish law about a Jew not being buried in a Jewish cemetery because they have a tattoo. However in some cases a person already laid to rest might have requested that no one with a tattoo be buried next to them. Other then that it is acceptable for me to get a tattoo and I felt betrayed by my mother. My mother was forcing me to be on this path that I didn’t want to be on. A path filled with her making all of the decisions for me. However this made me think about other cultures and religions where people are forced to stay on a particular path and have different ways in which they respect the dead. Whether your culture or religion buries a person the day they pass away, not using a casket for burial, or not having upright tombstones.

It was interesting to read "Teaching Urban Ecology", a text that explicitly talked about how "nature" and "culture" are so siloed from one another in the classrom and how Di Chiro used intersectionality in teaching Ecology in her classroom. Di Chiro raised many interesting questions in her class, one of them I was especially struck by: "How are environmental scholars and community activists re-thinking and re-connecting the ideas of ecology and social justice with the commitment to creating sustainable communities?" She then encouraged her students to explore this question more deeply by participating in action research which provided them with very interesing and enlightening insight. I think the original question she posed is so central to this course as well as being a question that should be explored in more classrooms across the country. All too often, students learn about "nature" and "culture" not only as separate, isolated concepts, but also without this intersectionality layer to explain how different people experience culture and the earth differently. How might this question be explored in a middle or high school classroom? How can educators and schools integrate the ideas of "nature" and "culture"? How can social justice and environmental jusice and activism be better linked in the classroom/school setting?

            In Ruth Ozeki’s Eco-novel All Over Creation, education, learning, or in other words, “consciousness-raising”, occur in different ways for several characters as the story unfolds. Frank Perdue, a janitor from the Midwest inadvertently gets involved with a radical environmental activist group, the Seeds of Resistance, and spends much of this time feeling skeptical about their work; feeling that people were not “ready to have their consciousness raised quite yet” (86). This statement begs the question: what does it take for people’s “consciousness to be raised”? Who is ready and how do they become ready? How much latitude in conversation and dialogue can there be for the maximum amount of learning to take place?  Can there be productive dialogue between two people who hold different perspectives or who are not ready to have their consciousness raised? In order to answer these questions, I will look at how learning takes place in All Over Creation—specifically for Frank and the individuals who the Seeds of Resistance reaches out too, and will conclude by bringing in The Lives of Animals and Radical Presence, other texts that touch on these questions.

I found Blackburn’s discussion of “negotiating threat lovingly” (95) interesting and helpful, and it reminded me a lot of what Kumashiro said about crisis. Blackburn writes about how youth perceived to be LGBTQQ and allies experience threat on a regular basis, but that what she had not previously realized was that, in efforts to combat homophobia, she was actually threatening those whose ideas she was challenging. Blackburn writes that she started to wonder whether threat was always good or bad. Like Kumashiro says for crisis, she comes to the conclusion that threat is something to work through, rather than avoid. She writes that working through threat lovingly requires a process of inquiry and “[believing] in others’ knowledge” (95).

Everything that any living being does, thinks, and feels is unchangeably its own perspective. I exist only within my own reality, only able to read and interact with the world through my own senses. My perspective is the most constant factor of my existence – ever-changing and developing, but solely my own. I am always drawn back to thinking about our universe: “the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space”. Not “the totality of all phenomena throughout space”, but the known and supposed. Humankind has ‘claimed’ the universe as its own. We have established ourselves as the focal point of existence. And just as humanity has claimed the universe, I like to believe that us people all exist within our own ‘personal universe’, for the totality of our own existence is comprised of what we know or suppose. This sounds like a very individual-centric approach to thinking about people, but it is because of this truth that our webs of porous connections and togetherness are so powerful. Everything we do is a choice, what we ourselves decide to do. And despite the fact that we exist in our ‘personal universes’, it seems to be a common link of humanity to constantly push ourselves to escape from our own singularity and choose to share, combine, connect, understand, and feel the perspectives of others. We have the choice to be selfish and self-centered.

Environmentalists. According to merriam webster dictionary, it's a person who to protects the natural world from pollution and other threats. One who is concerned with the environment quality. The term environment seems to have no connection to something else like society, the human interaction or behavior. It leaves no space for different environmentalists, for those who emcompass different qualities different opinions to grow from. 

To be an environmentalist...what doesn that even mean? White priviledge? Am I, a latina, low income individual not allowed or better yet said not qualified to be known as an environmentalist? 

I really enjoyed our visit there y'day; my images capture some of the stories on the gravestones (what are Isaac Hull's "private virtues," affectionately remembered by his wife? where was Olga Demidoff "laid"?--since she clearly didn't make it back to Laurel Hill, as she had hoped? what are the "rare merits" of William Wood? and what does "mayhem in the bedroom" REALLY commemorate?)--as well as the river, the budding trees and flowers, many of the images of angels, pointing upward, and people preserved in their life activities (not to mention you all, in various states of rest and reflection....;)

Sunday (April 13th):

EDUC: by 5pm – post an open response to this week's readings.

ENGL: by 5pm post on-line your third 5-pp. reflection, on how much "latitude" you can allow..

Monday (April 14th):

ECON: Bring a calculator to class and the exam.

EDUC: Read Chase, “Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies”; Di Chiro, “Teaching Urban Ecology” (password-protected file)