Planetary

At an ecocriticism conference several years ago, a Japanese scholar asked why so few American academics were paying attention to the great filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. Today, my class is going to talk about Spirited Away. Here are the discussion questions. I hope they get conversation started for you and your classes.

1. Spirited Away incorporates many elements from classical Western literature and folklore: people who magically turn into pigs (the Odyssey); the hero’s quest; the prohibition against eating the food of the Faerie (Irish folkore); a girl who goes to Grandma’s house (”Red Riding Hood”); the need to solve riddles. Do these familiar elements make the story easier to understand, or does their appearance in a Japanese film make them too alien to be helpful?

2. Through Chihiro’s transformation from miserable little girl to courageous adventurer, the film suggests that the world of the spirits is necessary to help us live in the everyday world, that spiritual development is part of the solution to environmental crises. What do you think about this?

3. Many of the film’s characters are related to fresh water: Haku, the Sludge Monster, Yubaba. The main action of the film takes place in a bathhouse, where spirits come to relax and refresh themselves in water. Chihiro’s family enters the spirit world by crossing a body of water. Chihiro and Haku first met at an incident in a river. How can the film’s preoccupation with water help us to understand the planetary water crisis?

4. Can you draw any connections between Spirited Away and Ishimure’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow or Kurosawa’s Dreams? What do these works tell us about a particularly Japanese approach to nature and environmental issues, if anything? What do these works have to say to an international audience?

5. The character No Face (the one with the white mask who eats everything) can easily be taken as a critique of consumer society, but No Face earns a happy ending. What do you think of Miyazaki’s solution to the endless appetite of the modern world?

6. Does it make sense to think of bodies of water as possessing spirit? Have you ever had a relationship with a river, a pond, an ocean, or the rain that prompted you to speak to water? Have you ever been rescued by a body of water? Have you ever cleaned a body of water?

7. The turning point of Spirited Away occurs when Chihiro cleans the Sludge Monster. The film’s creator, Miyazaki, based this incident on his own experience as a volunteer at a river cleanup, where he actually pulled a bicycle out of a river. What does this incident (in the film and in real life) suggest about the power of individual and communal action in environmental recovery?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE

Teaching the City

The editors of Transformations seek articles (5,000 – 10,000 words) and media reviews (books, film, video, performance, art, music, etc. – 3,000 to 5,000 words) that explore the city in a variety of pedagogical contexts and disciplinary perspectives—literature, women’s and gender studies, urban studies, architecture, anthropology, folklore, history, psychology, sociology, art, photography, geography, religion, working-class studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, science, and others. Essays should raise questions concerning, for example,

Topics might include: defining urban spaces; gendering the city; the history and interpretation of public spaces; global and transnational contexts and issues; racism, classism, and sexism in the construction and representation of cities; the politics of urban education; economics and gentrification; urban violence; environmental education; communities and cultural identities; architecture and urban planning; public history in/and the city; urban geography; suburbia and small cities; representations of the city in literature, visual, and popular culture; im/migration and transnational labor; teaching the city in K-12 and higher education.

Send a hard copy in MLA format (6^th ed.): Jacqueline Ellis and Edvige Giunta, Editors, Transformations, New Jersey City University, Hepburn Hall Room 309, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Jersey City, NJ 07305 OR email submissions and inquiries to: transformations@njcu.edu. Email submissions should be sent as attachments in MS Word or Rich Text format. For submission guidelines go to www.njcu.edu/assoc/transformations.

Published semi-annually by New Jersey City University

Deadline: 30 November 2007

Tuesday last, I had lunch with Dr. Eric Sanderson, the head of the Mannahatta Project, at the Bronx Zoo. (Yes, my job has some perks, if you’re willing to travel an hour roundtrip on the 2 Line to get to them.) The project, sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society, aims “to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted. Most history books dispense with the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages. However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.”

Sanderson wants Manhattanites to think of the future of the city by understanding its past. We at Planetary find this laudable in the extreme. Because the Mannahatta Project plans to coordinate its rollout with the quadricentennial of the European discovery of Manhattan in 1609, there is a strong possibility that it will make future appearances in this here blog.

I just returned from the Code Conference sponsored by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (The SLSA, aka “Salsa”). The SLSA is another example of what I called “strong interdisciplinarity” in the post directly below: a real cooperation across major divisions of knowledge based on real dialogue and a common, pragmatic set of goals. At the Code Conference, I talked with ecologists, programmers, ethicists, new media artists, and, of course, good ol’ literature scholars. I heard presentations about the representation of animals in nature faking and graphic novels, the ethics of wolf-human interaction, and media installations that project translations of bird calls (using real United Nations translators!) into the woods. I heard Kate Hayles talking about “intermediated” digital literature, and Brian Massumi on the emotional logic of the war on terrorism. I learned that “moron” is the word most often found in the code comments of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. (Naturally.) My own presentation, “Stupid Ontology Tricks, or, The Code of Unknowing,” stimulated both proponents and detractors. (As Bridget Jones would say, “V. Good!”)

Special thanks to Susan McHugh of the University of New England, Arielle Saber of Bowdoin College, and Aden Evens of Dartmouth University for organizing such a smashing affair!

The next SaLSA Conference in the USA will be in 2009 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bless their hearts. See y’all there.

I encountered the fine people of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy at the Code Conference sponsored by the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (see above).

This center is a new example of what the environmental humanities can be: in this case, a fusion of ecology, ethics, and public policy. This kind of interdisciplinarity, which has a scientific wing, a philosophical and cultural wing, and a policy wing, seems to be an excellent model for a strong interdisciplinarity, where all the pistons fire together to move us toward a common goal, rather than the typical, weak model, where one method comes to dominate the others. (Sorry Edward O. Wilson, I think consilience is a crappy, not to say epistemically imperialist, idea.)

My students have begun to response to the questions below by posting to our class blog, “Perfect Storms.” If you’d like to see their responses, by all means, see.

My students are about to watch Akira Kurosawa’s “Sunshine through Rain” and “The Peach Orchard,” short films collected in Dreams (1990), and “The Second Renaissance, Parts I and II,” that appears in The Animatrix as the backstory to the Matrix films. Then I am asking them to write about the following issues and questions:

1. In “Sunshine through Rain,” a boy witnesses the wedding procession of the fox-spirits. In doing so, he dishonors his family, and may be required to kill himself as reparation. Does a system of honor and shame make sense to you as a way of relating to other species? If so, how?

2. In “The Peach Orchard,” a boy is rewarded for his grief over the destruction of a peach orchard. Is grief an appropriate feeling to have toward peach orchards?

3. In both Kurosawa films, ritual theater mediates between humans and other creatures, both animals (the fox-spirits) and plants (the peach trees). What role might theater play here and now in mediating a relationship between humans and other creatures?

4. Given your ethical standards of behavior toward natural creatures, discuss those standards relative to artificial creatures, such as computers, robots, and other forms of artificial intelligence. If a strong artificial intelligence (capable of human-style thought and feeling) were created, what status would it have in your ethical system?

5. In “The Second Renaissance, Parts I and II,” the relationship between humans and intelligent/sentient machines is narrated in terms explicitly taken from the biblical books of Genesis and Revelation. Does that seem appropriate to you? If so, why? If not, what other stories or principles might organize our relationship to such machines?

6. In “The Second Renaissance,” the machine nation of Zero 1 sues for membership in the United Nations. Would strong artificial intelligences have political rights in your ethical system? How is this answer related to your feelings about the Turtle and Whale People having seats on town councils?

CNN is now broadcasting a special investigation called “Planet in Peril“–the first installment aired tonight. It stars certain charismatic megafauna–Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, and Jeff Corwin–and features a new REM song, so the project boasts a high bling-factor.

What I’ve seen of it so far makes me think that I would show it to students, were it available on DVD, but I would also be careful to point out its strengths and defects beforehand. The first part was very good at explaining basic ecological ideas, such as “keystone species,” “ecosystem,” and even the fairly technical “trophic cascade,” or food chain reaction. In fact, its analysis of Yellowstone after the reintroduction of wolves is the best explanation of the systemic nature of ecological issues that I’ve seen on television. Also, the show’s ability to link Madagascar, Greenland, Thailand, China, and the United States in a global system of environmental crisis and remediation is one of it greatest advantages as an instructional tool.

I will certainly caution my students, however, that the special appears to have a politically imbalanced approach to the global crisis. I’m no apologist for the disaster China is creating for itself and others, but I was disturbed by the images of swarming Chinese urbanites voraciously consuming everything in their path. It’s all too Yellow-Peril-ish to me, especially given how little is said about consumption in the United States, the EU, India, and even Russia. Why do we get a pass and the Chinese get the heat?

If others are watching this, I would love to read your reactions.

On Thursday, my class and I discussed Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Butler, one of the premier sci-fi writer’s of the last fifty years, died last year at the age of 58, quite unexpectedly. I think I speak for those of us who were looking forward to another 25 years of her writing when I say I’m still not over it. We nonetheless have “Bloodchild,” a story about a boy on an alien world where humans coexist with a species called the Tlic–giant centipede-wasp creatures. The Tlic have developed a relationship with humans that requires some of us to incubate their eggs inside our bodies in exchange for a limited political freedom. Butler compares the Tlic to botflies, and I think of them as ichneumon wasps. The story is creepy from beginning to end, as it combines the chest-bursting grossness of Alien with the politics of colonialism, rape, and slavery. Butler, in classic fashion, complains that it’s not a slave narrative, but a love story.

All of this is to say that the story generated the kind of classroom conversation that ecocritics long for: in 75 minutes, we discussed symbiosis, commensalism, and parasitism: male pregnancy; the politics of Indian “domestic dependent nations“; and the consequences of living in a world where humans are not the lords of nature. If this is the sort of thing you want, I can’t recommend Butler in general, and “Bloodchild” in particular, too highly. For folks looking to teach a longer work, Butler is also the author of the Xenogenesis trilogy, which takes place after an alien race has saved humanity from a nuclear war, only to demand a high price for survival.

Rock on, Octavia.

The New York Times is running a three-part special report, “Choking on Growth,” which describes the current environmental crisis in China. Part I is about the crisis in general. Part II is about the groundwater crisis. The third part concerns Wu Lihong, an activist who was recently sentenced to 3 years in jail on trumped-up charges because he drew attention to factory pollution in Lake Tai, a source of food and water for several million people about 100 miles west of Shanghai. The lake, pictured above, is being choked by pond scum fed by factory effluents.

In about a month, I will asking my students to read Arundhati Roy on the problem of Indian dams, and Ishimure Michiko on the mercury poisoning in Minimata, Japan. I am sad that they will now be reading about Wu Lihong as well.