Environmental Humanities Series

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Series editor:

Cheryl Lousley, English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

Editorial committee:

Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Environmental Studies, University of Vermont

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Tier 1 CRC in Sustainability and Culture, Environmental Studies, York University

Susie O’Brien, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Laurie Ricou, English, University of British Columbia

Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta

Description:

Environmental thought pursues with renewed urgency the grand questions of the humanities: who we think we are, how we relate to others, and how we live in the world. But unlike most humanities scholarship, it explores these questions by crossing the lines demarcating human from animal, social from material, and objects and bodies from techno-ecological networks. Humanistic accounts of political representation and ethical recognition are re-examined in consideration of other species. Social identities are studied in relation to conceptions of the natural, the animal, the bodily, place, space, landscape, risk, and technology, and in relation to the material distribution and contestation of environmental hazards and pleasures.

The Environmental Humanities Series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad: film, literature, television, web-based media, visual arts, and physical landscapes are all crucial sites for exploring how ecological relationships and identities are lived and imagined. The Environmental Humanities Series publishes scholarly monographs and essay collections in environmental cultural studies, including popular culture, film, media, and visual cultures; environmental literary criticism; cultural geography; environmental philosophy, ethics, and religious studies; and other cross-disciplinary research that probes what it means to be human, animal, and technological in an ecological world.

Bringing research and writing in environmental philosophy, ethics, cultural studies, and literature under a single umbrella, the series aims to make visible the contributions of humanities research to environmental studies, and to foster discussion that challenges and re-conceptualizes the humanities.

For more information, contact:

Lisa Quinn

Acquisitions Editor

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5

519) 884-0710 ext.2843

Email: quinn@press.wlu.ca

This is a periodic reminder that Planetary was created as a community blog, intended to host a group of bloggers. Should you feel moved to post, please comment on this post or email me at anthony.lioi_at_gmail_dot_com. I’ll send an official invitation to get you in the system.

Y’all come back now, hear?

Given my penchant for teaching the environmental humanities through popular culture, I could not resist recommending these two movies, currently in theaters, as films that contain smart perspectives on the environmental crisis.

Wall-E

Wall-E, the latest Pixar offering, is about a trash-compacting robot whose discovery of a green plant holds the key to the human return to Earth. Though I cringed at the previews that I saw months ago, my fears of a sugar overload–cute robots in space save the world!–went unfulfilled. Wall-E is not only a sophisticated, lovely piece of digital animation, it is also a smart critique of the way consumer media distract us from what really sustains a good life. (Yes, the animators get the irony.) Though it is a film Wendell Berry could love, it is neither cranky nor pastoral: the key to Earth’s future lies in knowing which artificial intelligences to trust. Once that decision is made, it allows humanity to clear away the garbage of the past and “go down to the ground,” as Peter Gabriel’s theme song says.

(Note: The review of this movie on Slate takes it to task for being anti-fat. While the demonization of fat is a serious problem, I think the reviewer misses the point. Humans have become infantilized by life in space, where low gravity and automated services have turned them into big babies. The movie makes this point visually in several places. The problem is not that people have become fat, but that they’ve become incapable of standing on their own feet, literally. When they finally realize what’s happened, they don’t behave like stereotypical fat people in Hollywood movies, who are lazy, stupid, and ridiculous. They react with resolve, courage, and intelligence.)

I plan to try this movie with my students as soon as possible because if fits their interesting combination of low level of denial and high frustration with apocalyptic rhetoric. They want stories that show them how to behave toward a world that is already less than pristine, but still beautiful and valuable. Wall-E provides an excellent model of beginning again after you’ve tried to run from your garbage. “Stiller Life, with Robots.”

Hellboy II

This film is more subtle in its green issues, but as A.O. Scott of the New York Times has pointed out, it borrows environmental themes from J.R.R. Tolkien and Hayao Miyazaki. The action begins as an elf prince denounces modern human civilizations as rapacious and destructive, repudiating the ancient truce between us and his people. Essentially, he goes to war for environmental reasons, and much of what he does would be classified as ecoterrorism by the current administration if it weren’t otherworldly in origin. At one point, Hellboy is forced to choose between saving a human infant and a rampaging plant elemental that is, he is told, the last of its kind. Though he chooses to save the infant and, ultimately, oppose the prince, Hellboy is left at the end of the movie wondering whether he chose the right side.

Like Wall-E, this film is a brilliant visual exposition of the world under our feet that we take for granted at our own peril. Instead of robots and spaceships, Hellboy has cthonic creatures and magical objects, but in both cases the fantastic, as a mode, is used to represent the nonhuman powers–technological and ecological–that we exile from consciousness even as we depend on them to sustain the world.

It’s interesting to see how the environmental crises are forcing sci-fi and fantasy together as both genres comment on our inability to escape responsibility, despite their common reputation as escapism par excellence. When I teach these films, the problem of escapism and responsibility is the angle I would hit first.

I’d be interested in hearing about anyone else’s approach to teaching these films, or films like them.

I teach one of the core classes in Juilliard’s humanities curriculum–Ethics. Last semester, I included a big helping of environmental ethics and animal rights in this class, and students responded well to these questions from the final exam, so I thought I’d share them.

Personhood, Equality, and Social Change

1. An advanced alien species, the Gas Bags of Jupiter, arrives in Central Park looking for new creatures to populate Jovian zoos. The Gas Bags are sentient and intelligent, but they do not resemble humans in any physical way, being bags of hot air, as their name suggests. How can you convince these creatures that humans are persons who don’t belong in a zoo? Write a letter to the Lord of the Gas Bags, Supreme Commander Oi Li, explaining the idea of the person and the status of humans as persons. Refer to any of the relevant readings, such as Singer, Midgley, Griffin, etc. Hope for your sake that Oi Li understands English.

2. In “All Animals Are Equal,” Peter Singer writes: “A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons and an extension or reinterpretation of the basic moral principle of equality” (26). To what extent are domestic or wild animals an “oppressed” group in our society? Must they be “liberated” in some way? Do they deserve “equality” in Singer’s sense of the word? Discuss. If you wish, you may use intelligent machines or “AI” as a point of comparison.

3. Can virtuous behavior help to create social change? In “Why Bother?”, Michael Pollan writes about a “chain reaction of behavioral change” (5) in which a critical mass of individuals influences whole societies to change. To what extent is this possible? In addressing this question, you may discuss climate change, as Pollan does, or another contemporary social issue of your choice.

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.

This is a great victory for environmental justice movements, but what about my needs? I’m teaching the book version of An Inconvenient Truth later in the semester, and now I wonder how difficult it will be to generate critical analysis of the argument after the Nobel imprimatur has been given.

Fortunately for teachers everywhere, a British court recently ruled that Gore’s apocalypticism is politically partisan and not motivated by the facts alone. (Yes, Virginia, we call that rhetoric.) Don’t worry, Al, Rachel Carson still loves ya!

The New York Times has just reported a hate-crime on the campus of Columbia Teacher’s College, where a faculty member found a noose swinging from her door. The entire article is reproduced below.

I think that teachers of the environmental humanities have a responsibility to articulate the history of political repression and terror tactics as a part of natural history. In the case of lynching, many cultural critics, historians, and political scientists have begun to connect the practice of lynching with the impossibility of pastoral retreat in traditional African American culture. The place of repose in the fields becomes the place of torture and murder. If anyone is looking for a place to start, or a reading to give to students, I recommend Daniel J. Martin, “Lynching Sites: Where Trauma and Pastoral Collide.” Coming into Contact. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Article begins here:

October 10, 2007

Hate-Crime Investigation at Columbia

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.

Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist.

Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007. Derald Wing Sue, one of her co-authors and a fellow professor at Columbia, said Ms. Constantine was devastated by the incident.

“She’s all right at this point with the support of colleagues, friends, students and family,” said Mr. Wing Sue, an adjunct professor at the school of social work. “But you can imagine the terrible impact that this has had on her.”

Ms. Constantine could not be reached at her office on Columbia’s campus this morning.

The discovery of the noose — a widely reviled symbol of black lynchings in the South and elsewhere — sparked outrage across the campus. Last night, about 150 students held a protest outside the Teachers College building at 525 West 120th Street, and organizers of the rally called for another protest and student walkout at 2 p.m. today. The news also ignited a chain of e-mail messages between students that described the incident as “Jena at Columbia,” referring to an incident in Jena, La., last year that prompted violence after three white high school students hung nooses under a tree where six black students had been sitting the day before.

In an e-mail message to students and faculty at the school, the president of Teachers College, Susan Furhman, said the incident was a “hateful act, which violates every Teachers College and societal norm.”

The president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, also released a statement condemning what happened.

“This is an assault on African Americans and therefore it is an assault on every one of us,” he said. “I know I speak on behalf of every member of our communities in condemning this horrible action.”

The discovery of the noose comes in the wake of several incidents that have incited racial and political tensions at Columbia in recent months, including a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September and the discovery of racist and threatening graffiti in a bathroom at the School of International and Public Affairs. Last fall, the campus drew media attention after a group of students stormed a stage to protest a speech by the head of a group that opposes illegal immigration.

Mr. Wing Sue, Ms. Constantine’s colleague, said students and faculty were at a loss to figure out who pinned the noose to the door.

“You speculate about all the possible reasons that could have instigated such a cruel and hateful act,” he said. “Is it a disgruntled student, is it a conflict with a colleague or staff, is it her work on racism that has pushed buttons on this matter?”

“This is something the police are investigating,” he added, “but to me it represents a major opportunity for Columbia to begin the process of dealing directly and honestly with race and racism. It’s a hot button issue that is representative of the larger community and society.”

Unity College in Maine Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Humanities

Graduate Program, Environmental Humanities, University of Utah

Environmental Studies Doctoral Program, Antioch University

Environmental Humanities Initiative, Bucknell University

At the inauguration of this blog in the long-ago time of September, Keri Cronin and John Lane both raised important questions about what the environmental humanities are. So I decided to see what people were doing when they said they were doing the environmental humanities. After a cursory search on Google (all praise the name of our future overlords), I discovered a strong pattern in the entries above, which topped the list of “environmental humanities.” Whether on the undergraduate, masters, or doctoral level, it seems that these programs all assume that the environmental humanities are: interdisciplinary by nature; concerned with the environmental crisis and solutions to it; interested in a conversation between academia and political and legal institutions and processes; and dedicated to providing students with intellectual skills that can be applied in traditional scholarly pursuits, or in the professions and the world of activism.

I think that’s pretty gnarly. I’m from New Jersey, so I probably have no right to that word, but there it is. Dude!

If anyone knows of other programs in the environmental humanities, please let Planetary know.

One of the oddest things about the environmental humanities, in my humble opinion, is that they have stayed resolutely away from (a) poetry and (b) religion. I find this odd because both poetry and religion have a lot to say about the human-cosmos relationship, what it has been like, and what it should be like.

As the beginning of a remedy to this state of affairs, I offer a link to “Persephone in Washington,” a sonnet sequence by Sarah Avery about the queen of an underworld who, like any good fertility goddess, rises in the spring–in Washington, DC–after gaining the help of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, and Aretha, Queen of Soul. In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that Sarah is my friend, but that doesn’t mean the sonnets are no good, it means I have excellent taste.

Speaking as a teacher of poetry, I think these sonnets are eminently teachable because, unlike most sonnets students are made to read, these have contemporary cultural references and a syntactic order that mirrors ordinary speech. So, the language will be familiar, even if the content is a bit unsettling. The perfect gift for the poetry-loving goth-grrls among us.

Here’s the first essay assignment from my environmental lit/ethics/politics class:

In order to relate the idea of nature to the questions of ethics and politics that will occupy us for the rest of the semester, you need to clarify your own idea of nature and set it against the background of the traditional ideas we have been studying. Therefore, for your first essay, I would like you to work through the question

What is the best way to think about nature today?

In this form, the question asks you to consider what is best, but in the context of your own life, your community, and the contemporary environment. You are not required to make a timeless definition of “nature,” but you should try to make a timely one.

Goals:

• To articulate your own picture of nature.  This may include reflections on personal history, scientific theories, and sense experience, among other things. Don’t be afraid to tell illustrative stories, to appeal to systems of thought we haven’t studied, or to appeal to your daily encounters with the environment. You may also quibble with the terms of the assignment itself; perhaps you don’t believe in “nature,” but, if so, you must appeal to some other account of the universe, rather than merely negating the ideas of others.
• To put your own world picture in conversation with the readings we have discussed so far, especially the material you encountered in your oral presentations.
•  To use your first and second blog entries as raw material for this work; to demonstrate a sense of recycling in your own writing.

A.O. Scott, one of my favorite movie critics, really loved this movie. You can see his review in the New York Times here.

Scott is one hell of a movie geek, and I trust his instincts. However–as readers of the ASLE listserv know–I have my reservations about the story of Chris McCandless, and so do many of my students. I think there is something cranky and conservative about our feeling that McCandless should’ve had more respect for the way the world can kill you, but I still feel that way. It’s good that not everyone feels that way, and it’s also good that not everyone dies in young adulthood, alone in an Alaskan forest. Nonfungible goods, these are, and probably incommensurable, too.

I haven’t seen this movie, but my current crop of students wants to see it, so maybe I’ll go with them. In the meantime, I would be interested to hear from others about their experience of the movie and the book.

The NYTimes has run a story on Bilbao and its attempt to reclaim its downtown and central river with Frank Gehry architecture. (Giant spider optional.) See “Bilbao: 10 Years Later”

Transforming ugly industrial space into beautiful civic space is an international project. Providence, RI has the Waterfire Festival, which centers on the confluence of rivers in the downtown that once was completely covered by concrete and asphalt. More on that in a future post.

I was attracted to the Times article because my students and I are discussing the status of cities in environmental literature. They’re reading Robert Sullivan’s Rats and Jenny Price’s “13 Ways of Looking at Nature in LA.” So far, they seem quite willing to take what we might call a strong immanental position: like rats, people are animals, and cities are just something that our kind of animal makes. We’ll see how this plays out next week when we discuss the slums of global megacities and the radioactive secret city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.

A “guilty liberal finally snaps” is the tag line of the family in Manhattan trying to live a year without toilet paper, among other things. Their story made the BBC; I’m going to ask my students to read about them later in the semester. Their blog is here.

Tomorrow, the husband/wife, scientist/actor team of Roger Payne and Lisa Harrow will perform Sea Change: Reversing the Tide at Juilliard. This multimedia piece about climate change has been touring North America, appearing at a number of schools. For more information, click here.

Roger Payne is the biologist whose recording of humpback whale song was included on the Voyager spacecraft’s record of life on earth. Holy Carl Sagan, Batman!

This week, as I was explaining the idea that Nature is identified with reproduction in Western cosmology, I gave my class this article about the “gay penguins” in the Central Park Zoo. I told my students that the notion of homosexuality as “unnatural” was linked to the idea that Nature = “the Birth-giver,” and that this mated pair of male penguins was especially provocative because they wanted to reproduce so badly they tried to incubate a rock. When their keepers gave them an egg to brood over, they became the parents of a chick named Tango. This led to the publication of Justin Richardson’s book, And Tango Makes Three, now one of the American Library Association’s “Most Challenged” books in American public schools.

Then it turned out that one of my colleagues, a political theorist, had talked about the book with her gender theory class on the same day. I had no idea that penguins were such accomplished critics of ideology.

If you follow this link, you can see a picture of “A Bird’s Life” by Elizabeth Grajales. This work is a series of ceramic tiles on the wall at the Uptown 1 platform at Penn Station in Manhattan. Though I feel like the bird is a fellow commuter, I am not sure what to do with this beautiful piece as a teacher. Underground Manhattan blackbirds. Who knew?

Anyone have any ideas?

I am beginning my environmental literature/ethics/politics course by having my students read a chapter of Nadia Tazi’s Keywords: Nature, a book that juxtaposes ideas of nature from a number of different world cultures. Leo Marx wrote “The Idea of Nature in America,” the chapter I’ve asked them to read. This chapter is a nearly flawless example of an essay in the history of ideas, as one would expect from Leo Marx. However, it is also the case that the chapter is not so much about nature in American culture, as it is about Nature in Anglo-American culture. I don’t see this as a weakness: the specificity of the subculture is part of what makes the essay so strong.

Nonetheless, it is no longer sufficient (especially when teaching in Manhattan) to assume that American culture as a whole is coterminous with Anglo-American culture. I assume that it is more accurate to talk about American cultures of nature. So, I am asking my students to compare Marx’s account of American nature with their own history with nature in America. If anyone is curious to see what they said, you can check out their posts at the end of this week on our class blog: perfectstorms.wordpress.com.

For many of us in North America this week marked the start of the academic year, a good time to think about teaching and pedagogical issues. The launch of Planetary provides an exciting new venue for this type of dialogue, and I thank Anthony and the rest of the editorial team for inviting me to participate.

I’ll start by posing a basic question: what do we mean when we talk about “environmental humanities” in the classroom? Courses on nature writing are, perhaps, the first thing that spring to mind. But what about other courses in the humanities that do not necessarily have words like “nature” or “environmental” in their titles? What are some strategies for teaching from an environmental humanities perspective in these courses?

I teach art history and visual culture and have had a couple of opportunities to teach senior level special topics classes with titles like “Landscape & Photography,” but for the most part my courses need to have a broader focus in order to fit into the curriculum of the various departments I have taught in. On the surface, these are not courses that appear to have an environmental humanities focus. If I were to ask incoming students to jot down their expectations of an introductory course on 19th century art, for instance, few would list “discussion of environmental issues.” However, when we stop to think about how cultural representations of space and place both inform and are informed by the world around us this connection becomes a lot more apparent. I often use writing exercises in order to get students to think about why a particular artist may have chosen to represent a landscape (including urban landscapes) in a particular way.

I’m interested to hear how others approach these themes in the various courses they teach. What kinds of exercises or models have you found to be particularly successful?

Welcome to Planetary, a new community blog about teaching the environmental humanities. Planetary started to form as the editors, sitting on their high horses, reflected on the need for a new media space to discuss, share, and preserve some of the excellent work being done in green pedagogy across the disciplines. We invite all who are interested in this work to join us as readers and contributors.

Planetary appears at a time when the environmental crisis has become unavoidably global; hence, our name. To think about fresh water supplies, global climate change, industrial pollution, environmental justice, species extinction, habitat preservation, and the like is to think about our life on Earth. The editors hope that this blog can play a role in enhancing communication across disciplinary and national boundaries. We want Planetary to be part of the global commons.

This philosophy informs our standards of intellectual property, too. Planetary follows the conventions of free use, with attribution, outlined by the Creative Commons movement. This means that readers are free to use ideas and information they find on Planetary as long as they give proper credit to the original authors. We encourage you to explore the realm of the intellectual commons by visiting creativecommons.org. Environmental pedagogy just wants to be free, as the Linuxfolk would say.

Though Planetary is, in part, inspired by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-USA) and its international affiliates, membership in the association is not required of authors on this blog. We encourage everyone, in and out of the academy, to raise their voices here, and to remember that we are not alone in the great work of planetary repair in the twenty-first century.

Currently, Planetary allows readers to comment on posts without joining the community, but if you’d like to post, you have to join. Fortunately, joining is easy. You can contact me, Anthony Lioi, at alioi_at_juilliard.edu, or one of the other editors listed in the About section, and ask to be invited to join. (NOTE: Email addresses are written with “_at_” to avoid detection by spambots. When mailing us, please use the regular @ sign.) Then we’ll send you an invitation. Once you respond, you’re in.

Planetary is a moderated blog; the editors reserve the right to weed out posts or comments that are in any way poisonous or violent. If we must contend, still there can be courtesy.

Let’s get to it!