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:

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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.