How’s that for diasporic culture!

I visited the Arizona State Museum pottery wing today, hoping I could see the kind of squash-blossom pattern on Pueblo pottery that Leslie Marmon Silko writes about in “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” No luck so far.

Then I wandered into the gift shop and found a goodly array of local pottery, mostly from the Hopi nation. After the shop dude chewed my ear off about Hopi pottery, I asked him if he had ever seen the squash-blossom pattern on pottery from Acoma or Laguna. He ran into the back room to fetch his boss, who pointed me to the Dine (Navajo) squash-blossom necklace on display behind me. It looked something like this:

This is not the pattern Silko is talking about. It is, however, interesting in its own right. The boss described his theory of what this pattern really is: an Indian adaptation of an amulet that hung on the forehead of conquistador-horses to ward off the evil eye. The flowers are not squash blossoms, but pomegranate blossoms, indicating the Arabic influence on Iberia. And the central pendant is the charm itself.

Now, in a strict scholarly sense, I can’t vet this account of the necklace. However, the pendant really does resemble a Mediterranean-style anti-Evil Eye charm, and the color of the lapis lazuli echoes, in local materials, the blues of the traditional amulet.

If this theory is true, it would mean that the “squash-blossom” necklace made in Arizona is the result of a Dine-Spanish-Arabic-Italian/Turkish/Greek odyssey from the borderlands of Eurasia to the borderlands of Mexamerica.

That’s a lot of borderlands, is all I’m sayin’.

3rd View/Second Sights

Linda Connor, Coptic Monastery, Egypt, 1989

Today we talked about photographic methods of relating to the borderlands, and the border shared by scientific and artistic approaches to photography.

On the scientific side, there is the excellent multimedia site “Third View/Second Sights,” which allows access to photographs of the same sites across the West as seen in the early 1900s, the 1970s, and the present day. This comparative visual method is a powerful way of representing change over time in both cultural and natural terms.

On the artistic side, there is photographer Linda Connor’s “Odyssey” project, which represents spiritual landscapes through a vocabulary of illumination and thick darkness. The blog “On the Seawall” displays outstanding examples from the collection.

I recommend both approaches heartily as alternatives to a text-only environmental scholarship.

Nature and History at the Nation’s Edge

This is my first post from the Field Institute for Environmental and Borderlands History, sponsored by the NEH as one of its summer institutes for university and college teachers. It’s being held at the University of Arizona, Tucson–the picture above is a view of the roof of the student union. Looks like a starship waiting to take off to these geeky eyes. Three cheers for nerd adventure!

The institute is quite the thing, bringing together teachers from fields as disparate as geography, anthropology, and literary studies–not to mention our kind overlords hosts, the historians of UAZ, Tucson. My own goals for this month-long project are fairly modest–to learn Desert Ecology 101, to understand the basics of Southwest history, and to bring back a photographic archive for use in teaching my students about environmental history and politics, especially the history and politics of the local “water wars.” (My family in Phoenix claims that the Colorado River belongs to them, but there’s the rub.) However, there are clearly many grand plans afoot among my distinguished colleagues, so we’ll see what sort of mischief arises as we head farther into the summer heat and deeper into Special Collections at the library.

Today, as an ice-breaker–if such a thing is possible in Tucson–we sat in small groups and discussed what we meant by the terms “environment” and “borderlands.” My own group wondered exactly what kind of borders create borderlands–the term as used by historians tends to refer to national or regional borderlands, but we are also interested in cultural, ethnic, and geographical borders within cities and neighborhoods. “The wrong side of the tracks” seems to us a kind of borderland, too. What we noticed about our use of “environment” is that it carries a strongly scientific and political valence at the same time, and that it tends to slide into “environmentalist” and “environmentalism”: the term for our immediate surroundings now implies a kind of person that guards or protects. I think this might be more true for my discipline, ecocriticism, than it is for environmental history or physical geography, but I’m not sure, and I intend to find out.

In any case, it became clear to me from the introductory lectures today that the notion of a transfrontier, an area that is better defined by geography and shared cultural and economic activity, rather than international borders, applies perfectly to Tucson and the Sonoran region to its west and south, especially when the history of the Tohono O’odham nation, which straddles the US/Mexico border, is taken into account. I will have more to say about this when we’ve actually gone into the field.

On a more archival note, we were allowed to see local natural history texts from mid-19th century Anglo-American explorers, and I was struck by their rigorously scientific tone. Just as in Victorian British natural history texts, animals are presented in written descriptions accompanied by illustrations, but unlike the more popular Victorian texts–I’m thinking of the Animate Creation series in particular–there is no attempt to make the animals perform allegorical functions. Foxes are foxes, rather than symbols of craftiness. As our art historian pointed out, however, it is interesting that only the birds are presented in color, as if the artists feel they must compete with Audubon, whose famous bird book was already circulating.

Personally, I feel lucky just to have found the bookstore, but tomorrow will bring our first trip into the field, and an experiment in cooking Saguaro cactus fruit the old-fashioned way, so I’m sure the feeling will fade. Until then, have a look at this xeriscaped garden, and then imagine acres of cactus stretching out to distant mountains…

Call for Papers: “Teaching the Earth”

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE

TEACHING THE EARTH

Guest Editor: Anthony Lioi

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 environmental issues in all pedagogical contexts and disciplinary perspective. Essays should raise questions concerning constructive pedagogical responses to local and planetary envronmental issues.

• Ecological literacy
• Environmental ethics
• Natural, cultural, and financial economies
• Resource depletion
• Mass extinction
• Popular culture and the environment
• Religion and ecology
• Corporate greenwashing
• Celebrity environmentalism
• The Earth and the Internet
• Resource wars
• Indigenous nations and environmental sovereignty
• The queer Earth
• Nature writing
• Green cities
• Food and farming
• Radical environmentalisms
• Ecology in the Borderlands
• Environmental racism
• The Anti-Toxics and Environmental Justice movements
• Rural, suburban, and urban geography

Deadline: October 31st, 2009

Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary forum for pedagogical scholarship exploring intersections of identities, power, and social justice. The journal features a range of approaches — from theoretical articles to creative and experimental accounts of pedagogical innovations from teachers and scholars from all areas of education.

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

Published semi-annually by New Jersey City University

Some Day We’ll Have Paris?

The New York Times recently reported on new plans to make Paris a green city by breaking the boundary between the old, wealthy city center and the poor suburban periphery. The most avant of avant-garde architects have weighed in: read the story here.

Farmed Salmon: The Cost of Fish Meal to Chimbote, Peru

“The Greed of Feed,” a report on the ecological and social damage of the fish meal industry in Peru, was produced by the Ecologist Film Unit (EFU), a division of The Ecologist magazine.

Anti-Coal Protest at Capitol Coal Plant in Washington, DC

On March 2, a number of local and national groups, including Greenpeace, Coal River Mountain Watch (see Judy Bonds interview below), and civic leaders from Washington, DC protested the continued use of coal in the plant that provides heat for a number of federal buildings, such as the Supreme Court. In attendance were Dr. James Hansen, the NASA whistleblower on climate change, Bill McKibben, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s Congressional representative.

Here is a video summary of the protest itself:

And a longer discussion of the issues involved:

Last week, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid called for the plant to convert to natural gas.

In terms of teaching, this is an interesting event for several reasons.

As he himself points out in the first video, Bill McKibben has been trying to kickstart global warming activism for twenty years. I teach McKibben’s work, and this is an interesting case of a long-term relationship between literature and politics.

In terms of environmental politics, this protest combined local citizens with direct action groups that operate on a global stage. It included American Indian, Anglo-American, and African American activists. It took an environmental justice perspective on the beginning of the coal cycle–mountaintop removal in the Appalachians–and on the end of the process–poisoned air for DC residents. It highlighted the disenfranchisement of DC in Congress. Therefore, it combined a number of groups, philosophies, and activist strategies that are normally discussed separately, but worked together under the aegis of climate change politics.

A special thanks to everyone who froze their asses off for justice!

Japanese anti-dam activism

I think this sort of story can be used to teach environmentalism in national context. Though there are, for instance, American, Chinese, and Indian anti-dam movements, each one grows out of a different national history and an idiosyncratic population of activists. It is too easy for American students to assume that the history of American environmentalism is the pattern for the whole world.

From the New York Times:

Grass-Roots Uprising Against River Dam Challenges Tokyo

By MARTIN FACKLER

HITOYOSHI, Japan — First, the farmers objected to an ambitious dam project proposed by the government, saying they did not need irrigation water from the reservoir. Then the commercial fishermen complained that fish would disappear if the Kawabe River’s twisting torrents were blocked. Environmentalists worried about losing the river’s scenic gorges. Soon, half of this city’s 34,000 residents had signed a petition opposing the $3.6 billion project.

In September, this rare grassroots uprising scored an even rarer victory when the governor of Kumamoto prefecture, a mountainous area of southern Japan, formally asked Tokyo to suspend construction. The Construction Ministry agreed, temporarily halting an undertaking that had already relocated a half-dozen small villages, though work on the dam itself had not started.

The suspension grabbed national headlines as one of the first times a local governor had succeeded in blocking a megaproject being built by the central government. It also turned the governor, Ikuo Kabashima, into a new emblem of a broader rethinking of Japan’s highly centralized style of government, in which Tokyo’s powerful ministries have held a tight grip on decision making all the way down to local levels.

“We can’t cower before the central government,” said Mr. Kabashima, a former politics professor.

Read the rest of the story.

The Fate of the Humanities at the Present Time

From the New York Times article, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth“:

“With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.

This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being.”

The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”

Okay: I’m a writing teacher, so don’t get me started on this crap about “no one knows what the humanities are for in the real world.” [Insert endocrine storm here.]

It seems to me, however, that the “crisis of the humanities” discussion is a great place for environmental humanists to advocate for our own worth, but also to give the humanities in general a shot in the arm.

Relevance? Fate of the earth, anyone?

OMB Director’s Lecture on Climate Change

I will admit: I’m becoming emotional about the way the Obama administration keeps appointing people who, um, actually seem to understand what’s going on. Here’s a link to the lecture Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, gave on climate change.

I [heart] the new OMB.