Blogs

Somebody came up and said, "You talk about your home as if it were part of your own body." And they were right, this landscape is a living, breathing part of me. I consider it something to protect, like I would my own body. That's an idea that's been passed down from generation to generation. - Judy Bonds (found here)

    Much of our ecology and ‘Ecoliteracy’ 360 began with conversations and questions about home, community, and belonging, and that makes sense, doesn’t it? I certainly thought so, until I came across Timothy Morton and his Ecological Thought, at which point I didn’t know what to think; his argument simultaneously illuminated complexities and made them more confusing. Morton argues that "Fixation on place impedes a truly ecological view" (Morton 26), a claim that I find problematic based on personal experience people I know. Morton says that in order to improve the various crises faced by our world and the human species, it is necessary for us humans to stop thinking of ourselves as apart from Nature-with-a-capital-N. What we need, he says, is ‘the ecological thought’, which he defines in many ways: "a virus that infects all other areas of thinking…It has to do with love, loss, despair…compassion…depression and psychosis…capitalism and what might exist after capitalism…race, class, and gender…society…coexistence.” (Morton 2) He goes on to even broader and more abstract descriptions of the ecological thought:

Tearing Down the Language Barrier

Every environment, whether it is in the city, your home, or the outdoors, has obstacles to tear down and work through. We are not a perfect community and in a way it is great that we will never be a utopia. Individuals gain knowledge through experience, through failing and learning how to overcome and adapt to face our biggest problems. Individuals would never progress intellectually, mentally, or emotionally if our environments were problem safe, poke free bubbles.

Every environment is unique and created differently due to geographic and economic standards. Philadelphia’s solution for better environmental education caliber might not apply to Houston’s solution due to a lot of reasons, but most importantly because of how different each population in each of the environments is. Houston and Philadelphia are two different cities in two different states miles apart from each other, not only does location play a big factor in the issue but so does the general make up of both environments. We would need to take into consideration the types of communities that build both cities, which requires stepping in, and becoming personally aware with who lives there rather than focus solemnly on the problem at hand.

After looking through all of the readings we have done so far in class I decided I wanted to focus on the readings that coverered bilingualism in public schools as well as focusing on disabilities in the public school system. The main focus for this essay is on accessibility: Accessibility for people with learning diabilities or language differences in the public school system as well as accessibility for people in nature whether it’s in natural parks or in playgrounds with man-made structures. For this essay I looked at Lapayese’s essay on bilingualism in public schools, two essays on disabilities, as well as Price’s essay which focused on the idea of access. I also wanted to tie in my own experiences with disabilities and school systems.

A handful of postings ago, I wrote a short one called “Everybody’s Them & Porous Perspectives” and it was about viewing our self and everyone else’s self as a center point; we are all center points. So, if everyone is their own center point, somehow our centrality or individuality cancels out with everyone else’s exact same position, so we are a bunch of me’s. A bunch of points. Points on a grid, evenly spaced out, spaced into infinity. I wonder if it matters that there is a finite amount of me’s currently on our planet. But then to consider and calculate our vastness over time, our growth, our expansion, and our already finished presences — I think if we cannot count and determine an exact number, than it is incalculable, hence, infinite. Effective infinity. There is a certain peace, a certain relief in infinity. A lessening of burden. If we know we cannot comprehend infinity, we can accept that, and then not try and deal with the whole. We can deal with our immediate range of vision, the section of the grid points we can see, and the spaces we can see.

             Environmental education is an effort to teach how natural environments function and the ways people can change their habits and behavior in order to live more sustainably. This form of education aims to foster more ecological intelligence, environmental consciousness, and more caring of the earth. One issue with environmental education, though, is that it often calls for “providing more positive opportunities for contact with nature among children and adults as an integral part of everyday life” (159). By limiting the scope to connecting students to “nature” or to wildscapes free from pollution, skyscrapers, and waste, students from cities who lack access to these outdoor spaces are inhibited from getting the “environmental education” experience. There is a bias in environmental education toward natural, pristine spaces, when in actuality students should be learning about their own communities; the environments they live in, breathe in, and attend school in. This issue of access to untouched outdoor spaces is especially the case in Washington D.C. where certain neighborhoods have disproportionately high rates of pollution compared with other parts of the city. Students who do not have access to “nature” as well as those who live in communities that deal with environmental racism, should learn more about their natural surroundings as well as means of action they can take to address environmental racism.

I’ve been waving Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women @ y’all for a couple of weeks now, and thought I’d take the time to write out a little of what I find so compelling about the book. It is really making me feel dissatisfied with the sort of writing we are getting, and making me be more thoughtful about ways in which we might help folks dig deeper, be more truthful.

If you don’t know the story of Medea, read about it here—it’s all about betrayal, abandonment, anger, “too much love.”

“Jones finds theatrical ways to interrogate the personal, surrounding the contemporary with the mythical, providing more texts, and thus context, for these women, so that each individual’s story is not isolated but always seen in relation to others…autobiography alone neither guarantees new insights nor changes behavior. As Joan Scott has argued, experience is not transparent but is ‘at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted’ (p. 21).

While some of us were hanging out with Michael last Friday (waiting for the rest of us to show up), he mentioned another article, written by a professor of public policy @ Rutgers Camden, which he thought we might find of interest. He just sent me the link: Poverty Porn in Rolling Stone.

Ok, so I know we're taking a break from All Over Creation, but I found this video the other day and thought it a little relevant to some of the topics in the novel. I think the Seeds of Resistance would approve.