When I was younger, around the age of 10 my mother told me a lie that made me question my ability to make my own decisions and put constraints on me via my family identity. I was conversing with my mother and the topic of tattoos came up and I told her that I wanted one. Her immediate response was, “If you get a tattoo you won’t be allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Is that what you really want?” At the time I agreed with her and put the tattoo idea behind me. A few years later I decided to do a google search of “Can a person with a tattoo be buried in a Jewish cemetery?” The answer I saw wasn’t what I expected. The answer said that there is no such Jewish law about a Jew not being buried in a Jewish cemetery because they have a tattoo. However in some cases a person already laid to rest might have requested that no one with a tattoo be buried next to them. Other then that it is acceptable for me to get a tattoo and I felt betrayed by my mother. My mother was forcing me to be on this path that I didn’t want to be on. A path filled with her making all of the decisions for me. However this made me think about other cultures and religions where people are forced to stay on a particular path and have different ways in which they respect the dead. Whether your culture or religion buries a person the day they pass away, not using a casket for burial, or not having upright tombstones.

It was interesting to read "Teaching Urban Ecology", a text that explicitly talked about how "nature" and "culture" are so siloed from one another in the classrom and how Di Chiro used intersectionality in teaching Ecology in her classroom. Di Chiro raised many interesting questions in her class, one of them I was especially struck by: "How are environmental scholars and community activists re-thinking and re-connecting the ideas of ecology and social justice with the commitment to creating sustainable communities?" She then encouraged her students to explore this question more deeply by participating in action research which provided them with very interesing and enlightening insight. I think the original question she posed is so central to this course as well as being a question that should be explored in more classrooms across the country. All too often, students learn about "nature" and "culture" not only as separate, isolated concepts, but also without this intersectionality layer to explain how different people experience culture and the earth differently. How might this question be explored in a middle or high school classroom? How can educators and schools integrate the ideas of "nature" and "culture"? How can social justice and environmental jusice and activism be better linked in the classroom/school setting?

            In Ruth Ozeki’s Eco-novel All Over Creation, education, learning, or in other words, “consciousness-raising”, occur in different ways for several characters as the story unfolds. Frank Perdue, a janitor from the Midwest inadvertently gets involved with a radical environmental activist group, the Seeds of Resistance, and spends much of this time feeling skeptical about their work; feeling that people were not “ready to have their consciousness raised quite yet” (86). This statement begs the question: what does it take for people’s “consciousness to be raised”? Who is ready and how do they become ready? How much latitude in conversation and dialogue can there be for the maximum amount of learning to take place?  Can there be productive dialogue between two people who hold different perspectives or who are not ready to have their consciousness raised? In order to answer these questions, I will look at how learning takes place in All Over Creation—specifically for Frank and the individuals who the Seeds of Resistance reaches out too, and will conclude by bringing in The Lives of Animals and Radical Presence, other texts that touch on these questions.

I found Blackburn’s discussion of “negotiating threat lovingly” (95) interesting and helpful, and it reminded me a lot of what Kumashiro said about crisis. Blackburn writes about how youth perceived to be LGBTQQ and allies experience threat on a regular basis, but that what she had not previously realized was that, in efforts to combat homophobia, she was actually threatening those whose ideas she was challenging. Blackburn writes that she started to wonder whether threat was always good or bad. Like Kumashiro says for crisis, she comes to the conclusion that threat is something to work through, rather than avoid. She writes that working through threat lovingly requires a process of inquiry and “[believing] in others’ knowledge” (95).

Everything that any living being does, thinks, and feels is unchangeably its own perspective. I exist only within my own reality, only able to read and interact with the world through my own senses. My perspective is the most constant factor of my existence – ever-changing and developing, but solely my own. I am always drawn back to thinking about our universe: “the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space”. Not “the totality of all phenomena throughout space”, but the known and supposed. Humankind has ‘claimed’ the universe as its own. We have established ourselves as the focal point of existence. And just as humanity has claimed the universe, I like to believe that us people all exist within our own ‘personal universe’, for the totality of our own existence is comprised of what we know or suppose. This sounds like a very individual-centric approach to thinking about people, but it is because of this truth that our webs of porous connections and togetherness are so powerful. Everything we do is a choice, what we ourselves decide to do. And despite the fact that we exist in our ‘personal universes’, it seems to be a common link of humanity to constantly push ourselves to escape from our own singularity and choose to share, combine, connect, understand, and feel the perspectives of others. We have the choice to be selfish and self-centered.

Environmentalists. According to merriam webster dictionary, it's a person who to protects the natural world from pollution and other threats. One who is concerned with the environment quality. The term environment seems to have no connection to something else like society, the human interaction or behavior. It leaves no space for different environmentalists, for those who emcompass different qualities different opinions to grow from. 

To be an environmentalist...what doesn that even mean? White priviledge? Am I, a latina, low income individual not allowed or better yet said not qualified to be known as an environmentalist? 

I really enjoyed our visit there y'day; my images capture some of the stories on the gravestones (what are Isaac Hull's "private virtues," affectionately remembered by his wife? where was Olga Demidoff "laid"?--since she clearly didn't make it back to Laurel Hill, as she had hoped? what are the "rare merits" of William Wood? and what does "mayhem in the bedroom" REALLY commemorate?)--as well as the river, the budding trees and flowers, many of the images of angels, pointing upward, and people preserved in their life activities (not to mention you all, in various states of rest and reflection....;)

Sunday (April 13th):

EDUC: by 5pm – post an open response to this week's readings.

ENGL: by 5pm post on-line your third 5-pp. reflection, on how much "latitude" you can allow..

Monday (April 14th):

ECON: Bring a calculator to class and the exam.

EDUC: Read Chase, “Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies”; Di Chiro, “Teaching Urban Ecology” (password-protected file)

Here they are!

Turns out there are links (bodies moved) between the cemetery in Morris Woods (behind English House)
and Laurel Hill (where they are marked by an enormous memorial--a great granite obelisk--and three gravestones).  Agatha and aphorisnt--this campus cemetery is where you should go this weekend; of particular note is that this graveyard, on Bryn Mawr College property, contains the remains of enslaved people who worked at Harriton House (while the bodies of those who served as field slaves are in unmarked graves on the plantation itself). More @ http://www.lowermerionhistory.org/burial/harriton/ and from my own earlier visits....we look forward to hearing what y'all have to add!