The non-human roles (green cards):

a squirrel from Elizabeth's site-sit

a baboon from the troop observed by Barbara Smuts

Max, Peter Singer's dog in "The Lives of Animals"

a Pachysandra plant in Morris Woods

a piece of Wissahickon Schist, now part of a Bryn Mawr College building

The human roles (orange cards):

Winona LaDuke

Henry David Thoreau

Peter Singer

David Bohm

Terry Tempest Williams

The blue cards looked something like this:

Each group included a red, a green, and a blue cardholder. The non-human character got to speak first.

I did not get a full record of who was in each group, but here are some of the memorable moments:

A baboon fell into the river and was in difficulties. The author in the group (Peter Singer) preferred to wax poetic than to rescue the baboon. The class member playing herself pointed out that the baboon could not appreciate poetry.

Squirrel: Elizabeth is an intruder in my house: Attack!

class member: do you not like humans?

David Bohm: intruding my house Elizabth is

Max the dog: I have worth but YOU do not get to decide what that worth is.

Thoreau: Learn to live on your own, dog. Undomesticate yourself. Then you will learn your true worth.

So I just finished reading an article about the slow food movement for my Italian culture class and I came across this: 

Se, come dice il poeta contadino Wendell Berry, “mangiare è un atto agricolo”, produrre il cibo deve essere considerato un “atto gastronomico”.

This is when Berry was talking about eating as an "agricultural act." It seems that many cultures have really embraced his views on ecological justice. 

Memo #3 Image

Borrowed from: http://whatshappeningswfl.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/an-evening-under-the-sea-april-27/

This paper explores how no true reform can come from within the prison system, or any insitution, unless we...

ABOLISH it!

Here it is! Thank you all for participating in the reconstituted poem exercise we did together. Phrases from the peom were taken from Walt Whitmans Song of Myself in his larger collection entitled Leaves of Grass. I encourage all of you to keep reading more Walt Whitman! I know two minutes definitely wasn't enough time to get to know the poems I handed out, but they are definitely worth spending some time with. Thank you to everyone for your amazing presentations as well! It was a wonderful semester and I look forward to having classes with all of you over the next for years. 

Every Atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you… and every atom of my blood formed from this oil, this air

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes the shelves are full of perfumes I breath the fragrance myself and know it and like it

I know that the hand of god is the promise of my own and the spirit of Fod is brother of my own

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing

This is the meal equally set, this is the meal for natural hunger, it is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I will make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away

I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time

The link to the sky burial video from youtube: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6hSK8CluxQ

Comment if you want to learn more about sky burials!!!!!!!

So it was really an amazing process of how we decided on the theme. We came up with two ideas (campus site revisit and the sky burial) and did not want to give up either of them. As we worked on the project, we found these two themes could well be connected (not just the hawk!). Over the semester, we have been having a journey. In much of the texts we have discussed, the horizon is limited by who the author are; yet not few of them indicated applying their theory to all other people. Personally, I believe that getting to know different cultures is crucial in an academic discussion of ecology. From campus (our culture) to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Tibet (an unfamiliar culture) is a major move that we should take after the course. That is why we named the project "Ecological Imaginings from Campus to the World".

 I really enjoyed the pictures and words collected for us to review. Sometimes rediscovering is even more delightful than seeing it for the first time. I myself actually regret that I did not take enough pictures of my site, so I sort of tried to make it up last Sunday. But...too late to record changes. I could tell those materials engaged the class a lot. (Yeah! Thanks to Shengjia for her sensibility, class!)

 Sky burial came up to my mind during the brainstorming, because when I first heard of it I found it striking and venerable. I wanted to present something that may provoke people to think.