Towards Day 24 (Tues, 12/2): "Our Vegetable Love"

I. coursekeeping
* Maryam is re-directing us to the lower level common room in Erdman
[where to on Thursday?]

* Welcome back! any eco-stories from your Thanksgiving vacation?

* everyone aware of the climate change conference happening now in Paris?
please add Naomi Klein's essay to your reading for Thursday:
What’s really at stake at the Paris climate conference now marches are banned, The Guardian (November 20, 2015)

* on Thursday, we'll also discuss Bruno Latour's Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene; in preparation...

* By 5 p.m. on Wed (tomorrow): twelfth short posting, giving 3 main ideas that you see Latour offering,
and one question his essay raised for you (this is a demanding essay; please start on it tonight).

* NOT ON FRIDAY, BUT by this Sunday @ 5, your last paper is due: drawing on our recent readings (Van Jones, Friere, Bowers, LeGuin, Latour, all those selections about the microbiome...) to reflect on what constitutes "ecological intelligence" (or: what intelligences do we need to think ecologically?). Bowers offered us a version which we took on/didn't buy completely last week. Your assignment for this week is to reconsider that concept; what does it mean/how should it be learned/taught? This might be a letter to Bowers, or a counter to him (what would you want your teachers to think/know?) This could be an expansion of Grace's posting, last weekend: "ecological intelligence takes account of relationships, contexts, as well as impacts of ideas and behaviors on other members in the cultural and natural systems" (Bowers, pg.45). I'd like to discuss if we as a class think that we use ecological intelligence in our discussion and in the way we read and analyze readings.

* in preparation for this paper, begin brainstorming what you might like to do, and especially who you might "think along with";
we'll spend some time in class on Thursday helping one another generate this work....

* also! you should be working hard now on your 6-week project presentations:
everybody needs to be prepared to present during next Tuesday's class, with 5-7
minutes describing what your pair learned in-and-about your "expanded contact zone."
Come to class on Thursday with a title for your group (so we can think about organizing
the presentations).

You will "track what you did" in your portfolio; but--
REMEMBERING HOW OUR *TEACHING* of KOLBERT'S CHAPTERS WENT--
next week, your task is less to "report" than to teach the class:
think pedagogically about you might most effectively share what you've
learned (this could be in the form of a conversation, q&a, hand-out, power point....):
after each presentation, we'll take a few more minutes for reflecting on what you've taught.

We are planning to meet together with both sections @ 7 p.m. on Thursday,
Dec. 10 for dessert (since you have a holiday dinner that night in the dining halls);
this still good for everyone?

II. on Tuesday, we discussed Bowers' essay on "recovering ecological intelligence,"
and found it wanting (from an earlier generation? insistently local, historical,
no acknowledgment of the internet, focusing on "intergenerationally connected
relationships" which "are not framed in terms of fostering more 'individual self-direction,'
'indepndence,' and 'ongoing questioning and revising'" --WHAT?!?

we also didn't really look @ the four other short selections:
Your Own Personal Ecosystem
The Human Microbiome project
“About the world within us,” The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Stacy Alaimo: Porous Bodies and Trans-Corporeality"

remember these....? go back there, as framing for our discussion of LeGuin's short story
yhamashima's posting, re: "About the world within us"
"What's generally seen is that, during disease, the diversity, that rich ecosystem in the gut or on the skin, seems to crash. Just as with a reef or a rain forest, the richer the ecosystem the better.”
I think Japan is one of the most sanitary countries. We wash hands and gargle every time after coming back from outside. We keep on doing it since we were very little. We separate inside and outside completely, so we don’t step into houses with our shoes. Maybe we are not so strong against disease, but then is it better to let them in?
Japanese people focus on “preventing” illness. Is it not effevtive?

see also otter15: The comment that calamityschild made about being "one" with the world (since we have porous bodies) is particularly striking; I've never really considered that our porous bodies could make us inseperable from the world. It seems like a lot of Tuesday's conversations reflected on how humans are interconnected with the environment and world, but ... aren't there situations where we have to distance ourselves from the world in order to make things easier to think about?

III. good science setting for Ursula LeGuin's short story, "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow" --
which invites us to imagine a world in which plant life is @ the center-->
she actually invites us to re-imagine our relation w/ plants.
Let's (re)start this conversation not w/ her imaginings, but w/ our experience.

What do you know of plant life?
How does it affect your own?
How central have plants been to the stories we have been telling one another this semester?
[turn and tell one another this; then share in large group....]

As large group: what were our reactions to LeGuin's story?
How did those reactions arise from/relate to our own relationship to plants?

What is the source of fear in this story?
Why are we/might we be afraid, alone in the woods?

----
Anne's Reading Notes
two webpages, 1 newspaper article about the human microbiome:
microbial communities which inhabit major mucosal surfaces of the human body,
including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract;
the idea that friendly microscopic "bugs are us" plays against the traditional sense of self--
mind-centered, egotistical, and laden with notions of personal identity, separation
and integrity (spiritual and physical).

Levi R. Bryant’s blog posting about Stacy Alaimo’s writing about "Porous Bodies and Trans-Corporeality"
breaks down the whole notion that there is any separation between us and our world,
that we can ever be exiled--or quite @ home....

They say the human is inseparable from “the environment,”
that there is no “over here” that’s isolated from over there:
"all bodies are porous….permeable…more like sponges than marbles…
Even marbles are a sort of sponge…even atoms are mostly composed
of void or space…All entities are characterized by a porosity
that allows the outer world to flow through them…"
cities constitute the countryside (flows of energy, water, information)….
We are constituted by the world around us…“the environment is a world of fleshy beings”--
“with their own needs, claims…unpredictable and unwanted actions”:
“the ecological pertains to the most intimate recesses of my sponge-like being”:
Big Mac = cow flatulence/rising greenhouse gases/clearing of rain forests, shipping, preparation, waste…

In her Forward to "Vaster than Empires...," LeGuin said,
The relation of our species to plant life is one of total depen­dence and total exploitation—the relation of an infant to its mother. Without plants the earth would have remained bare rock and water; without plant respiration we'd suffocate promptly; without vegetable food (firsthand or, as in meat, secondhand) we starve. There is no other food.

...but this relationship...can be completely ignored by a modern city dweller whose actual experience of plants is limited to florists' daisies and supermarket beans. The igno­rance of the urban poor is blameless; the arrogant ignorance of the urban educated...is inex­cusable. There is no excuse for deforestation, for acid rain, or for the hunger of two-thirds of the children of the earth.