November 16, 2014 - 21:55
Selena selects location for Anne's section (and will
post); Sydney will select Tuesday's class site
I. coursekeeping
paper due on Friday, reflecting on the implications of what Kolbert is saying--how does
her book connect with, interact with and/or challenge other material we’ve read this semester?
posting on Monday: read Bowers' article on "recovering ecological intelligence."
Skim the three other short selections assigned; chose one of these to read more carefully.
Then, post on what you'd like us to talk about, and/or what questions you have about
the material that you'd like us to address in class.
next week is Thanksgiving (!), and there will be no writing conferences...
@ the start of Tuesday's class, we'll schedule our final round of conferences for you all
review now instructions for your final Portfolio & Checklist --
we'd asked you to look through these, so let's start w/ your questions...
II. not quite done responding to Van Jones, in the voices of characters and authors we've met...
who would rally to his cause, who resist him, and in what terms?
III. Freire
many of us noted that what had been advertised as a “talk by E Kolbert about environmental issues"
was actually a conversation about writing between her and the college’s director of creative writing;
some of us appreciated that; some of us wanted more focus on questions of ecological concern;
Kolbert responded (on p. 266) that those two things aren’t separate ("If you want to think about
why humans are so dangerous to other species...you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap").
Today’s essay comes back to the question of what reading and writing have to do with
questions of environmental concern, and with the rest of the world more generally:
What does it meant to think of humans as part of nature? What does it mean to name something?
Start w/ a text rendering.
Re-read the text: underline a sentence/box a phrase/circle a word/write your own word.
Go round and read these passages.
What did we hear?
What is this text about?
What is it doing?
How does it address, or help us think about our relation
w/ the environment? about environmental action?