| not so proud of this so lj cutting it except i CAN'T for some reason so just dont read it |
[04 Jun 2009|06:08pm] |
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster in question is made from the reanimated tissue of an unknown number of corpses. This nauseating union between the supernatural and the rational results in the destruction of innocent children, of Victor Frankenstein, and of the monster he created. The story is a cautionary tale about the hubris of Modern science and the unpredictable consequences of human transgressions against the "natural order." British Romantic literature is suspicious in particular of technological progress in the tradition of doubt -- the logical mechanism responsible for empirical science, and, in turn, Hegelian dialectics.
According to Peter Coates in Nature, American Romantics were much more optimistic about technological ventures, though such optimism in the land of plenty was tainted by the “peculiar institution” of human slavery. British Romantics began early on to protest slavery from a humanistic standpoint. While Thoreau and Emerson wandered through the endless woods trying to find Enlightenment, Europeans were forced by resource stress to cope with a "full world" scenario and the end of colonialism. I argue that the Romantic period was a largely pessimistic (though not declensionist!) vision of the changing world and a period of artistic and political maturation for an increasingly critical group of writers. In contrast, the Modern period was a time of rapid intellectual growth and an outpouring of new ideas that were later tamed and conserved by 18th century thinkers.
Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon were three Modern philosophers whose ordering of the 17th century world is now canonical. Isaac Newton in particular had no thought of questioning God; he felt his scientific discoveries were a way of glorifying God by better understanding His creation. Isaac Newton remarked, “"The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion on an intelligent and powerful Being." Descartes set up a clear distinction between between "intelligent and corporeal nature" and used it to justify God's perfection. Bacon’s garden was a place of painstaking perfection and meticulous organization. Every plant he knew the name of was put to Bacon’s use. No member of the flora went unaccounted for; he even took into consideration the habits of passing birds, although he made no particular place for them. The hoarding of technical knowledge present in his work clearly indicates his materialistic orientation towards nature. He was probably one of the first people to identify beauty and relaxation as a commodity.
In contrast, the free association and emotional observations made by Romantic thinkers like Godwin, Shelley, Blake, Turner, and Wordsworth are far less focused on specific phenomena or organisms, but instead represent a vision-quest -- for the garden of earthly delights -- for sources of both positive and negative experiences. It was during this period that gentlemen of leisure began backpacking through the Himalayas, joining the French Foreign Legion, and getting addicted to opium from the Indochines. Those who did not travel recounted delightful places they encountered during meanderings close to home. Coates says that Romantic thinkers came to adore nature as the catharsis of inner forces: "the Romantics chose wild nature not only above its tamer aspects but also above the finest charms and accomplishments of the human mind" (Nature, p.127). Furthermore, such mystical scenery was to be found in enchanted forests and formerly reviled crags (like the Devil's-Arse). In addition, Coates says, the denizens of the Modern age were apt to close their curtains against wild scenery later found to be "picturesque" and worthy of reproduction by Edmund Burke and William Turner.
William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1793) is a clear rejection of the body-mind fracture made during the Modern period. Its heretical claims contradict once popular legalistic interpretations of a divine moral order. In particular, the "proverbs of hell" instruct the reader to "drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead" and worry about making your life and the lives of others better in the present, instead of worrying about some eternal reward. At the same time, the creatures described in the Marriage hail the spirit world and reaffirm its existence. Blake defiantly resisted dualistic thinking and saw it as a source of unnecessary human suffering. The Marriage is a synthesis of the spiritual and the worldly which complicates Cartesian dualism and precedes Hegel (1874) by at least fifty years.
The mysticism of British romantics in particular reclaimed devilish peaks and dark forests as places of Faustian drama, the bargains having been made long before the romantic period. Goethe said that “All that we perceive around us is merely raw material”, a materialistic standpoint from which human souls are supposedly separate and immaterial. For the Romantics action and observation were the natural extension of the more quantitative, spiritual instincts of Modern thinkers. Blake asserted (in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell) that the soul indeed was part of the body, and not located anywhere else. In direct contrast to Goethe, Hegel said: “Physical Nature remains in the condition of potentiality; it remains true to its laws and does not venture beyond them; it is potentially the Idea, but the Idea in it does not attain to independent being or being-for-self; its goodness is purely immediate.” The urgency and immediacy of action is present today, in the tradition of activism and experiential learning popular in liberal arts institutions.
In preliterate British mythology, devils and spirits had free intercourse with human beings, and though these stories were never written down, they persisted. People began to understand an idea of a natural world independent from divine forces and imagined some frightening moral consequences or, more specifically, the lack thereof. It was early in the Modern period that the Mephistopheles legend finally came to fruition in the form of Goethe's Faust. The angst in the Shelley family's literature portrays humans struggling to reclaim moral agency in the face of horrific and even unholy social forces -- namely, man's increasing alienation in an increasingly scientific world, which, like clockwork, made time into a terror. In Byron's Don Juan and Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, the devil is presumed to stand in the background pulling the strings of the protagonists.
With William Godwin’s idea of the perfectibility of man came the idea that humans as free moral agents could govern themselves better than a theological aristocracy. To Godwin, only an anarchist society could account for a nation of individuals with independent morality. In his novel Things as They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, Caleb discovers his master’s tragic secrets among his personal files, and, upon rebellion, is exiled, imprisoned, and is also inwardly tortured by the knowledge that his servitude was not the decision of Christ, but the avaricious and exploitative desire of Falkland. Even when Falkland comes to justice at the end of the story, Caleb feels terrible.
The entire Romantic period can be seen as a time of intellectual maturation for Europe as it came to terms the loss of the Arthurian/Heroic/pagan mythos which sustained it in a prior age. Instead of believing in a Providence that governed feudal societies, as Isaac Newton did, Romantics came to see the world of collective individuals as a fallen state prey either to the whims of demons, or to the unsavory consequences of a purely rational society. Some artists responded to this idea with hope, while others fell into deep despair.
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| hot, messy, passionate, sloppy, essay. |
[04 Jun 2009|06:01pm] |
The early pioneers were described by William Faulkner as animalistic man-children, "roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey," bearded, axe-wielding brutes who exterminated the native people, purchased and ravaged the land that rightfully belonged to no one, and built gleaming metropolis after gleaming metropolis on what once was an endless vision of countryside. The desire to subdue and conquer territory seems to be antithetical to contemporary land management practices. But a land bias similar to that of the frontiersman is expressed in contemporary descriptions of restoration work that favor arable land over less economically productive terrain.
Land managers (especially contractors) and restoration workers operate their seed spreaders and rototillers with archetypes of a particular place in mind. The unstated goal of such projects is not to revive "fantasies of untrammeled wilderness or Edenic landscapes unviolated by human influence," as Bill Jordan suggests in The Sunflower Forest, but instead to create scenery: blossoming wildflowers of every color; grass tall enough to hide a man high on horseback; furtive enclaves of reintroduced species available for scientific study; yet the deliberate ecological artistry should, in the end, remain unseen. Joel Greenberg, for instance, describes Chicago in its former glory: "clouds of passenger pigeons dense enough to blot out the sun for hours, paddlefish thrashing in the shallow waters of the Des Plaines River and its tributaries, and mountain lions stalking careless elk calves as they browsed on the edge of prairie groves." The motivations behind such work are complex and variegated, but they are primarily (for the purposes of this essay) ecocentric, aesthetic, and scientific.
Restored ecosystems are not typically inhabited, except on Sunday afternoons, when groups of neighbors and their children perform their weekly devotional in the area, cutting buckthorn and performing controlled burns in order to give the bur oaks a chance to fill out. A classmate described: “I came to relish the earth beneath me as it felt as if I were walking on clouds, which tuned me in to the surrounding sounds of nature.” Would restoration workers be willing to help prop up sagging saguaros with their deadly spikes, tear out devil’s claw and salt bushes in rubber boots, minding the rattlesnakes beneath? Would they be willing to work in Oklahoma, in tick season in tick country, at a time when the work is needed most?
Restoration is often painted by writers like Michael Pollan as a delightful travail, “restoring the congenial relationship that prevailed in this place [Cathedral Pines] long before the storm and the subsequent controversy,” but he only describes a piece of the ecological puzzle, a piece with which he is intimate. The demand for restoration workers of all ages in all states of health crumbles when it comes to saving truly fragile environments like deserts, where the relationship is tentative, solitary, and often fatal for either man or nature; or coral reefs, where the impacts are so global, pervasive, and systematic that any amount of effort or study is a losing battle. This sort of restoration work is male-and-youth oriented, and extremely taxing on the body and the emotions.
Then again, in the prairie, the original garden upon which the American farmstead was founded, restoration work simply takes advantage of preexisting soil conditions, the ones that humans evolved foraging. Such settings are ideal for personal re-enactments of lost frontiersmanship, but not in a strict sense. The ultimate goal of restoration work seems to be the integration, involvement, and intersection of people-with-land, in the ecosystem where we evolved, in a way that somehow makes us more human and forgives us of the original sin of being civilized in the first place. Only when these places have healed can people go back to feeling human, feeling free of social control, and once again indulge their animal innocence.
Jordan presumes an authenticity, not of nature, but of human behavior. The task of management is only ecologically effective in "an ongoing program of restoration:" a duty bound relationship between sinful human beings and yielding, forgiving ecosystems. This relationship is only truly possible in friendly environments such as woodlands, prairies, or wetlands. Xerophytic spaces such as mountains or deserts require a restoration worker beyond the Sunday afternoon garlic mustard puller.
So why does the land bias exist? In a time of necessary change, it exposes itself as a survivalist preference for revising ecosystems so that they might go back to an “untapped” state. If we can restore soil fertility, we can use it again once technology comes up (or DOWN) to agricultural practices that won’t strip it naked. If we follow Michael Pollan’s advice, the conclusion is ominous: we will never be able to abstract ourselves from the land, so we may as well start using its resources in an integrated, ecologically healthy way.
Restoration would also be an act of apology and reparation for our poor foresight in irrigation, fertilization, crop rotation, and pest control techniques. I would, a few years ago, have been fine with this conclusion, but now in my advanced state of paranoia I see such a plan as a conspiratorial effort to centralize agricultural production and make it impossible for humans to ever escape civilization. Once this is accomplished, we will lose the vision of the land-for-its-own sake that inspired many of us to become environmentalists in the first place.
From an ecofeminist perspective, the concept of restoration-as-gardening is not at all objectionable. The work often puts women in charge of healing the earth and bringing others to join the cause, as described in Miracle Under the Oaks, when Stephen Packard admitted to joining a restoration project because of all the cute “secretaries” and their friends. A seemingly sexist statement reveals the value of such work as an empowering activity for feminists, who guide scientists (a male-oriented profession) and teach them not just practical gardening strategies, but the holistic perspective required of such a lifetime hobby. In conclusion, I would propose that we stop trying to make “hostile” environments habitable for vulnerable human beings unwilling to face their nomadic realities.
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| sonoran desert ((white tanx)) |
[04 Jun 2009|05:04pm] |
I visited Phoenix for my cousin's wedding. My parents, sister and I drove 15 minutes west to the White Tanks national park. Although I was only there for a few hours, it was a very transformative experience for me.
Every night the heat left the ground like a heavy quilt had lifted, and the flowering saguaros rapidly closed their blossoms, and the moon flowers started to open. I have never been in a place where the vegetation was so startlingly different, and the front yards full of cacti and rocks surprised me, since I am so used to seeing deliberate grassy lawns. A few people had them anyway -- my cousin and I made fun of them for wasting so much water and money in a losing battle with evapotranspiration. Then, on the way out to White Tanks, I saw, actually smelled, a huge irrigated field of roses in every color, across from a gigantic orchard of trees heavy with sweet, fresh oranges. My parents stopped the car and we all got out, overtaken by the impossible scenery. It was then I knew the real meaning of the intention, to "make the desert blossom like a rose" -- it is the real dream and the creation myth of Phoenix.
When we got out to the park, I was instantly drawn to the sight of the saguaro and the barrel cactus in bloom. All the vegetation seems to have such stark identity; the (palo verde?) trees with their green bark; the welcoming saguaros wrapped in bands of white flowers; the (creosote?) bushes made of tangles and poison. I loved the reversal of senses that came with the desert - instead of seeing nature, I primarily smelled it -- subtly coming up through the aroma of baked rocks -- or heard it -- the scuttling of lizards and snakes far away, or the droning of trees and water holes as I passed them -- full of hornets. The fragility of desert ecosystems was also apparent to me as I sat on a rock and whistled, echoing far into the distance. I could see from where I sat the city of phoenix and the fields of roses encroaching on the sporadic environment.
I also felt the danger of my own presence as a tourist, thinking of the water bottle in my hand (nowhere to recycle it! I had to wait until we got to my aunt's house) and the ad I saw on the airplane, of a family driving away from a famous rock formation in Utah, with car piled high with pink plastic surfboards, smiles on their faces, and no sweat on their brows. I thought of Desert Solitaire, which I was reading at the time, and the description of the book as a tombstone, a eulogy for the desert that no longer exists in a hiking range from highways and roadways. I visualized the sprawling roots of the irrigation system taking precious water from the aquifer below the mountain, raising the water table and salinity of the ground beneath. I felt intense sorrow at the thought of never being able to visit this beautiful place again.
I saw a green rock on the ground in front of me, striped with quartz and pitted with desert varnish. A small rock, I palmed it and carried it out of the park with me. I have a habit of collecting rocks from every place I go: I have a rock from southern Illinois, rocks from Lake Michigan, rocks from Ohio, a rock from Appalachia. I never thought about how taking rocks, which have no desires or intentions, might harm the environment. I never considered that small action to be unethical. Later on, on the plane, I held the still hot rock in my lap and read my book. Abbey complained of the desert being picked clean of rocks by amateur geologists and tourists, and I started to feel guilty about taking the rock. The rocks are a natural resource eventually converted to food by hungry plants, flash floods and winds, and sent through the energy chain to the strange animals that inhabit the desert. They also preserve the character of the area and drive the ecology in subtle ways. They provide a color scheme for animals to camouflage themselves against.
I also felt guilty about being on the plane and travelling. My whole life seems to be an inner debate between two options: staying in chicago, where my roots are, and trying to keep my impact on the environment as low as possible, and roaming the land, seeking out new life-changing experiences, and seeing how other people live their lives, eventually taking the message and practice home to wherever I choose to live (probably chicago.) If anyone else reads this, I wonder: do you feel the same way? If so, how do you resolve this inner conflict?
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| lol 6 years later still bringing up topics from integrated (linguistic diversity in space and time) |
[05 Apr 2009|07:49pm] |
"Rural America is the place where cities conduct their most dangerous experiments in mass production and where they seek to dump what they cannot contain. In almost every case, soil is their victim."
--Bill Logan, Dirt (the ecstatic skin of the earth), p.50
The bildungsroman of agricultural America follows the New World through a very violent adolescence to an angst-ridden early adulthood. The American Dream was built on an empty-worldview: the idea that the bounty of the land is plentiful enough to sustain a growing population of 6.7 billion. By spreading the earth with "20,000 Nagasaki bombs per year" (Adelson) of petroleum-based fertilizer, agribusiness has poured empty calories into the soil, weakening and ultimately destroying ecologically sound methods of food production. In an open letter to the next Farmer-in-Chief, Michael Pollan summarized the system's dire need for reform and the challenges facing the government:
…the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
It is wise to be wary of assuming that food comes from the grocery store; for though the mind is willing, the flesh will always be weak. Every calorie of the super-charged corn and soy that goes into our bodies pacifies us, sustaining our way of life and worldview; both the energy and the ideology behind it are transferred into the bodies of our children, who we assume will have enough to eat. Food is considered a universal human right, though it is already denied to billions of people. According to article 25 of the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
The stability and peace of world societies is directly proportional to human access to food and self-sufficient food systems. Without them, the resource stress leads to malnutrition, death, rioting, and war.
What does it mean for Western civilization to "grow up"? Does giving up the dream require us to give up our idealism and (dare I mention) hope? Barack Obama famously said in his inaugural address: "We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things." If, as Obama has said, the time has come to put away "childish things," then the first thing which must be set aside is our diseased food system. The time has come to move away from an open stream of infinite mass production and GDP growth, and towards a closed loop of sustainable production.
In order to understand the changing destiny of the country, we must keep our manifest destiny in mind. The state of California, the furthest point west, has symbolized for over a century the promise of fortune for Americans. Especially in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl tore hundreds of thousands of families from their homes, California has held the place of paradise in our minds. The journey West to California is celebrated by every incarnation of American youth culture, almost without exception.
Even when the open palms of promise give way to the hard slap of poverty, people tend to blame themselves for not working hard enough, being thrifty enough, or spending enough money. As Woody Guthrie once sang: "California is a garden of Eden/ A paradise to live in or see/ But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot/ if you ain't got that do-re-mi" (Dust Bowl Ballads).
In the '40s, the literal garden of Eden was privately owned and depended, like most businesses, on a cheap labor pool of hungry Okies whose farming methods had stripped the rich topsoil and left them destitute. In the same decade that irrigation caused southwestern deserts to "blossom like a rose," dry wind flowed through Tornado Alley, revoking the dirt and turning the prairie into a desert. "The rains failed, and the cultivated soil became once more the mobile dust that it had begun as….the sun turned red and the day darkened to dust". (Dirt, p. 184)
Donald Worster, in his essay "Thinking like a River," calls for a revolution, for an overhaul in America's relationship with the land. Instead of pursuing the old rush of easy money promised by exploitation of Western lands, the new America is waiting to be rediscovered back East; "Go East, young man or woman, and grow up with the country." (Adelson p. 384) This means: hard work, personal sacrifice, and new networks of supportive communities. Closing the loop also means becoming mindful of our waste, of human and animal manure, less than a quarter of which is incorporated with the soil. "Roughly two billion tons each year, enough for a three-foot layer over all the home gardens in America" (Dirt, 41), is produced by livestock animals alone. This figure is only a small portion of all the manure which is flushed into sewers or picked up by dog owners every single day.
In Worster's terms, adult farmers practice "adaptive dry farming, drip irrigation," and other xeromorphic food systems. In Michael Pollan's terms, adult consumers "eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" (Adelson). In a way, growing up entails growing backwards, looking to "backwards" societies for clues about environmental stewardship. Worster asserts that the most important changes will be in our production methods. Michael Pollan's dictum is directed at consumers. In reality, growing up farms means a combination of these things, as well as rethinking the entire nature of our food system especially at the soil level.
There is a new primitivism associated with the deep ecology/deep agriculture movment. Although it has the potential to become a throwback to the racist back-to-nature movement, maintaining healthy social-ecological systems requires a high level of complexity already utilized by "Third world" farmers. Efficiency is not simply a measure of food acreage per household per year. It is a function of soil health, biodiversity, methodology, and human cultures. According to a pamphlet from Redefining Progress:
Shrinking our food Footprint also becomes a social feast. Support for sustainable food systems will let farmers become more than nameless raw material providers for a giant food manufacturing system. Sustainable agriculture gives a human face to food. We create relationships with the people who grow what we eat, as we work toward community food security and public education around our food supply. (Eating Up the Earth, p.9)
Even fasting and slash-and-burn farming are representative of deep, learned place-consciousness. Place-consciousness may seem exotic and backwards to us, but it is crucial to human existence. In a country populated by global citizens, we often forget the sacredness of the home, choosing instead to grow our souls by making a sojourn to an unfamiliar place and absorbing its folkways.
Colin Renfrew, the linguist, proposed that language diversity is related to rainfall. Where there is more rainfall, there is more agricultural productivity, and in the case of indo-european languages, "radial outflows of language from agricultural heartland areas" (First Farmers, p.206). Human knowledge of sacred/medicinal plants, the preservation of mushroom-hunting soils, the tallying of animals, scarcity, and the numbering of days evolve into diverse languages, traditions, and rituals that keep cultures alive.
The first question on anybody's mind is: does this mean that we have to give up meat? How can we make food systems more efficient? Most scientists say yes, statistically, eating lower on the food chain is not only healthier, but it is the only diet with a profound positive impact on sustainability. This is a somewhat sterile image based on American assumptions of passive grocery store subsistence. What do we consider agriculture? Mass production; plastic wrap. What might we consider agriculture? Subsistence; an act of devotion.
Though we can all live healthy lives off of the earth's primary production, the matrix of soil and aboveground biota spells out different diets for different cultures. Meat is a great source of protein and energy, and meat and dairy consumption, in small amounts, can be a healthy part of a human diet. For instance, the arctic tundra cannot support large amounts of vegetaton, but the fish, caribou and elk are a staple food of people living in these areas. This is, of course, an extreme condition, but even in cities, backyard poultry farming has become a subsistence micro-economy beneficial to women and the environment. In 2007, female Jamaican poultry farmers were asked to gague their measurements of success. All of the women interviewed maintained that the decision to raise chickens had an overall positive impact on their households and their communities. Though these practices are not necessarily rooted in the idea of sustainable agriculture, they are relatively simple, and easy to connect them with soil building processes to create a local, ecologically viable method of poultry production.
In a way, rethinking modern agriculture asks us to re-think the earth, situating us in an epistemological position (episteme?) to think of the soil itself as alive, as cellular material, as an organism which, should we adapt it to our purposes, requires our nourishment, demands our patience, and requests our praise. Using waste wisely can be an act of praise, as silly as it sounds. "Only by replacing what you take can you keep a soil fertile. To be responsible to the soil is to respond with gifts of our own" (Dirt, p.29).
The process of making soiil Even respected soil scientists are completing the circle, coming to see dirt as energy caught up in the natural cycles of the biosphere.
"A cell full of saltwater or my coursing blood or the plasma in a plant are all media for the exchange of the bases calcium, magnesium, and potassium. It is these elements whose circulation balances the chemistry of the earth, raising the pH. Their dance with the acid ions of hydrogen regulates most of the processes by which cells make exchanges" (Dirt, P.21)
What would an ethical flexible system mean? The problem is not inherently the human desire for meat. The problem is: Mass Production, Open(vs. Closed) nutrient cycles and Waste. A new system might require city dwellers to separate their compostable and non-compostable garbage. With the soil built from a city compost, people could easily raise poultry and eggs for personal/community consumption. Others may choose to raise grains, or participate in phytoremediation projects. In a square foot garden, a person can raise an abundance of food to share in the fall. True creativity comes from the sharing of ideas and of food to lower the price of life and increase its value. This is my utopian vision of composting and backyard chicken farming.
The empty-world perspective now in practice reflects our childlike dependence on the forgiveness of the land for the sustenance of an enormous number of people. As society looks to feed itself, large-scale agribusiness becomes dependent on quick high-calorie fertilizer sources that were introduced during the Green Revolution. Society, in turn, has become ignorant of production processes, less self-sufficient, and therefore dependent on mass-produced foodstuffs. In order for the economy (and the planet, and the people living on it) to survive, homo sapiens needs to grow up, reflect deeply, and change the way we provide for our bodily energy requirements.
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| i got my heart straight up broken in the middle of writing this so it's naturally gonna suck |
[05 Apr 2009|07:45pm] |
Every year, birds experience migratory restlessness. The weeks leading to seasonal migrations correspond with an increase in body fat, the maturation of fledglings, and changes in day length which correspond to a bird's circadian and circannual rhythms. Birds then look to the sky for atmospheric cues which facilitate a journey that may cross from one polar ice cap to another. Some of these behaviors, such as stellar navigation, are learned and remembered, but migration is by and large just another part of a bird's genetic sequence. Birds are aware of atmospheric conditions and will not fly during bad storms, often waiting for other members of the same species before flying again (Newton 2007, p. 635). Nevertheless, they are genetically predisposed to travelling at a certain time of year that nothing can change, though environmental conditions may determine how far they travel.
Disturbances in the atmosphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere can have a profound impact on the highly evolved migratory responses of the birds of North America. For instance, a permanent population of Canadian geese has been lured to the city of Chicago by an abundance of food, p[em water and mild winters. The Christmas bird count of Canada geese has increased from 0 in 1963 to 9,206 in 1993 (Greenberg, 385). Nevertheless, there are hundreds of other bird species in Chicago that still migrate and rely on the surrounding marshes, prairies, and lake for signals and stopovers during their migration.
Birds may be persuaded or forced to reconfigure their flight patterns due to changes in the availability of food, changes in the terrain along their flight path, and most importantly, changes in the atmosphere and weather patterns due to global warming. Birds are also sensitive to the earth's magnetic field; they have specialized organs for detecting the magnetism radiating between the earth's poles. Although magnetic north does shift over time, this happens so gradually that bird populations are able to compensate.
Food scarcity prior to migration can lead to smaller flocks of departing animals. A bird's transcontinental journey either follows a path across the mainland or the sea. In unseasonable cold spells, many insects (an important food source) die and increase competition among different bird species. "What few insects remain are concentrated on the ground, where even arboreal birds are forced to forage. This results in greater competition for high-quality animal food and the necessity of using inferior vegetable matter such as grass seeds" (Greenberg, 401). On the continents, food may be more available than in the ocean, where increasing dead zones pose the threat of starvation to hungry birds accustomed to following schools of fish to southern latitudes.
Most birds of the Chicago region cross into South America via the Mississippi flyway, either crossing Texas and Central America or the Gulf of Mexico to reach their destination. Food shortages may therefore arise from the desertification of Central America or the outward radiation of dead zones (areas of low oxygen) in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other hand, most birds feed on fruits, grasses, and insects as opposed to fish and rodents. Increases in sea level could sink smaller islands and destroy places where birds are accustomed to stop and recharge or seek refuge when crossing the Gulf (especially during hurricane season).
Global warming has also altered the length and timing of the seasons, despite unchanging photoperiods. Birds have no way of predicting the weather in distant places and therefore trust their circadian clocks to keep track of day length, a traditional indicator of the seasons. If migratory birds arrive in the rainforest before the fruit has ripened or the larvae have hatched, they face starvation. If a drought or torrent occurs, places that were once prairies may start to exhibit mesomorphic vegetation, or wetlands may dry up completely. "As these transformations occur, some birds lose habitat while others gain. The key is that, in any given year, places of enough diversity are available to ensure adequate habitat regardless of ambient conditions" (Greenberg, 383).
Some birds, such as arctic hawks and the snowy owl, experience irruptive migration due to food scarcity and competition. While an increase in temperature may lead to an increase in an animal's food supply, raptors may be outcompeted by temperate birds breeding further north due to milder climates. These animals are then forced to look in unusual places for food. "While the timing of spring migration could be influenced by weather conditions along the whole migration route, the timing of egg-laying depends on conditions in the breeding area" (Newton 2007, p.635). Developing juveniles and hungry, nesting birds may become so disturbed by changes in weather and food supply that they experience starvation. As the polar latitudes continue to heat up, unpredictable changes will occur in the food sources of arctic and antarctic predators.
The terrain that birds seek out to guide them through continental migration includes ridges and mountain ranges. This is especially true for birds of prey, whereas travel over forests and deserts is usually confined to short distances due to rain shadows and the cool, steady winds that blow over these surfaces. The formation of thermals, or upward-spiralling surface winds, is the impetus for the beginnings of a long flight. Thermals are formed by the movement of cold air over warm land or water. Thanks to human intervention, birds now travel on the thermal pathways provided by hot asphalt roads, which create thermal air currents for birds to follow on their way through the Americas.
Literally above all other factors, the flight of migrating birds is negotiated by atmospheric conditions. Birds are seen flying close to the ground, but the truly satisfying winds exist above the cloud layer. Although air pressure is low in high altitudes, most birds cannot tolerate the extreme cold and low oxygen of the upper atmosphere. Birds try to follow the tails of strong winds because these allow them to reach a higher altitude and travel at greater speeds. "Close to the ground, the wind is less strong than it is higher up -- certainly above 1600 feet [500 m] from the ground… if birds have to fly against the wind, they are lkely to be low and clearly visible" (Lovejoy 2007, p. 23). In order to ensure that winds are steady, some will wait for good flying weather carried in by low-pressure systems over the course of a week. In the northern hemisphere, peak southward migration tends to occur with "cool northerly tailwinds as a low moves away to the east, or a high approaches from the west, or both" (Lovejoy 59). The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere, where the coriolis force brings high pressure systems and low pressure systems in from opposite directions.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation is also a planetary/atmospheric event which influences migration. "Climatic shifts of this type can act simultanesously on local weather conditions in widely saparated breeding, migration, and wintering areas" (Lovejoy 734).
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| a quick summary of the last 100 years of environmentalism |
[09 Feb 2009|04:00pm] |
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Closely tied to the idea of private property, the exploitation of natural resources is one of the founding principles of the American way of life. Early settlers thought nothing of cutting down whole forests, relentlessly trapping and trading local fauna, or using waterways as waste dumps. The environment was considered by most to be a hostile place, full of fearsome beasts and savage indians; only recently has this idea changed. As of the early 20th century, our relationship with the environment has gone from one of outright exploitation to an apologetic desire to make reparations for our past crimes. Bucholz identifies four major events that mark the development of environmentalism in the US: conservation, preservation, protection, and sustainability (Bucholz 2007; p.10-19).
Guifford Pinchot spearheaded the conservation movement in 1900, claiming in his keystone essay "the birth of conservation" that "the very existence of our nation, and of all the rest, depends on conserving the resources which are the foundations of its life." (Environment 2008; p. 15) The conservation movement was focused on the conservation and management of natural resources for the use of human beings.
The limitations of this perspective became obvious during the Hetch Hetchy valley controversy of 1915, when San Francisco obtained the water rights to the Tuolumne River in Yosemite; damming it would completely flood Hetch Hetchy Valley and forever change the nartual landscape. Pinchot was a proponent of damming the river for the benefit of Californians, but met resistance from a growing group of environmental activists, especially John Muir, who called the valley a cathedral and the developers "temple destroyers" (Environment 2008, p.608), showing a shifting consciousness that considered nature in its own right.
The preservation movement that began with John Muir and the Sierra Club was eventually transformed into the Wilderness movement. In 1964, the Wilderness Act was adopted by the United States, creating a definition of wilderness based on the definition set forth by Robert Marshall in his 1930 essay "the problem of the Wilderness". Marshall calls wilderness
a region which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means, and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing must have the experience of sleeping out" (Environment 2008, p. 288).
The 1964 Wilderness Act adopted a similar framework: Wilderness is "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain" (Wilderness Act). Both of these definitions clearly involve a more biocentric attitude towards the environment.
The conervation of natural resources and the preservation of beautful recreational areas did not protect land or the life upon it from better living through chemistry. As the heavy tranquilizers of the 1950s wore off, people began to protest again the more degrading aspects of lassiez-faire capitalism, specifically in regards to the environment. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, detailed the long-term impact of pesticide use on birds; thanks to this book and subsequent activism, DDT was banned as a pesticide in the United States.
In 1968, Garret Hardin also published the Tragedy of the Commons, a definitive text of the environmental protection movement. Using a metaphor of pastureland and herdsmen, Hardin asserted: when everyone shares a common resource, human self-interest is the most logical option, and that resource is inevitably destroyed:
The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of 'fouling our own nest,' so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers (Hardin, 1968, p.1245).
With the publication of this and other essays, American anxieties began to rise about overpopulation, economic and social collapse, and chemical overload, infertility, and death. The United States Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970 and environmentalism seems to have been forgotten for the next twenty years.
We are awakening from another long sleep of decadence and materialism to realize that systems need to be put in place that do not lead to the collapse of ecosystems or human civilization. The sustainability movement began somewhat with our concern in the 1970s and 80s with concern over peak oil (the Hubbert Peak) and led to a search for alternative energy sources and the 1974 filming of The Man with the Golden Gun. The approach to energy crises was strictly economic until recently, when a more ecocentric approach was adopted.
Ecocentrism, which takes into account social-ecological systems, not just human or animal life, in mind, is not a recent idea, The earliest writing that could be considered "ecocentric" was that of Aldo Leopold and later, Arne Naess, who wrote the essay "deep ecology" in 1973. Leopold wrote in the 1950s as a "[passionate advocate] of a post-darwinian, scientifically based environmental ethic that recognizes humanity's interdependence with other species and consequent moral responsibility toward the land" (Environment, 2008; p. 689). His ideas were advanced beyond his time, and he was probably never truly acknowledged for the inspiration he has given the modern sustainability movement. The history of this movement has not been written yet, because the ideological battle for ecocentric thinking is still being fought.
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| the glen is annoying |
[02 Jan 2009|12:51pm] |
Glenview, IL: Imagine a tranquilized, agreeable patch of suburbia lurking on the edge of a developer's wasteland; a Harley-Davidson dealership, big-box retailers like Costco and Best Buy, corporate headquarters (Kraft is just around the corner), and two congested state highways, Waukegan and Willow roads.
Beginning in 1999, an immense tract of land comprising the Glenview Naval Air station began morphing into a luxury outdoor mall, complete with boutiques, a children's museum, and a four story parking garage tastefully hidden behind angular street parking. Shortly afterwards, a faceless church and school, foreboding gymnasium and golf course arose from the sawdust of 638 free-standing, single family households which face the three blocks of fabricated boutiques and eateries.
The controversial Glen town center, a New Urbanism installation piece, is a privately managed public space not unlike Disney's Celebration, Florida, and a suburban fantasy world perpetuated by a consenting public. Naomi Klein, in No Logo, describes this kind of place with admiration:
"Setting aside, for a moment, the Brave New World/Stepford Wives associations such a vision inevitably evokes, there is something undeniably seductive about these branded worlds. It has to do, I think, with the genuine thrill of utopianism, or the illusion of it at any rate."
This stately pleasure-dome and self-described utopia is truly a "town with no architectural blunders and no crime," and the Kohl Children's Museum adjacent to the shopping center "a museum with the deep pockets of Hollywood" (Klein, 159). The shopping center itself consists of three blocks of mall space, comprising the physical and spiritual nexus of the town.
The Glen's officious depiction of military scenes recalls former land use and invokes nostalgia. Each tree has perfect symmetry and spacing, marking the literal authenticity of the boulevard leading into town. In the very center of the main square are three flags, a fountain, a statue of three sailors, and the former tower of the naval air station. In capturing military nostalgia and surrounding it with artifacts of the neoconservative lifestyle, the Glen Town Center acts an effective surrogate for civic life in a magical ritual described by John Goss, keeping consumers in a liminal state of pleasant confusion.
The Glen also exemplifies the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption, first described by Thorstein Veblen in 1899. The images invoke foremost a sense of space, and the space itself fosters a connection to the history of the area, making the Glen seem less like a touristy shopping center and more like a storied village with a meaningful purpose. The newborn brand identity of the Glen sparkles with the elitism of the North Shore, using envy to provoke status-climbing and thereby consumption of luxury apartments. It is useful here to recall Veblen:
…the leisure class stands at the head of the social struture in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. (Veblen 195)
In Glenview, the decadence of the North Shore lifestyle exerts pressure from all directions: the wealthy villages of Winnetka, Northbrook, Northfield, Glenview and Wilmette lie caty-corner to the neighborhood on Patriot Boulevard. In order to engage these consumers and draw comparisons to them, the Glen's planners must "accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal" (195), marking the area as a site of the landed gentry.
The Glen can also be implicated in "hailing" (see Goldman et al) the landed gentry. Because these people (upscale white consumers) create demand for luxury through the emulation of the lower classes, their fashionable cuisine and high-tech playthings are on display at stores such as Wishes Toy Wonderland and the Red Star Tavern. In the Glen, you can buy items of pecuniary emulation: a wii fit, organic sugar scrub, artisan beer, and bubble tea. You may see one of your managers or business associates walking down the street. Shopping or eating at any one of these places is of interchangable value, based on the fact that you can buy a gift card good at any eatery or store. The tasteful invisibility and yet the crass expenditure of wealth in the Glen is the gesture that tittilates the pleasure centers of the mall shopper's brain.
In addition to the identical single-family houses, the Glen advertises multi-unit townhomes, apartments, and flats. Most of the 1.5 miles are easily walkable by a person of average stamina. The Glen, however, parasitizes public amenities of the town of Glenview, and all roads lead to Von Maur: the layout of the residential areas ultimately directs walkers to the mall, situated along the main drag, an immense six-way intersection more convenient to cross by car.
"Every perfect neighborhood should have a lake," claims the town website, "so we made one - Lake Glenview - right here in the Glen. It's the perfect place to take a stroll, feed the ducks or watch the sunset." Such idyllic strolls have a high pricetag: the average cost of the ducks and the sunset is about $1.2 million (Zillow). The only inlet to the area is a single, busy road called Patriot Boulevard, which juts off of two hectic streets in a barren suburban wilderness on either side of the development. This segregates the village entirely; the garish "Glen" sign announces its distinction from the surrounding communities as a sort of tourist trap.
Before turning to a physical description of the mall and the fantasy world it creates, it is also useful to examine the emerging brand identity that draws people to live and shop in this inconvenient place. In Branded Nation, Twitchell describes FMCGs and SMCIs (fast moving consumer goods and slow moving cultural institutions). This area is neither a commodity in itself nor an institution. Instead, it is what he calls an LBE, a location-based entertainment; the Glen is a place where "art, literature, and divinity are created in a site where a certain kind of experience can be exchanged for a certain kind of currency, not just money but, more interestingly, affiliation" (Twitchell, 10).
The vicarious enjoyment of wealth and an affiliation with the North Shore is clearly part of the Glen's brand identity, but the ad copy in the website also whispers (in lowercase) seductive invitations to the pleasure dome. "oh go ahead. just one more. ok two," reads the website under a picture of an ice cream cone. "we'll take very good care of you," claims the "health and beauty" section of the website underneath a picture of a man's muscular back and some massage oil. Creepy enticements such as these litter the Glen literature. The Glen is "the new town on the north shore," according to another ad. Bottom line, the ads for the Glen suggest that life in this utopia imparts the flow of goods, pampering and pleasure thought confined to the resplendent mansions and tree-lined communities along Sheridan Road.
By the way, the most recent (december 2008) issue of Sheridan Road magazine, published by and for the upper crust, contains an article regarding the "east-west controversy" surrounding life in the north suburbs of Chicago.
"The earliest settlers established themselves along the beautiful shoreline of lake michigan. Of course, these were no ordinary settlers. These were the McCormicks, and Swifts, and Farwells, and Bernhams, and Sears -- and other wealthy Chicagoans who built fabulous estates on large pieces of land. Even today, proximity to the lake is paramount and coveted; but owning a home on the lake is out of the reach of most of us mere mortals." (Stevenson, 101)
Kathy Stevenson's article describes the percieved class division along the Union Pacific's railroad tracks which separates the "old money, Great-Grandpa-Came-Over-On-The-Mayflower folks on the east side, and the Nouveau Riche, wannabe transplants on the west side" (Stevenson, 101). Unfortunately, this is an accurate model for the brand created by the McMillan planners; the Glen sits betwixt two train tracks, it contains an artificial lake, the identical mansions that line the streets are all decorated with candy canes and christmas lights, signifying that these homes have been built upon pastures of plenty. The anonymous WASPy church on the corner of Patriot Boulevard adds to the illusion of the Glen as a passionate, involved community as it invites an uplifting spiritual respite from the drudgery of shopping and social climbing suggested by the rest
of the local scenery.
John Goss outlines the magical features of a modern, successful mall. The mall creates a "sense of place" through voluntary residential interaction. It creates a civic space through landscaping (every tree deliberately placed) and historical architecture (the air station tower).
"In constructing an attractive place image for the shopping center, developers have, with remarkable persistence, exploited a modernist nostalgia for authentic community, perceived to exist only in past and distant places, and have promoted the conceit of the shopping center as an alternative focus for modern community life." (Goss 209)
The aura of innocence and childhood is evoked by the gigantic buildings mysteriously piping music into the street, an abundance of candy and toy stores aimed at indulging adults just as much as their offspring. There are street signs, lamps, benches, parks, 15-minute parking spots, garbage bins, trees with gates around them and smoking areas to make you feel like spending your money is purely an option in this public area. When all else fails, the 10-screen movie theater draws bored adolescents and adults into its deep seats, aforementioned surreal blend of private and public functions; an anonymous church sits at the edge of Pleasantville.
So no, it is not enough to have a North Shore address. According to the vision of the Glen, you must live in a spacious house in a wealthy suburb mere blocks from the lake (it doesn't matter which,) where your children are ensured the most meaningful education humanly possible. You must work out three days out of the week at the high-tech members-only gym. Finally, you must be connected to local history to avoid becoming a trashy Nouveau Riche -- and while you're looking in the other direction, they're stealing your children.
The Glen's connection with children is its way of creating unique, cradle-to-grave consumers. In "real life," most people would break from shopping to entertain their children; the Kohl Children's museum allows parents to drop their brats at a sort of free day care center while they spend more time at the salon getting a fancy haircut. Adults can now break away from the responsibilities of real life and spend more time (and money) on the narcissistic pursuits provided by mall entertainment. In addition to the Kohl's museum, there is a pottery/craft store called Color Me Mine, and several regular "kids-only" events advertised on the website. This keeps children begging for more and adults indulging again and again.
According to Goss, "our real desire… is for community and social space free from instrumental calculus of design." (Goss 215). The Oliver McMillan Corporation has come up with a solution to this feeling of alienation. "Making special places happen!® is what award-winning OliverMcMillan does." (McMillan)
A sense of home matters the more detached we are from reality, and the Glen provides a manufactured sense of place. All this glamour is not only for the benefit of residents, but the revenue that tourism generates. In the midst of suburbia, where dying strip malls and hustling streetside shops dominate the landscape, the Glen is like a college town without the college or the annoying resale shops catering to people short on income. The yuppie's desire for a more authentic post-college lifestyle is played out in the big gymnasium, the church, the cafes and entertainment centers. The shopping center also has the feeling of a european getaway, with apartments (Aloft™) located above the shops, statues and water fountains, angular parking, and vendors crammed in every possible corner.
Roleplaying is probably the most important part of what makes the Glen function as an extremely successful retail venture. The work of the Oliver McMillan corporation, the Glen is a utopian shopping center and residential space where the boundary between crass consumption and private life is deliberately, consensually erased. The fantasy of a white American-Dream-type-situation placates the upscale residents of the Glen, many of whom work in nearby corporate complexes, or drive daily the 30 miles to their jobs in the Loop. These conspicuous consumers eagerly grasp the rungs of an infantile way of living wholly severed from a conscious or critical understanding of the world.
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| essay in which i paint EVERYTHING with a HUGE BRUSH |
[18 Jun 2008|08:13pm] |
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Pictures (with descriptions!) Click on each to advance. Map of the town
I. Overview
The village of Northfield is a small (about 1.5 km2) node on the I-94 expressway in the north suburbs of Chicago. The town is characterized by small families of well-educated, high-income, mostly white citizens, earning a per capita household income of 63,857 dollars per year. Despite the fact that the nearest Metra stations are within 1 mile of the town's limits, 80 percent of residents drive to work alone, in a car, an average of 26 minutes per trip. (U.S. Census) Since Northfield is about 19 miles north of the Loop, this indicates that a large portion of these car trips end in the city. 66 percent of the women over 16 in Northfieldare also unemployed, and many are likely to be stay-at-home moms. Furthermore, service labor within the village, especially for corporations, is imported from other suburbs and the city; Dominick's, Walgreen's, and Starbucks are some primary employers, as well as the offices in the business plaza. In its early years, Northfield was a small farming community, and its people called it the "skokie swamp." Now, the Skokie Swamp is the property of Glencoe, and Willow Road is the central point of access to Northfield, Winnetka, and the surrounding suburbs. It is a great point of contention among citizens. The Skokie Lagoons were built during the Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps (WPA) to drain the swamp and control flooding in the North Shore. Forest Way Drive, Waukegan Road, Lake Street, and Dundee Road mark the outermost boundaries of the suburb. There are several large parks in the village where annual community events are held, such as the Winter Carnival, Fourth of July Parade, and Rib Fest in the fall. Northfield issues horse lisences, and has a horse trail in the forest preserve. The Community Center (home of the Park District) is part of Middlefork Elementary School, which lies on the Middle Fork of the Chicago River. The Village Hall is located near the police station, public library, and Dominick's.
II. Opportunities Currently, the Village Hall has been embroiled in debate. For fifteen years, the widening of Willow Road due to traffic congestion has been an issue under discussion, but recently, several meetings between "The Lakota Group" and Northbrook/Glenview residents, have put the widening process into full gear. With children traveling to school from both sides of the road, and large-scale unsustainable/corporate developments in the suburbs West of Northfield, residents are concerned that adding extra lanes will take away Northfield's character and make the community seem less welcoming and accessible. I would like to list some examples of sustainable infrastructure in the adjacent suburbs. In Glenview, at the intersection of Wagner and Lake, is the Wagner Farm, through which the village of Glenview provides agricultural education and volunteer opportunities. Glenview is also known for the Grove, which, along with the Botanic Gardens, is a popular destination for Northfield's summer camps. In Northbrook, at the intersection of Sunset Ridge Road and Voltz Road, there is a vacant horse pasture with 4 acres of land, which was historically used for recreation. There are many deeply wooded areas in Northfield and on the periphery which deserve protection and recognition. The Somme Woods exists along the Milwaukee rail line and is an important site in the history of Chicago restoration. Northfield's fauna, though not protected or restored, is an extension of this prairie savanna. In addition, many people use these sites, and especially the Skokie Lagoons, for hiking, fishing and canoeing. Sadly, very little energy has been put into creating institutions such as these within the village itself. Northfield runs a popular Farmer's Market in the New Trier Parking lot from June to October, and many local businesses participate. In addition to corporate plazas along the highway, Northfield residents have access to one major business plaza, from which operate Northfield's tavern, a Dominick's, specialty shops, a popular pizza shop, and a cafe. The plaza is pedestrian friendly, and in the past, housed a video store and bowling alley. outside of the town, in Wilmette and Glenview, are impersonal strip malls and corporate shopping centers along wide, busy roads. This is another reason why widening Willow Road will close off economic opportunities for independent businesses and lower Northfield's potential to develop sustainably. The most important part of Northfield's transportation infrastructure is the old UP right-of-way that was discontinued about ten years ago. Plans to dedicate this space to the CTA Yellow Line are logical; however, this would be a LULU and residents would rather see the space converted to a bike/walking trail. The CTA could much more feasibly extend their tracks along the Edens Expressway, and thereby invite Northfield citizens to take the train rather than suffer the notorious commute.
III. Social Infrastructure
Northfield is home to a plethora of educational and religious organizations. Within the town borders exists New Trier High School, Christian Heritage Academy (Loyola Prep), Sunset Ridge, Middlefork, St. Phillip's, the Hyde Park Day School, the Northfield Community Church, Temple Jeremiah, Am Yisrael, Chinese Church, St. James the Less Episcopal Church, the Convent of the Holy Spirit and the Lutheran Church of the Ascension. High-income Northfield residents have complex personal and social incentives to contribute to community services and participate in charitable organizations. The Firemen's Ball and St. Phillip's summer festival are two local fundraising events that recently ceased to exist. A local sustainability initiative could benefit from the input of these influential individuals. However, incentives for individuals to act more sustainably should not just be personal, they should be encouraged and acknowledged by the village and county government. Such policies might hearken back to the Carter Administration's environmental practices (PURPA) during the 1970 energy crisis, and include tax breaks, retail and wholesale discounts, and public recognition. The #1 reason people consciously choose to move to the suburbs is to obtain access to safe neighborhoods and good schools in which to raise their children. A sustainable suburb would be sadly remiss in neglecting to address the possibilities of a sustainable childhood education. One example of such an education is the Prairie Crossing Charter School in Grayslake, IL, which is "an innovative public charter school offering students an academic curriculum centered on the environment." Most social networks in the community develop around the PTA and school activities. Including even small-scale sustainable gardens in district 29's educational plan will greatly increase the commitment of both students and their parents to the environment. Sunset Ridge already has a "green committee" which focuses on alerting parents to local environmental concerns. Middlefork Elementary is situated in Willow Park, an extensive recreational area with room for a garden. As Greg Christian has suggested, young people readily grasp ecological concerns and the interconnectedness of life. Personally, I have benefited from the time my parents graciously spent in shaping our backyard garden and creating a miniature pond. I also have come to ecological consciousness by living near the UP right-of-way and having access to extensive biodiversity in my own backyard. The concept of wilderness is also deeply tied to religious concerns. According to William Cronon, "[God] would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality;" this is the traditional Christian approach. One way to integrate faith and church doctrine with the current state of the planet is, rather than taking the apocalyptic approach of fundamentalists, or teaching an to interpret environmental stewardship as part of God's command in Genesis 3:23, when Adam and Eve are sent "forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence [they were] taken."
IV. Possibilities The second step in making Northfield more sustainable is to consider the needs of individuals who rely on their cars in order to travel to adjacent suburbs, full-time working parents who cherish what little time they have with their children, and the elderly, who are less mobile overall. There are several models already in place for dealing with these transportation challenges, some of which can be seen in European cities. For instance, Deerfield has a taxi service available to elderly (non-drivers) at .25 cents per ride. Using the taxi service will encourage elderly people to carpool and raise consciousness in a group that faces marginalization and has severely limited access to public transportation. For those working parents who claim they have no time to think about the environment, instituting a European bike share policy will give parents an opportunity to participate in outdoor recreation with their children. Parents renting bikes from public stations, perhaps in the plaza, would have access to a variety of bike trails that Northfield is lucky to have. This is reminiscent of Tim Beatley's description of the European public bike system. Creating inter-suburban public transportation is a difficult challenge that Chicago has yet to meet. The bus system is still ineffective and unclear in the suburbs, and many people are uncomfortable with the quality of PACE transportation. Encouraging bus transportation will involve reducing car transportation; a lack of options may frustrate commuters but also make them more aware of their other options. An easy way to do this, as has been done in Freiburg, (Beatley 120) is to create a bike lane, "giving priority to environmentally friendly traffic," and increasing the visibility and operating hours of Northfield's bus stops. Northfield is currently served by two buses: the 423. which travels from the Blue to the Purple line, and the 421, which travels from the Purple line to the Northfield Plaza. These PACE buses have TVs inside of them, but the places they stop are little more than poles in the ground adjacent to a bench. Increasing visibility of bus stops, as discussed in class, should also increase bus usage. The Northfield Farmer's Market, as has already been mentioned, provides a strong link to future development of the community around the concept of sustainability. Families living in large homes could easily begin by growing their own food, provided support and education from local schools, and a place to showcase their work and share ideas. This is especially relevant to the 40 or so percent of women in Northfield who are stay-at-home moms. By taking the organic local foods trend into their own hands, Northfielders will be able to take the concept of "greenness" and sustainability away from disenfranchising corporations (such as the Whole Foods that just opened on the town's periphery) and break free of the culture of consumption that sadly characterizes stereotypical suburban life. Transitioning from impersonal to conscious consumption is, arguably, the most important shift our society has to make. The suburbs, without an economical approach to sustainable development, will continue to have a strong parasitic effect on the surrounding rural and urban areas. Creating public gardens and encouraging organic farming networks will provide meaningful employment to young people and working or nonworking parents.
Exploring a sustainable Northfield: Part II In our last look at personal and policy impacts on sustainable lifestyles, idealistic challenges arose, as they always have, in actually getting people to participate in edible gardening, organic farming, restoration, and education. Without any energy or sense of urgency, the average suburbanite is unwilling to make the drastic changes called for by a green vision. Most people, as a measure of sanity, keep their spheres of action away from their personal lives. The devotion and diligence asked of us by our deteriorating climate is simply not for everyone -- and should not be. In order to enjoy life, we all must participate in popular delusions and self-indulge once in awhile. While environmentalism no longer seems like a holy crusade, and while more people are making real sacrifices for the planet, obstacles remain within institutions that capitalize on the generation of waste. This paper will look more deeply at transparent ways to enforce normative environmentalism by utilizing suburban infrastructure. If we give to Earth according to its need, we will be giving our intention, work, and love in the opposite direction this energy usually flows. All of these suggestions, however, should implemented in order to undermine oppressive power structures and generally ask "of each according to her ability," and high-energy institutions of theirs. When considering urban infrastructure, of foremost importance is the "built environment" i.e, the buildings that stand upon a piece of land, the materials that comprise them, and their maintenance and upkeep. The built environment, in most of the West, invites things we call "infrastructure," such as electrical wiring, water and gas supply, and road access. Water and waste management systems supported by buildings are therefore a second major component of urban infrastructure, including drainage and sewer systems, ponds and rivers, catchments, water purification or reclamation, and irrigation. In a very deliberate fashion, the most invisible component of urban infrastructure, and a main impetus for green design, is the direction of solid and liquid waste flow that is generated by these institutions.
I. Buildings Pat Armstrong is a 60-year old naturalist and teacher living in Naperville, IL. Her approach to sustainable building is extreme and unique. As personable environmentalists, she and her husband are wonderful stewards of native Illinois flora and fauna; Pat has 84 different bird species visiting her yard and prairie rooftop every year. Greenroofs, which were described by Beatley, are part of ecovillages in Norway and other parts of Europe. Pat's passive solar and winter insulation save her lots of money and guilt and increase Naperville's species richness by a large number. In order to extract itself from the power grid, solar producing buildings in Northfield would have to, say, install solar panels and sell power back to the grid. Many European neighborhoods have accomplished this by aggressively promoting energy efficiency and publicly demonstrating renewable energy with wind parks and free rent in sustainable buildings (Beatley Chapter 9). Let's just say that we enforce energy efficient housing in the suburb of Northfield. For instance: from 10 AM to 3 PM, the cost of heat doubles in the winter, a time when most people are out at work. While this may be unfair to consumers, forcing them to look at the thermostat twice a day might increase energy consciousness on the whole and eliminate the need for this program. Next, the village could hold a competition to see which housing unit has the lowest electricity bill per square foot and award the winners with a free energy audit or energy efficient appliances. Another energy-saving system is that practiced in hotels in Germany, wherein keys can only lock a door once all the lights have been turned off. In businesses, churches, and schools, this can enforce energy efficiency without being intrusive or creepy. Buildings are large consumers of our money and time; upon making rennovations, therefore, builders could push reusable materials, both for the credibility they might receive as a LEEDS builder and a tax credit that's good for, say, 25% off of a business's or indiviual's property taxes per $1000 spent on renewable building materials. By structuring the benefit this way, the company doing the installation is given an incentive to promote LEEDS certified materials. Unnecessarily large living units, where it is possible for more people to live, might be converted into smaller dwellings or flats, a la Oikos, where buildings are designed with a future as rental units in mind. In the suburbs, families commonly only live in an area for the duration of their children's education, moving to a retirement community or back to the city once their children have graduated from college. Whether or not I believe that this should change, flexible housing strategies could accommodate this exodus and influx of empty nesters and young families.
II. Water The Great Lakes Regional Collaboration (GLRC) states several goals for reducing non-point source pollution, one of which is to "protect and restore wetlands in rural and urban areas to improve the overall health of the ecosystem and waters within it" (Espinosa). Within Northfield, there are two major water systems: the first, the Middle Fork Branch of the Chicago River, was responsible for the town's original name. Northfield, once known as the "Skokie Swamp," was frequently flooded by the Middlefork River. What was once largely prairie floodplain and woodland savanna is now densely forested throughout. Today, via drainage from the Skokie Lagoons and additional drainage ditches in various parts of the town, the river only floods parts of the village, contributing to the semiannual drench of the entire region. Traditionally, sewage is handled by Water Reclamation plants, where water is treated with chemicals such as chlorine and fluoride, and allowed to sit in aerated reservoirs for short periods of time before being returned back to the lake. John Todd's sytem of wastewater treatment is a vast improvement in this design, and Northfield as a segregated suburb has no system in place for the handling of greywater or blackwater. Joel Salatin, in Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, discusses the environmental benefits of using composting toilets, which are cheaper than septic tanks and feed plants nutrient-rich human waste. With the ample backyards in most suburban homes, this system could easily be encouraged with government incentives upon remodeling. The one part of Northfield that still gets flooded regularly is Willow Park, the location of the Northfield Park District and Middlefork Elementary School. If even a tiny part of this park were utilized (and I have no idea about the mechanics) efficiently, it could serve as a nutrient sink and filtration system for contaminated water. At the very least, students in the nearby school could visit and help steward this area to learn about wetland ecosystems. Unfortunately, the Skokie Lagoons punch a big hole in this idea as they are the final source of most surface runoff in the entire North Shore. Nevertheless, the use of fountains, such as the fountain at the corner of Willow and Waukegan roads, would play a part in the aeration of greywater, and environmental curriculum can play a part in wetland maintenance and rainwater collection. The schools in Northfield could also install automatic bathroom fixtures; these buildings are very outdated and receive high restroom traffic from children with small bladders. Finally, the simple act of conserving fresh water has been strongly suggested since the beginning of the environmental movement. Low-flow showerheads, toilets, and portable water heaters are already present in environmentally conscious households. Northfield could follow the lead of America's semiarid communities by imposing a fine for careless watering, such as watering during the midday when evaporation is quickest, and during rainstorms.
III. Waste In Northfield, we have outsourced our infrastructure to the extent that in one phone call to the village hall, I could not find out where waste water, garbage, or recycling ended up. I could not find out where, on the earth, my parents' electricity and gas was coming from. They told me to call Waste Management, where I was given the number of their Customer Service hotline. I made a phone call to Waste Management's customer service department to ask where Northfield's garbage ended up. They, in turn, directed me back to the Wheeling Hauling & Transfer Station, and then I was transferred to a dispatcher named John who inquired suspiciously, "why do you want this information?" Now I know why people say that Waste Management is run by the Mob. Anyway, John eventually revealed that waste from Northfield is transported via semi-truck to the Prairie Hill Landfill in Morrison, IL; or the Pheasant Run Landfill in Bristol, WI. There are 10-15 trucks that make this 2-3 hour trip every day with garbage from the north suburbs. It can seem impossible to challenge consumption habits in a traditional suburb, especially for those who remember the landfill that once stood on the village limits where Kraft Headquarters and a Whole Foods now stand, and find them (and the golf course) a favorable improvement. Most residents would literally turn up their noses at the idea of garbage picking, which is reminiscent of slum life in low-income areas and in the "third world." Additionally, in large and well-regulated cities, the "preferable aspects of these informal recovery and recycling systems...become more costly" (Feurdy) as they are more restricted by sanitation policy; nonetheless, Northfield and other suburbs have, for many years, assigned an annual "Spring Cleaning" day, on which glorious piles of true reusable junk are set out on the sidewalk. Sadly, while scrap trucks travel for miles to celebrate this occasion, most of the junk from Trash Day ends up in Bristol or Morrison, and little is reclaimed by the residents. At the source of clean waste, more people in the country are beginning to use the "Freecycle" network, an online community where people can request or give away things that they no longer have any use for. Nearby Northbrook, Glenview, and Wilmette, have active freecycle communities. Simple programs such as a biannual rummage sale or publicizing a local recycling or donation center would increase the reuse of waste. By providing complementary recycling in all townships, and perhaps building payment into residents' taxes, the suburbs could bypass recent recycling fees. This would be similar to the I-Pass payment, wherein traditional tollbooths cost more than owning an I-Pass and driving on the tollways regularly. Another easy and profitable form of waste reduction is at the front end of digestion. Gardeners in the community use compost as fertilizer; some small farms may actually buy compost. In the fall, when people put their leaf rakings and yard clippings out on the street, these might be put to better use in a community compost pile; both a commons sink and source, a resource all can utilize in gardening and to which they can contribute. Alternatively, the Park District might be able to use compost instead of mulch when planting trees and maintaining the grounds of the few parks that exist within Northfield. Feurdy has described systems of this sort that occur in Jakarta and Bangalore; unfortunately, there is no infrastructure in place to support craft-based renewal such as shoemaking, carving, or carpentry. If locals showcased their skills during village events (of which there are plenty, trust me), it might inspire people to become apprentices. At the goose lake prairie state park, for instance, Morris locals re-enact scenes from the frontier during their annual "Cabin Fest." Schools see this as an opportunity to give students interactive historical experiences.
All of these systems are flexible to cultural and institutional norms of energy use. One of the quickest ways to implement sustainable policy is within channels of high public use. Business, transportation, and telecommunication systems are capable of generating large sums of money and attention. By beginning to structure sustainability around tax incentives and penalties, friendly local competition and debate, and religious and educational socialization, Northfield can begin taking much-needed steps towards a greener world.
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[18 Jun 2008|07:59pm] |
The impact of coal mining on a social-ecological system: mountaintop removal (MTR) and environmental changes
“When we come alive to the mythic dimensions of our lives, we may find it intolerable to go to work every day at a job where our boss regularly humiliates us. When we know, with the deepest fiber of our being, that all of us are interconnected, we cannot pass by the homeless beggar undisturbed. When our blood is alive and singing with the sound of the wind in the forests, we can’t be complacent about the clear-cutting of the trees. And when we’ve tasted the communion of the circle, the ecstasy of raising power together as a group and feeling love and support and appreciation surrounding us, we cannot settle for isolation and alienation as our daily fare.”
--Starhawk&Valentine, the Twelve Wild Swans
This paper looks at the social component of resilience in the Appalachian Mountains, a region disturbed by many years of government neglect and the rise of King Coal. In southern West Virginia, northern Georgia, and eastern Kentucky, among other places, radical epistemologies have emerged that resist the demands of mainstream society to grow ignorant and assimilate; however, mountain subsistence lifestyles are endangered by the intractability of the larger social organism and the impersonal nature of corporate coal mining. Unfortunately, the communities I discuss will be separated by vast stretches of geography and duration, but each one experiments with flexible traditions of reclaiming local knowledge.
The force of intention is a community effort that some people call magic and others call epistemology. I begin with serious a discussion of magic because witchcraft creates a community’s physical resistance. Witchcraft fits all of the criteria for the resilient world/view: it is experimental and innovative, diverse and modular (subject to infinite interpretations), vigilant (of tight feedbacks), capable of naming hard truths, highly personal, trusting, and grateful to ecosystem services.
The intention of workers in marginalized communities – their ability to communicate and reorganize – can offset both social and ecological destruction. The mountains were an early battlefront in the labor movement; today, the mountains’ battle scars are visible from space. The biological response, the ecological resilience, of a natural area, is thought to be intrinsic to the earth and extrinsic to humans; however, when people attend to their vision of a social-ecological system, or resist the intentions of others, they, too may change its feedback, ‘magically’ transforming it into the place they wish to live.
~
Susun Weed, who lives far away in the Catskills, is a pioneer in “Wise Woman” tradition, invoking the voices of common roadside weeds, insisting on their powers of commonness and invisibility. Alliance with the common transforms the invisible condition of women into a sacred space, instead of an obstacle to equality. Here are some of the things she lists: Nourishing, Motherhood, Women, Especially women of color, Women making dinner, Women speaking, Women’s social groups, The uniqueness of everyone, commonness, preventative medicine, and that “one of the powers of the wise woman is to be invisible “ (Weed 57). Susun harvests common plants because they don’t mind being taken, and give abundantly of their healing properties.
The annual harvest of ramps is done out of a spiritual connection with the abundant leeks, which are made into “ramp vinegar, ramp seeds, dried ramps, ramp jelly, pickled ramps, even ramp wine” (Tending the Commons): the possibilities are endless. The image above represents the seasonal “round” of work compiled by the Folklife association of West Virginia; ecosystem services and seasonal activities are depicted in the form of commons resources, including the gathering of local plants, subsistence farming, and the trade for export of rare medicinal plants. These plants would not be scarce were it not for external, secondary demand for their heroic healing properties (Weed 57); in this way, the very value of a social-ecological system can make it vulnerable to decline.
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Witchcraft is not the only epistemology of intention. In her book, Radical Ecology, Carolyn Merchant describes the link between intention and ethics:
Environmental ethics are a link between theory and practice. They translate thought into action, worldviews into movements. Ideas generated from social conditions must be transformed into behaviors in order to change those conditions. (67)
In this sense, the practice of ethics is a form of multidirectional resistance. Westerners famously quest after the “first” knowledge of indigenous people with a thirst to regress to a more natural, primitive state. In reality, language is as dynamic as an ecosystem and experiences transitions in space as well as time. When indigenous people lose out to the global economy, they do not quietly assimilate, but become part of the conscience and lore of the dominant culture. This kind of cultural shift is rapid, radical, difficult to quantify and hard to explain. Resulting controversies are “equally incisive and healthy” to radical ecologists as they clarify the assumptions and principles of environmental ethics (Merchant 238).
The third way of knowing, the new indigenous knowledge, represents a pluralistic, contemporary approach to sought-after traditional systems. This discourse resists assimilation; it often relies on personal contact and narrative theory rather than objective documentary footage or factual data. Once again, it is necessary to acknowledge the legacy of “traditional” American racism, of interrelated oppressions. In a complex approach, we experience the magic of a healing narrative alongside constant and critical self-evaluation.
Paula M. L. Moya walks this line in her essay on cultural particularity: “This project of self-examination must be carried out by oppressed peoples and then shared with people who have not been oppressed in the same way” (Gracia 92); the personal (horizontal) narrative has more emotional power than inert (vertical) exposition. In addition, place-memory, traditional wisdom, and resourcefulness are interdependent with physical ecosystems and biodiversity. Biodiversity is lost and land degraded when “traditional resource management practices [break down] in response to growing populations, increasing production pressures on resources, and commercial agricultural enterprises displacing peasant subsistence farmers” (Gobster, 284).
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In Rabun Gap, GA, Foxfire magazine utilizes oral tradition and holistic, hands-on learning; its students preserve and publish the knowledge of local elders, including detailed schematics for traditional methods of carpentry, clothes making, and anything else they see fit to publish. In Foxfire’s twelfth printing in 1998, an interview is reprinted with a Cherokee family, the Chiltoskeys. They speak with dignity and laughter about their hardships; they tell no “Indian” stories, but fishing stories, mountain stories, war stories, ghost stories. The war stories are especially poignant upon remembering that Cherokee veterans, who had the most dangerous jobs, received little thanks for their service. This is one reason the Chiltoskeys resist assimilation; the effort, however, seems futile, for Mary posthumously warns her granddaughters, “Don't name these hard words like you get the word from overseas” (Foxfire 407).
The stories of the Chiltoskeys may seem faded and remote because social reinforcement of Native American epistemology has come quite late in the intentional tradition. All but one of Mary and Goingback’s grandchildren have entered a new regime, but which? Thankfully, Rabun Gap has avoided the gruesome intrusion of coal mining industry, but small towns are also threatened by high emigration rates of children looking for a better life. Foxfire taught the children of Goingback and Mary “more about curriculum mandates, local history, their community, and their elders; and most important, they learned more about themselves and what they were capable of doing” (xv). Foxfire is a small, yet hopeful, work of magic accomplished by the entire town; all of the Foxfire writers become guardians of local knowledge and increase their commitment to the community. The classroom, as it is today, is being thinned by budget cuts and lack of interest. The village’s sociological maintenance system has become vulnerable to the exploitation and export of its natural resources and of its creative young writers.
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Shirley Burns does an excellent job of outlining the impacts of strip mining in West Virginia. Toxic slurry, laden with heavy metals, looms, impounded over populated valleys; coal dust hangs so thickly in the air you could cut it with a knife. Ephemeral watersheds are filled up and contaminated by coal mining debris. And this is just the beginning.
When the mountaintop is leveled, it displaces huge amounts of soil and rock, which fill streams with sediment, decreasing their oxygen content and increasing water temperatures. Later, during the process of “reclamation” (when the mountain is gone), they completely flatten the mesophyte forest, fill the valleys, and create grassland ecosystems instead. As a result, “native woodland species are being replaced by non-native species that are typically associated with grasslands,” (Burns, 132) and secondary succession cannot occur.
Because of the energy crisis and the need for American fuel, the life of the Appalachian coal miner has been publicized in the media as the “traditional” way of life. MTR coal mining, despite vehement outrage on the national level, has been fed by federal laws that squelch local protests (Burns). Why has there been no change? Is it a question of the resilience of the mountaineers? Is it the failure of Western thinking to accommodate regional land use strategies? Long-term exploitation of the mines and miners in West Virginia has made its people the poorest in the nation, yet they are the ones who keep our lamps trimmed and burning.
The jobs generated by coal mining bring minimal income to the communities where it actually takes place. (45) The resilience of these communities, and their coexistence with toxic sludge, is very high. West Virginia’s state motto, once “Wild Wonderful West Virginia,” has been replaced on state boundaries with the slogan “Open for Business.” (Daily Mail) All kinds of corporations have capitalized on the willingness of state officials to turn a blind eye to corporate greed. Brian Walker explains that less resilient communities are “Increasingly preoccupied with process (company policies, public liability, compliance, tort laws, etc),” (Walker, 147-8) and less comfortable with its radical opponents, or people who simply wish to opt out of the system. Clearly, the question of social-ecological resilience in Appalachia is a question of scale.
Despite the mythological stasis of Appalachian folklife, the violent transformation of the mesophyte forests is causing mountaineers to emigrate. A large number of these communities do not wish for a return to the coal mining methods of the 1960s, but wish to embrace the work of living sustainably. The following statement is from the Canary Project in Eastern Kentucky:
For years, coal miners would take canaries into the mines to warn of dangerous gases. When the canaries died, the miners knew it was time to get out of the mine. Now, we are the canaries, warning everyone about the dangers of coal before it is too late. We no longer believe the big lie that coal is a cheap source of energy, and we are no longer willing to have our homes and lives sacrificed for coal company profits.
Their vision of the mountains includes the high social capital generated by protecting the mountaintops as wilderness areas. One such suggestion involves Monongahela National Park, where ecosystem services are estimated at $174 per acre per year (Monongahela). ‘Wilderness’ areas in the Appalachian Mountains do need to increase, but as protection from corporate use, not from human activity. Ideally, leaving the land open to commons use and increasing local stewardship would bring money to a variety of stakeholders, allowing for experimentation, horizontal sharing of information, and “flexible coordination and cross-scale responses to solving problems” (Walker, 138)
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In neo-pagan rituals, recognition is given to the forces that shape the earth by casting a circle in the cardinal directions. In the Foxfire tradition, knowledge from the elders builds and maintains connections between community members. In West Virginia, a tradition of outspoken social activism is not enough to make up for large-scale environmental destruction. Each of these epistemologies is useful in envisioning alternative futures for the mountains that don’t involve exploitative coal mining.
Sources:
Valentine, Hilary. The Twelve Wild Swans. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2000.
Weed, Susun and Durga Bernhard. Healing Wise. City: Ash Tree Publishing, 1989.
Walker, Brian et.al. Resilience Thinking. Washington: Island Press, 2006.
Gracia, Jorge. Hispanics/Latinos in the United States : Ethnicity, Race, and Rights. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Burns, Shirley Stewart. Bringing Down the Mountains: The impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia communities. Morgantown, WV: West virginia University Press, 2007.
Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Collins, Carver, Kaye et.al. Foxfire 12. Garden City: Anchor Books, 2004.
Gobster, Paul. Restoring Nature. Washington: Island Press, 2000.
Website: Mountaintop Removal: Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
http://www.kftc.org/our-work/canary-project/campaigns/mtr/mtr
Website: Tending of the Commons
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/tending/season1.html
Website: The Canary Project
http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/frontporch/categories/C7/
PDF: Monongahela Wilderness and the West Virginia Economy
http://www.appalachian-center.org/issues/economics/EconomicsPlusWilderness_Monongahela.pdf
Article: Manchin: Make ‘Wild Wonderful West Virginia’ Official Slogan again.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-09-18-wva-slogan_N.htm
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| shredding your life at school then walking home in the rain ========== April is the cruelest month |
[24 Apr 2008|06:40pm] |
Malthus still comes up in many biology classes because he is thought to have fathered population genetics; I think I have his thesis down: population increases exponentially, whereas agricultural yields increase on an arithmetic or linear scale. Clearly, this concept is still “relevant” because I’ve been tested on it in multiple classes. Unfortunately, the rest of Malthus’s philosophy was overlooked for his more alarming message.
As we discussed in class, technology (or should I use the economic term, “development?”) has made it easy for areas with historically low populations to skyrocket, enhancing survival rates while not necessarily increasing the quality of people’s lives. In denser cities and rich industrialized countries, however, population is apparently decreasing. Reconsidering the population issue in this light, it seems like we should not focus as much on birth control programs or food shortages (both of which are Malthusian concerns) as we should on expediting development or tearing apart the capitalist investment system that inspires all development.
Malthus dismissed Romantic prudishness, asserting that the creation of new humans was an inevitable biological constant. People are guided more by their biology than they are abstract notions of purity and virtue. They are also opportunistic (“lazy,”) following the path of least resistance to the path of greatest reward, often unreflective of its impact on their children. Malthus was also way ahead of his time in suggesting vegetarianism as a way to put off societal collapse, and critiquing Godwin’s notion of the perfectibility of man. With over half the fertile land in the US now locked up by the meat and dairy industries, Malthus seems especially prescient.
I’m (82%) sure we should brace for a sudden crash or collapse. Thanks to human versatility, folks have changed their whole lives to accommodate an ecological conscience. I doubt there are very many people who believe that business-as-usual no longer has consequences, though I have met some who say they do not care. They are, in a sense, cultural free-riders, and believe that technology will continue to solve population problems for us, that humans are destined to live in some kind of utopia. At this point, I think it would be useful to invoke Malthus’s appeal to the imagination, which is the only method we have of seeing into the future.
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| still scared of aliens (please don't abduct me for putting this on the internet) |
[17 Mar 2008|08:32am] |
Image Analysis 5: Extraterrestrials/COMMUNION
Dyer wrote this whole chapter about death and satanic imagery, and tried to analyze the meaning(lessness) behind figures of extreme whiteness. Extreme whiteness, he says, is the representation of evil in a form that dissociates us from atrocities like the KKK and the Holocaust. Dyer also discussed the vampire archetype, a white terror that kills in the night. I felt that this chapter was engrossing, yet incomplete. What did he leave out? Well, albinos. The aging white businessman dressed in gray and carrying a briefcase. The one who is, or who's sold his soul to the devil. Robots. Canonical freaks like Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi. Aliens!
There is a popular theory that extraterrestrials are humans from the distant future who have invented time machines. They might also be the product of government mind control experiments, or our neighbors from mars. Another interesting theory is that these extraterrestrials are the designers and guardians of human life/culture on earth -- some people want to go further and claim that they're waiting for the human population to reach critical mass, and then "harvest" them in some way reminiscent of the Last Judgment. I am very interested in how this mythology fits in with Christian eschatological thinking and the concept of technological apocalypse in the TechnoFutureVision.
SO. I want to focus on the most extreme form of paleness ever known to American culture: the "grey alien." The grey alien is, according to Wikipedia, "a thin diminutive grey figure with a bulbous bald head, large almond shaped eyes, and minimal facial features." Grey aliens range in height from freakishly short to stretched taffy, appear emaciated, and have enormous, glistening, entirely black eyes. They seem to have a few favorite pastimes: mutilating cattle, making crop circles, flying around in UFOs, abducting humans, and violating them sexually.
Now, it is a well-researched fact that many people who believe they have been violated by aliens are experiencing dissociative flashbacks to a traumatic childhood event. Dyer says, "to be white is to be a thing of terror to oneself," (212) and so it makes sense that the terror of childhood sexual abuse should be imposed on these specters stark and unfamiliar. Blaming the alien for sexual abuse is a way of denying that a family member or friend is capable of pure evil. It also updates nicely the traditional image of a "white man or woman in the grip of libidinal needs s/he cannot master," (210) or the vampire.
Another reason for the grey alien's high status and integration with popular culture is our loss of consistent cultural mythologies and the rise of the TechnoFutureVision as an authority. Extraterrestrials provide convenient explanations for a variety of human experiences, and are easily understood, as are ghosts, by all Americans. They are unlike ghosts, a real part of the scientific imagination. There are scientific laboratories whose sole purpose is to seek out contact with other forms of life. The fact that NSF money goes to such endeavors lends the quest for aliens credibility over faith-based issues of life after death and sacred visions.
I think there are many good movies we can examine for their references to whiteness in the sky: Men in Black, Communion, 2001: a space odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. In the end, I felt disappointed that Dyer gave no consideration to any of these influential and mainstream films.
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| 2 of the less crappy journalz |
[04 Mar 2008|02:20pm] |
JOURNAL ENTRY #1
Image analysis: Giant Poster, Victoria’s Secret store, Old Orchard
http://i.ivillage.com/DF/Slideshows/AlistWorkout/DF_VictoriaSecret_325.jpg
When you finally reach the store’s nexus, past dressing room mirrors painted pink with the single command to “STRIP,” through noxious clouds of perfume, listening to songs like “the mating game,” the weary shopper is confronted by a larger-than-life version of this poster, which stares IMPOSINGLY down at you while you search the ransacked discount drawers for your puny 36B.
The image of this “angel” (a popular Victoria’s Secret motif) appears to take an empowering approach. The model’s arms are posed confrontationally (in a typically male gesture,) and her appearance is one of bold confidence (see Adrienne Rich’s discussion of Calvin Klein ads.) she wears a secretarial smile, her right leg is in forward motion, she is the sexy white woman of the future. But something is really creepy about it.
Would this model’s smile seem vapid above a collared shirt? Under a head scarf? Perhaps it just looks stupid to grin in the wind from that giant fan blowing her hair back. Or it could be the blue eyeshadow, which my mother once warned me was a color “for whores and hippies.” Apparently, there are different kinds of smiles. I was watching that awful reality show, “Crowned,” the other day, and they brought on a pageant agent to explain to the contestants the seven smiles they were to use during their onstage interviews. They included “the intelligent smile,” “the show stopper” and “the mysterious smirk.” This one looks pretty mirthless. Is it because she’s… naked?
The major function of the giant poster, I believe, is to intimidate. Few self-respecting women wish to display their bodies in public this way, but it is a representational norm for the clothing store. The hard smile on the model’s face hearkens back to a stained-glass smile, one of judgment and righteousness. Her confrontational stature, combined with the classical image of the (white Christian) angel, appears to be omnipotent, and conscious of your brassiere purchases –something supposedly “secret” and personal. The angel’s face stands at least four feet above a very tall person’s. She is clad in an armorlike metallic bra, behind which struggle her breasts anyway; she, careless of her body, manages to seem innocent; oblivious to her sexuality; something I might like to be: it’s more convenient.
The “Angels” line itself has obvious religious implications. It is, merely by being an advertisement, sacrilegious. It plays on the idea that what the body does is nowhere near as important as the soul. It also upholds the myth that women, especially white ones, are perfect angels, beautiful like snowflakes. This winter effect is accomplished by using a dark blue background against glitter and white lace, a little like “White Christmas.” The angel’s wings look like plants covered in snow. It implies that her perfection is organic to her existence; she has done nothing to look this way; she is as God created her.
When it comes to racial imagery and dynamics of the female body, nothing really invites more analysis than the representation of breasts. Bell hooks, in “Black Looks: Race and Representation” talks about a pair of chocolate breasts she saw in a store window. Dismembered and anonymous, they symbolized to her both bodies on the auction block and the “mammy/whore” dichotomy. Despite being an installation project of female insecurity, Victoria’s Secret is perhaps the most popular clothing store in a country obsessed with breasts, using aggressive sales tactics and intimidating TV commercials to sell its pricey lingerie. This image is one of many that idealize and protect white women’s breasts, sexuality, and selfhood, while also violating them and inviting scrutiny through their commercial representation. I won’t even talk about that weird white light shining between her legs.
Image Analysis #2: Scientific American, February 2008
Since it's still February (and since I don't want to rip it apart) you should take a look at the cover of this month's Scientific American. It features a blue and white and computer generated particle man who is receiving some kind of spiritual/physical pleasure from the illuminated center of a digitized electron flow. Yes it does, go look. There's this theme in science and its mags, I'd call it the artistic manipulation of the idea that "whether you are white, black, brown, blue, or yellow…" whatever you're about to read is TRUE. And it's going to BLOW YOUR MIND!!!
Scientists really profit from this. Somewhere around 1994, when digital imaging became commercially available to researchers, most of the big science/technology magazines made the switch from traditional photographs and illustrations to futuristic CG imagery. This transition relieved the scientific community somewhat of ecofeminist hippie critiques; what do those people know anyway? Since then, scientists have been in symbiosis with the Man. When "they," whoever they are (I'm guessin' Photoshop pirates,) publish technical articles, a raceless human universal, though still identifiably white, is used. Did I mention that the blue dude has erect nipples?
The best part about this magazine is that it's about physics -- the indisputable fibre of reality. The popular theory is that matter is woven together in a spiritual (yet mathematical) way called "string theory." I don't much get it myself, but I've only ever heard it spoken of reverently. The article itself is scary as hell. The gist: they're almost done building a giant particle accelerator under Lake Geneva that can probably create matter, opening up portals into other dimensions and irreverently snipping the strings of reality for the sake of "pure knowledge."
The caption for the accompanying image is: "The [LHC] and a proposed [ILC] should propel humankind into a pristine realm of unknown particle physics." What better to represent the phallic skyrocketing of masculine knowledge ideals than a blue man suspended ecstatically at the center of a giant atom, his loins on fire at the nucleus? I mean, is that not where a blue man should be? And if you don't agree with me that he looks white, just look at the white light used to highlight his face, one that seems to radiate with equal brightness from a spot above the atom and from his crotch. Scary.
Big Shot scientists, such as those behind SciAm, are usually the highest paid, as all workers should be, because some organization thinks their research is worth money, money they have acquired by maintaining certain beliefs and behaving in certain ways. These scientists, under heavy government supervision and corporate pressures, are often hired to "prove" a "fact" in the interests of propaganda. When results do not correlate with desired outcomes, they are ignored or relegated to the back pages of academic (not mainstream) journals. The dogma many people would like to believe, that "the facts speak for themselves" also contributes to TechnoFutureVision's success.
TechnoFutureVision is still a white vision, because it expresses a white man who has been disintegrated and castrated by intellectual scrutiny but who has rebuilt himself into an omnipotent figure through sexual communion with the numbers themselves. In this way, it can be seen as an attempt by the dominant persons behind our knowledge industries to reclaim their authority in the face of pluralism (or even globalism.) The idea that modern scientific theories are free from racial or gender bias, furthermore, creates an "epistemology of ignorance" beneficial to the generation of wealth for research scientists.
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| i have had to do very little actual writing this year |
[11 Feb 2008|04:12pm] |
"indigenous" and "knowledge," a response to
http://www.schumachersociety.org/publications/laduke_93.html
“I think naming, as well as knowing why names are, is very important in restoring your relationship with the earth and finding your place. Restoring this relationship is our challenge.”
The act of naming, sociologists say, is supposed to be integral to identity formation. In many myths and stories, characters’ names are destroyed, exploited, or changed for the benefit of evil. Such stories (spirited away comes to the top of my mind) are about the hero’s process of reclaiming his or her name. When LaDuke talks about narratives and names, she is speaking for the earth—which, like her people, has been stripped of its names and stories by Western knowledge traditions. The process by which Westerners take indigenous knowledge and commodify it is very interesting to me. For instance, most people know that pharmaceuticals (a popular example is chemotherapy drugs from yew trees) are developed from plants that were once part of indigenous traditions. Many of these beneficial plants are difficult or impossible to synthesize.
Chinese and American ginseng are both endangered species, now going at walgreens.com for about 12 dollars a bottle. Ginseng is increasingly rare in the wild because people following the “natural supplements” fad harvest it for profit or recreational use. More importantly, the original communities from which this knowledge was taken receive no compensation for the radical (or even “traditional”) new drug, as do the patent holders. Were indigenous communities compensated for the industrialization of their traditions, they would be empowered beyond belief, in a way that LaDuke implies inspires “fear” in her white neighbors. In other words, they would have more power to uphold and enforce their ancient contract with the land – even on non-indigenous people.
The indigenous perspective and the industrial perspective differ mostly in that industrial societies believe thy are exempt from natural law. That humans have “some god-given right” to natural resources. Another way in which they differ is in their eyesight. Whereas capitalists (yes, CAPITALISTS) only see things in terms of their immediate circumstances, the Ojibway have their children’s children, up to the seventh generation, in mind. In addition, they have their ancestors, as they speak through the vectors of an animate world, where even rocks have knowledge to give. Within the indigenous “employment” – not recognized by the government – system, there are people whose charge is to monitor the land for signals of its consent (which is so amazing I can’t even begin) and communicate this to the group as a whole. According to LaDuke, such self-regulatory mechanisms of indigenous cultures are similar throughout the world. It makes me want to think more about the anthropological place of violence and death, and about the Inuit's plans for empowerment (ie whether they'll let me move there.)
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| yall should read the land ethic |
[04 Feb 2008|10:49am] |
"When godlike Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence. This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong."
Leopold's comparison of modern land use to slavery was, for his time, a radical and dangerous explanation of the motives behind a Western, ethnocentric notion of progress. Most people understand the idea that "development" is based on exploitation of some kind -- of races, of women, of animals, or of ecosystems. But the idea that the environment is oppressed is not radical until you understand a) how directly we are involved and b) the social and spiritual implications of acceptance.
At the material level, people often talk about labor and sweatshops as representing access at the margin of oppression. At the material level, we rely daily on clothes, furniture, shoes, makeup, appliances, electronics, kitchenware, and food the origins of which we are clueless. Between the earth and the household there are many chains of supply; raw materials are torn from the earth by laborers in peril, chemically synthesized in polluting factories, whose waste contaminates the water, air, and land, threatens the lives of people living nearby, and triggers the exodus or extinction of thousands of animal and plant species each year.
When I worked at an elitist, "gourmet" grocery store, people were constantly asking me about the origins of the produce. They did not need to ask about things like beer, cheese, or bread; the very appeal of these foods is in their locality. In Northbrook, where people can afford to buy food qualitatively, concern with local produce is a matter of personal taste and individual responsibility (see: ethical vegetarianism is unfair to women and children,) rather than a long-range conception of a society ordered around ethical food consumption.
While individual actions, such as buying a Prius, adopting an acre of forest, or shopping at the farmer's market help subtract from that individual's impact, as long as "conservation" is done within a capitalist framework, it also distracts us. It's unfair to wonder why, when people with privilege have gone to such great lengths to "save the earth," others haven't done the same. Actions that do not redistribute access or knowledge tend to pacify the consumer of conservation efforts and blind him/her to the structure of conservation and environmental racism. Truly empowering the environment will also empower the people who work closest to it, those who are at the fringes of a traditional power structure, and who have for so long been exploited with the same logic we apply to nonhuman life systems.
As long as conservation is done in the interests of the economy and the people who control it, the land is still considered am infinite resource, given to humans by God for their manipulative ends. The land has no interests, no consciousness. It is not conservation that we need, but restoration, rehabilitation, and popular education. The environment cannot consent to its use unless we personify the biosphere and its interests. Environmental ethicists propose that "the natural world" -- no different from "the world" that includes people -- is the one organism hit hardest by human activity. In other words, if the idea of humans as a resource diminishes the quality of human life, we are treating the land organism in the same way, and causing it to suffer. This idea, which Leopold proposed in the land ethic, should be the basis of environmental awareness.
bonus "i hate thoreau" mandatory response
Thoreau is such a hypocrite. I never liked that guy. Over and over again he says he wants not to work with his hands, that he just wants to go out and consume nature, to feed his mind with it, to "cage" himself near the birds instead of having them caged. I think that this attitude, and the attitudes of many (not all) nature poets/transcendentalists, such as Wordsworth, Whitman, Frost, and Emerson, are really stereotypically poetic, are true men and misogynists, and survivalists only interested in their own survival (except maybe Walt Whitman.) Thoreau's writing does nothing to promote ethics, and he is popular in America because he helped carry the flag for rugged individualism and hippie culture. I'm pretty sure everyone also knows that he lived in Emerson's backyard… which isn't bad in itself, but it was a lie! He claimed to provide for himself on Walden pond but really just ate at his friend's house every night!
I guess it's just something about his tone. I appreciate many of his insights: ("why are we determined to be starved before we are hungry?" "Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbance") it's the language they are embedded in that gets on my nerves. For instance, he's going on and on about how he does not want to work with his hands, a pretty aristocratic notion. "The Farmer is the Man Who Feeds Them All" is an American folksong, I'm pretty sure Woody Guthrie sang it at one point, but it has no owner. It asks: how did Thoreau eat when he was living on Walden Pond?
How would I describe a life at peace with the land? How would I do it differently from Thoreau? I value the influence of art, poetry, and song on popular culture (some more than others) and the art I respect most comes from action and practice -- Walden reads more like a travel journal than a social critique, so I guess I would start there.
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| another "journal entry/reflection" |
[21 Jan 2008|03:18pm] |
I really liked Leopold’s discussion on page 173 about the drama of hunting. “The swoop of a hawk, for example, is perceived by one as the drama of evolution. To another it is only a threat to the full frying-pan. The drama may thrill a hundred successive witnesses; the threat only one—for he responds with a shotgun.” People are included in this drama, as on page 168: “The duck-hunter in his blind” – it’s funny that he used that word – “and the opera singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accoutrements, are doing the same thing.” A character in a drama usually acts on impulse, which is what makes the drama interesting.
What Leopold seems to be doing is developing a sense of human ecology in a world where growth of the population goes unchecked, rendering our participation in it a parasitic activity that threatens even itself (though Leopold didn’t mention this explicitly.) There is a drama to human participation in an ecosystem; when people are oblivious to their impact, their ignorance is reproduced through the manifest destiny of roads paved into the wilderness. When people are conscious of their participation, they are far less of a threat, and are a less dramatic part of the ecosystem. (This idea is also explored in Ishmael, where cultures are classified as either “takers” or “leavers”). Leopold’s suggestion is to preserve wilderness by planting it, to an extent. Still, he doesn’t talk about farmers, who are “closest” to the land, but receive no ecological training (probably not true anymore?)
In the “wilderness” section, Leopold talks about wilderness as heritage; it is “the raw material” out of which we have built our cultures. I found nothing else written in this book that I connected to as profoundly; I often sympathize that “a militant minority of wilderness-minded citizens must be on watch throughout the nation, and available for action in a pinch.” In order to attain the “intellectual humility” he speaks of, you must admit your mortality, which our society is completely unwilling to do. We don’t think about the past at all, or death, when we drive our cars out to the Golf Mill shopping center, or go to the UP for a weekend on the lake. (Freud has a lot to say about this!)
For some reason, it makes me think of this song:
The farmer comes to town with his wagon broken down,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you'll only look and see, then I think you will agree
That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Lives on credit 'til the fall.
Then they take him by the hand, and they lead him through the land,
And the middle man's the man who gets it all.
The lawyer hangs around while the butcher cuts a pound,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
And the preacher and the cook go a-strolling by the brook,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
When the banker says he's broke, and the merchant's up in smoke,
They forget that it's the farmer feeds them all.
It would put them to the test if the farmer took a rest
Because the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
Then the farmer he left town, and the place was broken-down,
And the pigweeds and the thistles they were rife,
But the land in fallow lay, it was waiting for the day
When dreams and hands would bring it back to life.
Now the farmer's back in town, with his wagon broken down,
Once again he is the man who feeds them all.
Things are better now, no doubt, because the middleman's left out,
And the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Come and get your punkins in the fall!
Just put on your garden duds, bring a box and get your spuds–
Because the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
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| teeny journal entry |
[17 Jan 2008|02:41pm] |
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Since our last class, I have become interested in the space “ritual” occupies in our relationship with “nature;” the study of anthropology seems to be antithetical to the wilderness aesthetic -- Leopold says: “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” (96) Leopold’s knowledge is relevant to more than his experience of sense, which, since everyone can have it, is not the qualification for an ethical relationship with the land. His commitment to ecology comes from his awareness of the interconnectedness of life on the farm, forest, and prairie, an awareness that can be thought of as traditional (taught by elders), and in some ways spiritual. In his stories he explains the environment in terms that cannot be quantified; he gleans the desires of the mountain, the feelings of the buffalo. When you ask people to “do their part” and think of ecological resources that exist beyond their immediate desires (AKA biological diversity, turned over for deer, farmland, and timber,) giving them access to the environment in the first place is the key to inviting rituals (and thus commitment) to its preservation. Our society already has many unspoken rituals; most of these are based around consumption and spending money. The emptiness of this lifestyle is already apparent to most Americans, who seek to supplement it with spiritual experiences, drugs and alcohol, art, book-learning, or the closeness with the land. i am SO OBVIOUSLY biased towards that last one.
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| oh man i feel like such a dunce about race theory |
[22 Dec 2007|06:54pm] |
Reflection: Creole
I took my mother and teenage sister to see the Sunday, November 18 showing of Creole, a new play by M.E.H. Lewis. I was very impressed and disturbed by the play. Neither my mother nor sister felt that the play challenged their previously held beliefs, but both sincerely enjoyed it. What follows is my response framed through the eyes of a Western Liberation theologian.
Creole is a deep exploration of both white and black/African epistemologies in the context of slavery on a Virginia plantation. Aesthetically, this exploration is conducted through dance and rhythm, and semantically, through the dense text of the play. The main character and focus of the story is a young slave named Cora, a brave and “sassy” woman who learns the terms of her freedom by learning, through force, the terms of her enslavement. Cora, though she experiences rape, commits infanticide, and turns against her inner self, experiences a kind of salvation by the end of the play, and finally sets herself free. Creole expresses the social factors on an average Virginia plantation that prevent Cora from learning to empower herself, but also those that preserve her soul. Creole brings context to the structure of white organizational systems in the face of disaster, rendering the play relevant in contemporary reflections on Hurricane Katrina.
The first epistemology that must be discussed in Creole is the epistemology of self-hatred, the epistemology of ignorance. In the beginning of the play, Cora, who is, according to Maisie, “a woman now, and that means trouble,” is willfully ignorant of white devilishness. She wishes desperately to see the world through the eyes of a white person, specifically, her master Lucius, a white judge she thinks kind. Cora learns to speak the way Lucius and his sister Julia speak; she insists in learning the “magic” of words, which Tom, who loves her, warns are a kind of evil magic. She has no interest in the “dirt magic” or “blood magic” that her mother-figure Maisie practices.
Cora survives by distancing herself from Lucius’s other slaves; and since “you can’t make a person hate the root without making them hate the tree” (Malcolm X, page 9,) Cora comes to be motivated by self-hatred. Instead of standing up for Tom, she participates in his emasculation. She tells Julia: “You know them colored boys,” they’re bottomless pits. But while Cora denies her own hunger, Tom’s hunger is a metaphor for his desire to “break the flowerpot,” to break free and become his own person. Perhaps the best illustration of Cora’s willful ignorance is her resemblance to her enslaved mother, who “watched herself in Elizabeth’s big mirror,” and walked with blood on her face from her white half-sister’s fist. Cora spurns her lover Tom because she believes that Lucius is not like all white people, as if her oppression rested in the hands of individual white people, rather than in their institutions.
Lucius’s way of knowing, which Cora seeks out at every opportunity, is symbolic of patriarchy, for in the first scene it is Cora who sees the eclipse, or as Lucius calls it, “the fiery crown of the sun.” The crown, of course, is reserved for kings. Lucius, the consummate patriarch and king, wishes to be the father of all his slaves. What defines white Christianity if not the belief in patriarchy as the just order of the world? Shouldn’t a judge know? Lucius looks to his father, to books written by men, as a guide for how to dole out punishments and favors to those in bondage. Lucius asserts: “fathers remind us who we are.” As James Cone says, “white supremacy is so widespread that it becomes a ‘natural’ way of viewing the world” (Cone, xxv). In the traditional Christian theodicy, Adam receives knowledge directly from God, Eve from Adam, and from both the white Adam and white Eve the slave, who is seen as little more than an animal, learns his or her place in the world. Lucius, when he learns that Cora is to bear his child, thinks it natural that he should have full dominion over its body and soul, until the day he dies.
Lucius and Julia like to wax rhapsodic about many “facts of life.” Julia, for instance, loves “darkie parties,” stereotyping Tom as wild and sexual, when in fact he is a brilliant carpenter. And anyone can know about the timing of eclipse, Lucius tells Cora, forgetting she is a human, and a human who cannot read. “Anyone… who can read.” He and Julia use their privileged theology to extend pity to the slaves on the plantation. Everyone (meaning all white people, every human) knows, Lucius says, “that slavery exists for the Negro.” He and Julia don’t treat their slaves as humans, but like animals, just so that they can keep believing in the institution. Julia wishes that her neighbor’s slave sons, contradictions to her ideal racist society, would be kept out of her sight. “It’s not right,” she says. But Julia’s brother is guilty of such a creation. Lucius, perhaps out of guilt, is so condescending and needlessly protective of his sister (whose only ‘work’ is sewing and giving Lucius emotional support) that she uses the slaves as an outlet for her frustration and thus gains a reputation as a shrew.
The condescension espoused by Lucius and Julia is in direct contrast to his slaves’ subversive social order: it is a matriarchy. Maisie, old and wise, tells Cora, “you got to know who you is… no matter what your hands touch,” and “no matter who touches you;” in other words, Maisie gives birth to Cora, gives Cora her secret name –something no man, white or black, can take from her– and plants in Cora the seed of feminine self-knowledge which is the source of the black woman’s iconic strength. Maisie tells Cora, upon her decision to abort hers and Lucius’s soon-to-be “slave baby,” that “everybody needs to be mothered by somebody.” If, as Mitchem claims, “motherhood is a critical role in black communities for transmission of folkways and wisdom” (Mitchem, 50,) then Maisie is the othermother and source of strength for the others, who have been stripped of their family histories by the auction block. Because of Maisie’s experiences, she can impart such hard knowledge and give reality checks to Cora, Tom, and the others. Maisie, giving her necklace to Cora, reminds her that “the world is a circle,” demonstrating an understanding of “the interconnections of person, community, and nature” (Mitchem, 43) that are essential to a black/African theology.
Another epistemological reality for the slaves in Creole is rooted in standpoint theory. Standing at the margin, the slaves have a secret knowledge of oppression, best remembered by Maisie’s assertion that “white people do whatever they get away with.” Cora believes that although Lucius is white, the fact that he is educated and kind means that he is conscious of his oppressor status. Perhaps Cora even believes that slavery is for her own good. But for the most part, the slaves in Creole, including Cora, embody Cone’s idea of the “divine election of the oppressed” and have been “given the power of judgment over the high and mighty whites” (cone, 39). They are acutely aware of their own sexual enslavement, which, when it is named by Tom, drives Lucius to destroy him. Cora remembers how another woman’s breasts were eaten away by dogs as a consequence for running away. Tom, knowing she wants it, drops whatever he is doing to flatter Julia’s appearance, even though Cora is the black apple of his eye.
In an amazing post-Katrina essay by bierria, liebenthal, and incite!, entitled “to render ourselves visible,” the authors posit “Oppressors render the oppressed invisible or hypervisible, relative to how the situation benefits their agenda.” In the aftermath of Nat Turner and in the aftermath of Katrina, black faces were uncontrollably rendered hypervisible, promoting the formation of white militias – with white folk “shooting and beating every black face they saw” in a literal attempt to erase them from sight. In better time, Julia gives Maisie an ostentatious brooch: “so that everyone can know where you stand.” Julia’s gift of visibility also means that Maisie is under her watchful eye, and can be held accountable for mistakes attributed to others. Invisibility also played a large role in the artistic direction of the play: all the work of setting up the stage and shifting its contents –even when that involved cleaning up a murder scene –was done by black actors in the interim, a sinister device that made scene changes run very smoothly.
After the Nat Turner rebellion, a disaster with a death toll, Lucius is rendered impotent. His authority becomes nonsensical. He keeps telling Maisie to go make tea for Julia, and denies Julia’s reaction to the event. Julia wants to see the heads of those who revolted on stakes in her front yard. Lucius tells her to go lie down. They discuss the invisible labor that gives humans dignity, a theme made explicit and known among the slaves: a blond girl who was slain in the field was valuable because of her hair, it was “as if she had made it with her own two hands.” Ironically, Tom, with his two hands, has made the house his masters live in and all its furniture. His labor has been rendered invisible, totally taken for granted.
Like many women, Cora must learn the hard way that “not only the sadness, but also the grace-filled transforming moments must be recognized as components of the whole understanding of salvation.” (Mitchem 107) Cora learns that her son and a lifetime of preferential treatment will not prevent him from growing up like Tom (literally cut down for asserting himself,) or make Lucius realize that Cora is human, and not just “the dog that licks its owner’s hand.” This transformation, realized during Lucius’s continued refusal to remove her from his protection, allows Cora to extend grace to Lucius and let him participate in his son’s funeral. It also gives her the impetus to “jump the broom,” something she can now no longer do with Tom.
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| i TRIED though! god this is awful |
[29 Oct 2007|01:18pm] |
To what extent did the British “westernize” India?
The unending history of human conquest gives deep meaning to the word ‘resistance’ and to the context of identity formation in almost every contemporary society. While the ‘will to power’ does not represent the terminus of human compassion, it complicates the ‘victim’ status of people living in a capitalized global economy. When the American media portrays modern Indians in the rags of postcolonial destitution, these representations must be challenged. The cultural heritage of South Asia is rich and interesting. Its centuries-long contact with British imperialism in no way left its resulting countries unchanged; however, while language, tradition, and business leaned towards westernization, people living in India continued to resist homogenization, making their own significant impact on canonically Western ways of living. The British rulers slyly galvanized various Indian constituencies in order to bring out aspects of Indian culture beneficial to subordination. At the same time, however, Indians wrested power from the British government in various ways.
On a concrete level, the company Raj exerted cultural pressure on Indian society from its inception. The permanent settlement and its subsequent modifications forced zamindars to exploit peasants using “formidable powers of extra-economic coercion;” the Mughal zamindari system imposed reasonable regulation on land ownership, but British policies placed implicit trust in landowners’ abilities to “extract rent from the peasantry and regularly remit revenue to the government” (Bose and Jalal 55). Though the British continually tried to destroy subsistence agriculture, it remained the only remedy for famine where acres lay fallow due to gross mismanagement by the state.
Brahmanic opportunists, continually sponsored by the British, used colonialism as a chance to push their own agendas. Power, in this instance, flowed like water from the British colonialists to the volunteers in the army, enabling a minor cultural shift among existing members. Officers exerted political pressure to deny entry of lower castes into the military; Caste prejudice determined crucial targets and the movement of troops. The ease with which members of the Indian Civil Service manipulated their power shows that the British had a lot less control than they thought. By preying on the extant Brahmanical agenda in the military sector, the British lost touch with their soldiers and so lost their grip on the army; the mutiny of 1857 simply could not have happened to a people who had their religious and political identities trampled out of them. In fact, the biggest change sought by both the Bengali army and the agrarian revolt was a return to the Mughal empire, which, though it had oppressed them, was in touch with their customs and their needs.
The whole Colonial project has its roots in the Orientalist-Anglicist debate. The British Empire at times “sponsored Indians in their own culture” (Robb 137) sought out the needs of its subjects, and used insider knowledge to streamline its bureaucracy. At other times Anglicists “buried” the diverse identities of South Asians “under a racist paternalism that infanticized them” (170). White capitalist patriarchs who dominate and vilify darker skinned, differently religioned, gendered people “divide and conquer” in order to sanction their own way of life. This practice, which bell hooks calls “eating the other,” relies on the sexual, linguistic, and economic subjugation to make “contact with the Other even as one wishes boundaries to remain intact” (hooks 29), thus normalizing any kind of colonial enterprise. The creation of an Other begins and ends in consumption. The East India Company was the parasite that began to eat away at Mughal infrastructure and exploit the Indian economy in order to bring its exotic goods to the world. The company and the industrial colony exploited India’s resources in order to sell Indian goods made with Indian labor without the financial burden of reinvestment. This phenomenon was also known as the drain of wealth: “the growing commercialization” –without profit– “of Indian agriculture based on commodity production.” (Bose and Jalal 81) British “anthropologists” and pseudoscientists thrust sexual oppression on all people of color by emasculating Indian people, and consuming representations of them as non-human in order to supply their greed.
Fluency in a “western” language—the language of the colonizers—is a traditional indicator of the degree to which a state has been westernized. Literally, the ability to pronounce the ideas embedded in language is shaped by business, education, and bureaucracy. With the ability to speak the language of the oppressor, people both gain the ability to challenge its politics and lose the ability to resist its ideas. English first became the official language of India’s government in 1835, in an attempt to “form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” (Bose and Jalal 67) English remains one of India’s official languages today, and is a standby for communication in the government and on the streets. It is interesting to note, however, that Indo-European languages all share “western” word forms and semantic constructs.
The invocation of linguistic control lacked the ‘civilizing’ effect the British hoped it would have. Due to the relatively low psycholinguistic effort and semantic change required to translate Indic and European languages, new English literates could focus on the ideas the colonists tried to indoctrinate. Bandyopadhyay eloquently states: “The Indians who were attracted to English education were predominantly Hindu upper-caste males from middle and lower income groups… [who] selectively adopted this knowledge and deployed it to interrogate colonial rule itself” (Bandyopadhyay 144). There are many similarities between high-caste Indian culture and aristocratic notions of class; members of the high caste and high class reaped benefits from maintaining the company Raj and both desired a Western education. Educated Indians, sharing this European value, have a history of educated resistance; for instance, the Indian National Congress was a committee of letter writers born of Anglicist educational institutions.
The great Rammohun Roy was one such Indian: western-educated, upper-caste, and progressive, though he “believed that modernization of India would come through English education” (Bandyopadhyay 141). His generation, credited with the birth of Indian feminism, was born from burgeoning educational opportunities for Indians. They learned in their English classrooms of the shallowness of colonialism’s philosophy, reading Locke, Hume, and engaging “the legal, sociological, liberal, and democratic debates of contemporary Europe” (Robb 181). Thus with the understanding of Western consciousness came the desire for Indians to break away.
“The Indian intelligentsia also responded to the civilisational critique by advocating and supporting reforms to improve the status of women in Indian society” (Bandyopadhyay 151). Such it was that, though sati was abolished, though many social movements began to ferment, the minds of Indians were far from decolonized. As Mohanty puts it in Feminism Without Borders, “patriarchal practices were shaped to serve the economic interests of both the landowning classes and the colonial state; even the seemingly progressive customs such as widow remarriage had their limits determined within this gendered political economy” (Mohanty, 62). There began to develop a culture of resistance, a slow trickling of hope, though it was transmitted from ‘westernized’ educated persons; for instance, the Deoband movement and the Brahmo Samaj, and the allure of the queen’s proclamation. Gandhi himself is a product of westernization. His resistance cannot, in truth, be credited entirely to British ideology. He inspired revolutionary activity never before seen in the colonized world, the civil rights movement, and many forward-thinking individuals.
People, even when forced, automatically apply their cultural values to the media they are exposed to. Since the British made minimal efforts to assimilate into Indian society, the Indian people they placed in power got to define what was and was not part of the Indian national identity. British rule fermented some of the oppressive ideas already held by the upper echelons of Indian society in order to deflect responsibility for its own disastrous reign. At the same time, Indian people reclaimed and decolonized their culture, not only by the sweat of their brows and the blood of their hands, but by taking advantage of negligent British bureaucratic policies and sheer persistence.
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| my first lab report!!!! |
[20 Sep 2007|04:58pm] |
i'm so proud!!! i can only post the first draft because i lost the rest of it in a computer somewhere.
Lab Report #1
Kathleen
Fermentation,
a form of anaerobic respiration by which yeast, and other microorganisms
found abundantly in the wild, convert sugars into acids, is responsible
for many traditional (now considered “gourmet”) foods in the human
diet. The same creatures that make our cheese, sauerkraut, and
apple cider are also the culprits of the interesting refrigerator and
pantry disasters that people have learned to revile and disinfect.
This report will focus solely on the yeast fungi, (Saccharomyces
cerevisiae) which famously metabolize sugars for their bread, converting
them into CO2 and alcohol. A spirited fan of liquid ferments might
marvel at this process, which precedes human history by billions of
years.
In
the interests of furthering the awareness and availability of yeast
byproducts, two simple test tube experiments were conducted to determine
first, whether sugar (specifically, a solution of glucose in water)
could be eliminated from the fermentation process; second, whether a
9%lactose solution might be successfully substituted for glucose to
produce similar results. The hypothesis was made that yeast alone
would, in fact, successfully metabolize the glucose out of a solution,
producing a measurable amount of CO2; also, that yeast alone would react
with 9% lactose to produce CO2. Furthermore, a prediction follows
for both experiments that yeast produces more CO2 in the span of a half
hour with the two substrates than either sugar solution on its own or
yeast on its own. For the second experiment, an additional prediction
was made that yeast with 9% lactose would produce less CO2 than the
glucose solution from the first experiment.
This
experiment was conducted as part of a class lab section, where 10 other
groups conducted the same experiment shown in Table 1, followed by a
second experiment using different substrates for their setup in Table
2. The experiment conducted in this report is known as “group
10,” or “The Sunshine Cobras.”
TABLE
1 |
Tube 1 |
Tube 2 |
Tube 3 |
| 9% Glucose |
4 ml |
0 ml |
4 ml |
H2O |
4 ml |
8 ml |
8 ml |
| Active Yeast |
4 ml |
4 ml |
0 ml |
For
the first experiment, 4 ml of a 9% solution of glucose was transported
to a 50 ml plastic tube alongside 4 ml of active yeast and 4 ml of distilled
water from separate pipettes. Simultaneously, two control groups
were established; one with 4 ml of yeast in 8 ml of H2O and one with
4 ml of 9%glucose in 8 ml of H2O. These were then transported to three
separate fermentation tubes of equal volume; these tubes were made airtight
and their contents shifted to eliminate air bubbles. Initial measurements
of CO2 were taken by calculating the volume of air in the closed end
of the fermentation tubes. After 30 minutes, measurements of CO2
were again taken and the results were compared (see lab manual for General
Biology, 2007).
TABLE
2 |
Tube 1 |
Tube 2 |
Tube 3 |
Tube 4 |
| 9% Glucose |
4 ml |
0 ml |
0 ml |
0 ml |
| 9% Lactose |
0 ml |
4 ml |
4 ml |
0 ml |
H2O |
4 ml |
4 ml |
8 ml |
8 ml |
| Active Yeast |
4 ml |
4 ml |
0 ml |
4 ml |
Table 2: Experiment 2 setup
In
the second experiment, the same methods were followed, but an additional
tube with 4 ml of 9%lactose, 4 ml of distilled water, and 4 ml of yeast
was tested. Instead of the control used in tube 3 of experiment
1, 9% lactose was substituted for the 9% glucose solution. Once
again, the solutions were allotted 30 minutes to ferment before measurements
of CO2 were taken.
During
the initial phase of experiment 1, a mysterious bubble of air measuring
1.217 cm3 could not be eliminated from tube #2, containing the yeast
and distilled water. After 30 minutes, however, there was no change
in the volume, consistent with class data. Tube 1, with the 9%
glucose solution and yeast, exhibited a change in volume from 0 cm3
CO2 to 2.827 cm3. All other groups in the class experienced a
change in this control group. Tube #3 experienced no change in
volume, in Group 1 or in the rest of the class. This confirmed
the hypothesis made by all parties, that the yeast would react with
glucose to produce CO2, as well as the prediction, that respiration
would not occur in the absence of either yeast or glucose.
During
experiment 2, the 9% glucose and yeast solution repeated its performance,
producing 1.806 cm3 of CO2, while all other controls maintained the
same level of CO2 (0 cm3). See Table 3 for a list of class results
for experiment 1, Table 4 for the results from experiment 2. In
Table 3, the same measurements are used as in Table 1. All units
are in ml (cm3) of CO2 produced in 30 minutes.
TABLE
3 |
Tube 1 |
Tube 2
|
Tube 3 |
| Group 1 |
3.06 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 2 |
3.925 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 3 |
2.42 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 4 |
5.49 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 5 |
1.96 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 6 |
2.2 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 7 |
3.53 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 8 |
2.355 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 9 |
4.16 |
0 |
0 |
| Sunshine Cobras |
2.827 |
0 |
0 |
| Group 11 |
5.02 |
0 |
0 |
TABLE
4 |
4 ml glucose
4 ml yeast
4 ml H2O
|
4 ml Substrate
4 ml yeast
4 ml H2O |
4 ml Substrate
0 ml yeast
8 ml H2O |
0 ml Substrate
4 ml yeast
8 ml H2O |
Group 1
9% glucose and 20%
ethanol |
3.38 |
2.04 |
0 |
0 |
Group 2
9% glucose and 30%
ethanol |
2.83 |
1.10 |
0 |
0 |
Group 3
9%Nutrasweet |
2.36 |
0.79 |
0 |
0 |
Group 4
9% glucose and 20%
ethanol |
3.53 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Group 5
9% glucose and 20%
ethanol |
2.36 |
0.98 |
0 |
0 |
Group 6
9% fructose |
2.04 |
1.81 |
0 |
0 |
Group 7
9% Saccharin |
3.14 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Group 8
9% Ribose |
2.35 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Group 9
9% Sucrose |
1.57 |
1.25 |
0 |
0 |
Sunshine Cobras
9% lactose |
1.80 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Group 11
2% glucose |
3.38 |
1.88 |
0 |
0 |
Table 4: class results from experiment
2
By
comparing tubes 1 and 3 from experiment 1, it can be determined that
glucose cannot be eliminated from the fermentation process. Tube
2, lacking any change in the volume of CO2, suggests that yeast is also
integral to the fermentation process. The fact, however, that
tube 2 contained a bubble of air points to a possible error in the initial
measurements for that set of data. Nevertheless, looking at trends
in the data heavily supports the conclusion that yeast and glucose have
a thriving relationship with one another in solutions of water.
The minor differences in class data for the first experiment are likely
due to an uneven dispersal of yeast fungi and glucose in the solution,
due to a lack of motion in the containers.
All groups had a positive hypothesis for experiment 2. There was
no change in CO2 in the solution of yeast and lactose, thus thwarting
the hypothesis that lactose is an input for a fermentation process using
yeast. For the groups that also lacked a change in volume with
the yeast and substrate, the same conclusion can be reached. For
the groups with 20% ethanol (the waste product of fermentation), the
volume of CO2 was generally decreased. Against the class average
of 2.99 ml/30 minutes for tube 1 (using data compiled from table 1 and
table 2), solutions with ethanol showed a definite decrease in volume.
Even among groups with positive results from their substrates, all recorded
volumes of CO2 were below average. To determine whether these
results are flukes, or whether they represent a genuine trend in fermentation
reactions, further testing should proceed to determine their average
reactivity.
Based
on the fact that no substrate produced more than the average amount
of ethanol made by yeast digesting 9% glucose, it appears that glucose,
the old standby for alcohol production, is still the best method.
The fact that the average CO2 production was lower in experiment 2 (2.61
ml) suggests that yeast were less active after the 40 minutes of time
it took to conduct and discuss experiment 1. Nevertheless, none
of the other substrates surpassed this average. It is also uncertain
from this experiment whether sugars were metabolized in the same direction
in each fermentation tube—that is, the amount CO2 that collected in
the closed end was measured, while there were no standards for measuring
CO2 in the open end of the tube.
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