Positive interactions between people and land

Something sweet happened in class yesterday, prefigured by seeing my breath in the clear sunny air of a crisp morning as I walked to the subway at 125th Street on my way to school.

Our readings were David Abram's "The Commonwealth of Breath," based largely an Native American understandings of holy wind as holding and pervading us, not just as "air" but as consciousness, "awairness," and the first few chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. I thought we might start by celebrating the air in our classroom - no need to open the window, air is everywhere! - but students quickly dismissed by suggestion that we "savor the air," instead complaining about how bad the air in New York is. (I saved noting that the air is much better than that in many cities, including New York past and, given unfolding Trumpery, future.) Rhapsodies followed to the air of the sea, of home, of upstate - we should take a fieldtrip, one proposed! As for the City, "I try not to breathe it," one said. This wasn't going anywhere (I was going to draw attention to a note where Abram considers the different, but analogous, experience of denizens of water) so I let the discussion move on.

But then we came to Kimmerer's report that, at the start of a course on ecology at her college, she'd been astonished at students' answers to a questionnaire she'd given them. While they listed many "negative interactions between people and land" - they were students of environmental policy, after all - when she asked about "positive interactions between people and land" the response was: none. My students shared her surprise at this, but I interjected: can you name any positive interactions between people and land? "I'm not sure I can," I admitted. One student spoke of parks and nature reserves and taking children to them. Another said that it was a positive interaction when we undid the damage of our negative interactions. I was hoping for more - I wasn't joking when I said I'd come up short myself -  but that was it.

After a pause I confessed that this question haunted me, and I had no answer. I knew no way to understand my own existence as anything other than parasitic - taking but never giving back, consuming, destroying. Kimmerer's pecans and strawberries are happy to be eaten because their seeds are spread to other soil by the eaters, but my shit just goes down the toilet. A negative interaction! Composting is great but our own bodies' work as composters, which fed the nightsoil cycle I was so moved to learn about in Bonneuil and Fressoz last year (poop collected in European cities used to be collected to fertilize the farms that fed the cities), is interrupted.

But then I had a little whiff of Abramian inspiration (one of the many terms he reminds us are about the power of the air). What about breathing out?, I asked. We read about how plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, don't we, as animals, return the favor by taking in oxygen and producing CO2? Uptakes of breath throughout the room. It's not a lot (actually we typically inhale and exhale about 10,000 liters of air every day) but it's a start...

This is something I'm thinking hard about, and will continue to. (I sense that the next step, one uncomfortable in other ways, is reckoning with being a predator - whose ecological niche involves giving by taking.) For now I'm savoring the thought that this discovery was a gift of the crisp air and the sun this morning in the Manhattan Valley, which forces the subway and its passengers out into the open, and made the invisible wonder of breath - including my own - briefly visible.

Landed

In "Religion and Ecology" today I again got to share the surprising news that a river runs through our neighborhood - well, a creek named Minetta flows beneath most of the blocks of The New School. I showed the 1865 Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York (turned on its end here; it actually runs southish to northish) which shows our island's remarkable diversity of terrains, but the idea that there's terrain at all may be the biggest surprise. The grid and the city's dazzling verticality can make it feel like a featureless flat platform waiting for humans to start building stuff on it. (A student who's a skateboarder told me they're always aware that few of the streets are in fact flat - they have to be or they'll taste the ground!) I've asked them to explore the creek before our next class; let's see what they manage to do!

Calling up that map again, I had a look at what it tells of the topography of the place we now live, not a place anyone could think was flat! Morningside Gardens sits on the south slope of the Manhattan Valley, on what

here looks like a promontory. There used to be a fort here, in fact - and doubtless it had served long before as a vista point for the original inhabitants of Mannahatta. Way cool! The view will have been toward and up the river to the left, and through a narrowish valley to the Harlem Plains to the right! At least in 1865, Manhattan Valley wasn't, as I assumed it must be, a river valley. I wonder what carved it open?

The point of bringing up Minetta Creek was to get students to think about the land beneath us, supporting and sustaining - and taken for granted by - us. Knowing about its flow over the years has changed my sense of place in the West Village. What sense of place might the topographical map afford for me as a resident of Manhattanville?

Cabbage cluster...

Green sky (and an airplane)...

Ducks in a row

Fun(ny) thing about traveling until the eve of a semester. Where usually I'm busy the week before tweaking and rearranging my syllabi, this time they've been fixed for weeks. Going through this first week - Rel & Ecology Tuesday, Job and the Arts Wednesday, R&E Thursday, Varieties today felt downright planned.

Morning light

(Thank you, jetlag!)

To life!

Kicked off "Religion and Ecology" with a marvelous piece by Rebecca Solnit, a piece I thought would do many valuable things for us as we got started as a community of inquiry. I think it did, but it took more work than I expected, and I learned more from trying to explain it.

I thought Solnit's acknowledgment of younger people's "fury" at inheriting a world spoiled by their forebears, relating it to her experience as someone older, would bring affect out into the open, as well as the generation gap between me and the students. The way she honors this righteous rage is lovely:

maybe your fury pointed in the right direction is a treasure: a non-fossil fuel, a clean-burning fire, a passion to do what we need to do. Fury can fight for all that is still with us and all that is worth protecting. And there is so much that is worth protecting. ...

the fury you feel is the hard outer shell of love: if you’re angry it’s because something you love is threatened and you want to defend it. ...

I know the fear and fury about climate destruction is also life wanting to live, and it’s generosity that wants life, and good life, for others—other people, other species, other lives in times yet to come.

This last line is central to Solnit's suggestion that we are called to be part of the larger story of "life wanting to live," but in the event it took some work to get the class to hear it. Some students thought Solnit was really telling young activists to put their rage aside: I suppose this advice, which sounds lovely from my end as a member of Solnit's generation, sounds patronizing from the receiving end, as if it were our call to give young people permission to be angry, or to interpret their rage for them. Touché! The best I could do was convince them that Solnit really does see strong feelings like fear and fury and grief as resources, so long as they don't lead to despair and hopelessness.

Amplifying Solnit's argument a little I suggested that these powerful feelings should be understood and honored as more than individual. It is life itself which grieves and rages in us, life understood as something larger that we share and participate in, linking us to "other people, other species, other lives in times yet to come," who share our distress and our hope. But to to get that point across I needed to realize that Solnit's refrain "life wants to live" sounded to many in the class sinister, not inspiring! Doesn't it give us permission to continue devastating nature, asked one? This understanding of life as inherently predatory and conflictual (Lynn Margulis' "Neo-Darwinian capitalistic Zeitgeist") stood in the way of appreciating Solnit's hope. We'll have to work toward a more symbiotic sense of the wonder of life.

A final reason I hoped this piece would serve as a good start for our journey together had to do with particular religious cadences to this idea of "life wanting to live" - it is a course called "Religion & Ecology" after all! - but nobody had picked up on them. Solnit's essay ends with a religious exhortation.

Morissa also sent me a quote from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

I thought the way Judaism shows up explicitly at the very end would be a good way to start exploring the contribution religious traditions might make to ecological understanding; it's especially powerful coming after an exposition which has focused on recent history of successful struggle - this brings a deep historical frame to our challenges. But in order to recognize that one would have to know what the Talmud was, which only one student apparently did! (Actually the phrase isn't even from the Talmud but from the Mishnah Pirkei Avot 2:15-16, in one Rami Shapiro's contemporary rephrasing which also enlists Micah 6:8's famous injunction that what G-d requires is "but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God' - which also drew blanks.)

In the end, it may have added to an appreciation of the power of Solnit's ending with religion for students to discover that that's what she was doing. But trying to loop back to hear the Bible in "life wants to live" may have been a bridge too far.

We need to understand the worst-case scenarios and the suffering and loss happening now, so we know what we’re trying to prevent. But we need to imagine the best case scenarios, so we can reach for them too. And we need to imagine our own power in the present to choose the one over the other.

Was I just imagining it or is there an echo here of the urtext of l'chaim?

I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live... (Deuteronomy 30:15-19)

Solnit isn't a religious writer. She's described herself as the child of a lapsed Catholic mother and a non-practicing Jewish father (a description which sounds like many of my students!). But I think the force of "life wants to live" and the call to "want life, and good life, for others" comes in part from this religious source. Reading these famous words from Deuteronomy in this context it becomes clear that on our choice - which begins with recognizing we have the power to choose - depends the weal or woe not only of humanity but of the land, too. You don't need to think a text like this is revealed to feel its force. If Solnit didn't have this in mind she should have!

Was telling students that these powerful texts were at work in the background of Solnit's argument enough to make them work for them? Might it even have made the class receptive in ways they wouldn't otherwise have been to ancient tradition? Hard to say, although one student after class told me he was Jewish but knew little about his tradition and was thrilled to encounter it here. Perhaps I've been able to plant a seed. Perhaps venerable old religious traditions (and not just contemporary "spirituality") do have something to contribute to our understanding of ecology, starting with very the nature of life!

S20

A new semester commences, and a busy one - I'm involved with four courses! But it's a little less than the University Course Catalog suggests.

The James' Varieties course meets only for ten weeks, albeit for three hours a pop. I don't do the grading for "Performing the Problem of Suffering," which is handled by two graduate student teaching assistants. And I'm only pinch hitting for 'Literature and Ecology," though I intend to attend as many sessions of this courses as possible: it's the university's first lecture course in environmental humanities, and those of us involved with it are hoping it becomes a valued parts of the New School landscape going forward. Still, I'll be in classrooms four days a week for the better part of the semester. What fun!

Emergence

Latest installment (#29!) of our newer, truer history of the New School!

Horizons

It's good to be home - we were away almost a month! And what with bloviations about the new year and new decade, and the culture shock of being in China as it gears up for its new year - not to mention larger climatic and geopolitical crises coming to a head - it seems even longer. (Incidentally, great combo of decade reflections and US-China here.)

Traversing

At Pudong Airport, advertisements shared time with the Shanghai Expo's animation of the "Along the River in the Qingming Festival" scroll.

Flying cabbage!

We head back to NYC today after a satisfying little tour of Shanghai, Yangzhou, Nanjing. Revisited to the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre in its new, slightly smaller, digs, a somewhat different experience now that I know folks who were sent to the country instead of college, etc. - and now that the country's being led by one of the few who enjoyed that experience.

Nave

The plane trees of Nanjing, especially those lining the avenue leading up 紫金山 Purple Mountain to the Sun Yat-Sent memorial, are amazing. And it's not just the photo: in winter it feels like being in a vast cathedral!

扬州再去了

Escaped from the hustle and scale of Shanghai to the more manageable old city of Yangzhou a few hours' drive to the northwest.

Old texts to the rescue!

This was a fun occasion, though Duke Kunshan University proved a little less cutting-edge than I'd idealistically imagined. I think of Duke's campus at Kunshan - a small city between Shanghai and Suzhou striving to be Eastern China's Silicon Valley - as one of the places where liberal arts is being reimagined beyond the American century (to put it a little polemically). Despite Sino-American tensions it's growing apace - campus to grow and faculty to double next year, and again the year after - but the challenge of "Anthropocene" isn't yet on everyone's lips. Maybe it is now!

My question "Are Holocene religions dangerously out of date?" applies to most of what's covered in non-presentist humanities curricula. One should worry about outdated views which will just make us nostalgic, resentful, fatalistic - or deny our changing reality altogether, as religiously blinded leaders of the US, Australia, Brazil do. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. These traditions may have life in them yet!

I also offered some reasons to spend time with old texts in particular which, I thought, might have particular resonance in China. Ancient texts (I was prepared to discuss the Book of Job but it didn't come up) come to us recommended by many generations, each of which found something in them to value. Understanding ourselves to be part of an interpretive community with them broadens the horizons of our historical imagination, helping us imagine alternatives to the present. But it helps us also try to be accountable to interpreters of the future by acknowledging we, too, will die. And it can even help us overcome modern blindness to community with the other-than-human, which - if in a more stably Holocene way - was something premodern thinker arguably apprehended better than we do, though we need to teach ourselves to see it. (And the Holocene wasn't that stable anyway...)

Snapshot

The "Obsessed" photographs of Sun Yanchu, on show at the Shanghai Center for Photography, confirm why it's valuable to spend time in China, not just read about it. Life with all its riddles happens here, too.

As ever spot-on, Tom Toles.

Shades of grey

Familiar Shanghai murk - but a pretty spectacular view from our Airbnb!

Transpacific

After a lovely long stay in Southern California (saw this busy tangle at Torrey Pines this afternoon), we're off for a week and a half in China tomorrow. I'll be revisiting 上海 Shanghai, 扬州 Yangzhou and 南京 Nanjing - but because of the Great Firewall I may not be able to tend to this blog while I'm there. I'll try!

Picture of a hummingbird

You wouldn't guess but this isn't just a picture of the Torrey Pines Extension with last year's bee plants, or the hulking ruin of a giant Torrey Pine, or even of the moon ... An Annas hummingbird captivated us as it sat on a branch in the mid-distance, flashing its unearthly magenta our way on a kind of rhythm, each time breathtaking.

Gone rogue

In the reckless escalation of our lawless president's recent actions regarding Iran we see the poisonous fruits of impunity. Leaving aside the evident thoughtlessness of the decision and the certainty of terrible consequences, assassinating Soleimani was a violation of international law and an act of war. Ordering it without informing allies was disloyal. Doing so without informing the leaders of Congress was unconstitutional. Topping it off with threats to destroy sites "important to the Iranian culture" signals a willingness to commit war crimes. Donald J. Trump has made the US into a rogue state. The man is out of control. Responsible are his enablers, who do not just permit his lawlessness but celebrate it - though they will probably not be the ones to suffer for it. How do the rest of us reclaim legitimacy for American government, domestically and internationally, and how could we ever make amends for the many innocents who will die before that?

Fear

As our feckless president plays with war with Iran (really? to avoid an impeachment trial?), Australia's suffering utterly terrifying bushfires. Many human and untold non-human lives have been lost - and the worst is yet to come. The scale of the hundreds of blazes, and the cascade effects involved, can be felt in images of glaciers over 2000km away on New Zealand's South Island discolored by dust from the fires. Prayers.

 

Textures of a rocky beach, Del Mar

2020!

I join the Ocotillo and Torrey Pine in best wishes for the new year!