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"From The Page to The Garden to The Fridge",,"For the first two decades of my life, food wasn't something to which something I gave much serious consideration. I was guided—as I suspect most young adults are—by taste, convenience, and price. I knew what I liked, where I could get it, and that I could get it for cheap. My lack of interest in what I ate directly paralleled my ignorance and detachment from the landscapes in which I lived. My family moved every few years; I barely got to know a place before we moved again, never bothering to seriously try and set down ""roots.""
As a first-year graduate student in the heart of Iowa, I became friends with a number of budding writers and scholars who grew up with an entirely different mindset. Almost all of them were deeply interested in place, the environment, and how body and land are more intrinsically linked than we might otherwise believe. At our cozy shared office one day, one colleague dropped off Kingsolver's 2007 memoir, a year-long chronicle of her family's efforts and experiences to raise and grow as much of their food as possible. I didn't read it until the semester finished, when the freedom of summer allowed me to read, reflect, and honestly think about the text on a page.
Kingsolver is a beautiful writer, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is further proof of this. Scenes chronicling the gradual growth and progress of rhubarb, asparagus, tomatoes, and potatoes are described in poetic rhetoric, detailing such small changes with a clear sense of wonder, awe, and reverence. Beyond these observations and recordings, however, the books is laced with commentary about our contemporary food systems—farming, restaurants, soil management, corporatization, commodification and seed patents—and how alternatives exist, both small and large scale, right before our eyes.
I finished Kingsolver's book wanting—needing—to both eat differently and think more deeply about how I lived as a part of the natural landscape. Trips to nearby farmer markets, supporting local growers, spending my dollars on organic products, learning to garden, learning to cook—all of these were habits gleaned from her memoir, and behaviors that led to me becoming a more passionate environmental activist over time.
Most of the courses I teach are grounded in environmental concerns—climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, drought—and how we write about them. What's made Kingsolver's memoir not only a personal favorite, but a classroom jewel as well, is that her book is empowering: my students frequently note in course evaluations that this memoir not only revealed and informed them about the realities underlying their current relationship with food, but also provided them with tangible, pragmatic solutions about how they might incorporate changes. Sometimes, I am self-conscious and wary when talking about what my research and teaching interests concern. I am a late-bloomer with my environmental passions; I didn't grow up strongly intertwined with a sense of place or spend my formative years actively thinking about issues that bridge human and nonhuman worlds. Kingsolver's writing, and this memoir in particular, show that it's never too late to start paying attention, begin learning, or caring about where you live—an inspiring message that's never more timely and needed than it is today.","Barbara Kingsolver","Animal, Vegetable, Miracle",,2012,"Luke Rodewald, 28, English Ph.D. Student ",,,,,,page-garden-fridge,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Dr. Andy Mink, NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency","College Teaching,Environmental Activism,Environmental Humanities,Kingsolver, Barbara,Landscapes,Sustainability,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/463/1c87237f-a74f-4e08-a1ea-0f828425d293.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Chimborazo and the Sublime",,"There is a term in the humanities known as “the Sublime” (Rabb). The Sublime specifically refers to a concept in art established during the Romantic era when landscape paintings thrived. The Sublime alludes to the beauty in the untamed and dangerous aspects of nature; it is the “awe and reverence for the wild…[it] can also be uplifting, but in a deeply spiritual way” (Rabb). My humanities moment occurred the first time I truly felt the Sublime.
Even though my humanities moment was not associated with a painting or physical piece of art, it transpired in nature - allowing the sense of the Sublime. It took place in December of 2017 in Ecuador. I currently live in Ecuador with part of my family and around the Holidays, we decided to visit a city about two hours away called Riobamba. To get from Quito (where we live) to Riobamba, however, you have to drive past Chimborazo. Chimborazo is an active volcano sitting at about 20,000 feet and, because of the equatorial bulge, it is the furthest point from the center of the earth. This volcano is huge and magnificent and because of the altitude, it is rarely clear enough to see it as clouds usually perch at its peak. That day, as we drove closer to the base of Chimborazo, we reluctantly resigned to the fact that the opportunity was most likely gone and the clingy clouds would block our view that day. However, as we continued to drive, we turned a corner and found ourselves right below the colossal Chimborazo. At that exact moment, the clouds quickly parted and the sun shone down right onto its exposed crest. Instantly, everyone in the car went silent and my breath was physically taken away. The Sublime was so real in that moment. This towering, formidable, awe-inspiring mountain made my heart sink and tears come to my eyes. It was the first time I remember something not man-made and so coincidental evoke such a feeling and a reaction; something non-human or not created by a human could make me feel human. We all sat there staring at the majesty and grandeur and wallowing in the Sublime.
As I look back on it now, I realize that there was a second element that elevated my humanities moment. As we turned the corner a song was playing; a type of song that had never made me feel anything before, but in that moment it did and it exalted the experience of the volcano even further. The song is called “On Earth As It Is In Heaven” composed by Ennio Morricone from the movie The Mission. This score has always been considered ‘celestial music’ in my family however, it never really spoke to me. In fact, classical music in general has never really spoken to me, until that day at Chimborazo. As the clouds parted and the sun shone and that song climaxed, the feelings were indescribable. I chose this experience as my humanities moment because multiple things impacted me in ways I had never experienced. First, nature had never before given me that feeling of the Sublime. I had never become so reverenced and awe-inspired by untamed and wild nature before, to the point of tears and speechlessness. Also, no piece of classical music had ever before made me feel something or evoke an emotional response until that day. I could always take or leave classical music and I never had a passion for it until then. Because of this experience, I have learned to appreciate more the natural and beautiful things in life. I have learned to allow myself to be moved by nature and art and to enjoy the world around me. Because of that music and the Sublime, I will never forget that day at Chimborazo.
Works Cited
Morricone, Ennio. “On Earth As It Is In Heaven” The Mission Soundtrack, Virgin Records Ltd, 2004, 1. itunes, itunes.apple.com/us/album/on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven/714408074?i=714408593, accessed January 10, 2019.
Rabb, Lauren. “19th Century Landscape - The Pastoral, the Picturesque and the Sublime.” The University of Arizona Museum of Art and Archive of Visual Arts, 9 Oct. 2009, artmuseum.arizona.edu/events/event/19th- century-landscape-the-pastoral-the-picturesque-and-the-sublime.",,"A volcano called Chimborazo and a song titled “On Earth As It Is In Heaven”",,"December 27, 2017","Emma Barlow, 18, Student ",,,,,,chimborazo-sublime,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"My English 12 teacher ","Books & Reading,Chimborazo Volcano,Chimborazo, Ecuador,Emotional Experience,Environmental Humanities,Morricone, Ennio,Music,Nature,On Earth as It Is in Heaven,Students,The Sublime",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/280/800px-Chimborazo_Volcano_-_Ecuador.jpg,Text,,1,0
"A Poem Remembered, a World Created",,"During the past several weeks I've been drafting some thoughts I've had for a number of years regarding the way we learn from nature and from other people's thoughts and writing. My Humanities Moment is a poetic description of a memory I had that was prompted by a poem from Alfred Tennyson -- ""Flower in the crannied wall."" The moment when this poem, this memory, and this essay came together is an example of the boundless and unpredictable infectiousness that operates between the minds of people and the objects and symbols of the natural world. I explain how the little flower in Tennyson's poem prompts my own memory of a little tree resiliently hanging onto its life in a canyon wall. While writing, this tree acquired more meaning for me when I addressed it in a personal way, almost as if to both a teacher and interlocutor. Prompted by Tennyson, I came to see in this tree the meaning and expression of human life and the nature of our struggle in defying the forces that oppose us and bring us to despair. I wrote this essay resembling the form of free verse, as I thought that was the best way to convey the tone and intimacy of my humanities moment. My moment is about the multi-lateral connection that is preserved by words and memory between the past and the present, between the natural world and the human world, and between human minds separated by the centuries.
A Poem Remembered, a World Created
I read a poem by Tennyson the other day. A very short poem. Only six lines:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Sometimes a very short poem can capture the desire of the human race. This flower took my mind to a tree I once saw growing in a rock. So I wanted to try what Tennyson did:
Little pinion growing in the cliff, how you hang, how you droop, parch and slant. How you survive. I watch you crouch so high at the sun, and defeat it by your years. The needles of your humility still stay green. Each day you face the fall. And each day you cling to that sheer rock. The peace that city dwellers seek emanates not from you, but only the repose that comes from fear. The pain of the wilderness speaks in your sun-bleached bark. Without consolation is this heat. You preserve the mystery of existence and give no assurance that nature is my friend. The grandness of your story is found in the scarcity of your speech. Words from you are dumb, reminding me that I am not home in this world. I must be honest in your presence. You dare even as you stick. The passage of time, with its change and continuity, never escape your sight. You may tire of the cycles — the filling and drying of the winding creeks, the wetting and burning of the sand, or the traces of green, then yellow, of the trees and grass below. But you abandon them not. The hope you have comes only in these colors. For you do not see water itself. In you is that long war against gravity, against wind and the breaking of ice, against the fracture of rocks that choke a little more of your soil each year. In you is the secret of striving. Something whispers that what God would tell me he tells me through you. The clench of your roots teach me that the world is not meant to disintegrate, but to fight, to withstand, to last. Together we testify what will adds unto nature. You are the ambition of our poetry, the conceit to capture meaning behind the surface. We need you to see ourselves, and we need you to point us beyond ourselves. Little pinion, I speak to you in my memory. When I saw you those decades ago, a seed from your cone blew toward me and planted in my heart. That seed has grown into a sequoia of significance. I had neglected you until I read a poem by a man over the ocean, a man who lived in green and did not know this arid west, nor these mountains of rock. His soft flower became the pluck of your pine. And so across time and across this globe, the union between your kind and mine has solidified. Before you were a tree, but now you are a world.",,"""Flower in the crannied wall,"" a poem written by Tennyson and also an experience I had observing nature in the desert southwest",,"A few decades ago","Nathan Nielson, 44 years old, writer and director of Books & Bridges, a humanities nonprofit organization",,,,,,poem-remembered-world-created,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Heidi Camp and Nora Nunn contacted me some time ago, told me about the project, and asked me to write this essay.","Books & Reading,Environmental Humanities,Flower in the crannied wall,Memory,Nature,Poetry,Tennyson, Lord Alfred",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/235/desert-3453545_340.jpg,Text,,1,0
"This Couldn’t Happen to Me",,"This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my head was there’s no way this could happen to me. Tragedies, catastrophes, and other huge losses have never affected me so directly.
Then, in one of my English classes we began to read a book Beyond Katrina, which detailed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Reading about these people who lost so many family members so suddenly and so young just broke my heart in ways I had never understood until now. The same thought was most likely going through their heads, this can’t be happening to me.
It was at this time that I realized that we really are all in this together. Death and loss is a tragic thing, but it brings people so much closer and that is the most human thing I have ever felt. It was so beautifully sad.",,"Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey",,"April 2018","Madison Forrest, 18, student ",,,,,,this-couldnt-happen-to-me,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,Death,Emotional Experience,Environmental Humanities,Families,Grief,Natural Disasters,Students,Trethewey, Natasha",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/153/download.jpg,Text,,1,0
"Resilience, Humility, and Picnics",,"
I like picnics. Picnics take us outside, to share food with people we like. Those are my three favorite things, and picnics offer all three with a minimum of fuss or cost.
Every picnic is a special occasion. But one stands out because it showed me how much we can learn from deeply observing the world around us. Such observation joins us to the experiences of those who have come before, and perhaps even see through their eyes. It is a humanities experience.
One summer day, to celebrate a birthday, my spouse and I packed up our little girls and went to California’s China Camp State Park for a picnic. China Camp is a few hundred acres of oak savannah and salt marshes on the Marin County shoreline of San Francisco Bay. It is a humble place, just a few buildings clustered around an old pier, but the sheltered cove offers one of the few calm wading beaches in San Francisco Bay. Settled at the lone picnic table under a feral plum tree buzzing with bees, we ate our food and then played with our toddlers on the gravelly shore.
But it wasn’t gravel, we soon realized. It was shell. Much of the beach was composed of tiny, sharp oyster shells of the California oyster, Ostrea lurida. Long thought functionally extinct, the bay’s native oyster still flourished on the Marin Shore and across the bay near the Chevron oil refinery. This humble state park, named for the Chinese shrimp fishermen who lived and worked here in the 19th and 20th centuries, represented not only a physical reminder of these men’s presence, but also the bounty of fish and shellfish that fed Californians for more than a century.
For me the picnic brought an epiphany. San Francisco Bay is not only the battered, polluted remnant of a majestic natural resource, as environmentalists often see it. It continues to be the living, thriving host to the West’s most productive wetlands and California’s green heart. The water that circulates through the bay sustains both the human and nonhuman communities of the region. The shell, and its place, tell an environmental history. They reveal the interdependence of humanity and nonhuman nature. What looks like a purely cultural space turns out to be full of nature. And what looks like a purely natural space turns out to be full of culture. San Francisco Bay, like the oyster and China Camp State Park, is a hybrid of human labor and natural forces.
I am not trying to be nostalgic. Such hybrids are not always peaceful, just, or safe. Indeed the Chevron refinery does more than shelter a threatened native species. The neighboring community, which is mostly nonwhite and disproportionately low-income, suffers from the presence of the refinery. The refinery site is the continuing site of contamination, illness, and hazardous exposure and a textbook case in environmental injustice. Living well with nature requires sharing the risks of our industrial society, not just dumping them on the vulnerable.
My “humanities moment,” then, is an oyster shell I found in an unlikely urban setting. The shell and its place taught me a lesson about nature’s resilience, about memory, and the imperative for social justice. All three are elements I associate with the humanities.
","San Francisco Bay","San Francisco Bay",,"May 2004","Matthew Booker, associate professor of American environmental history, North Carolina State University",,,,,,resilience-humility-picnics,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"China Camp State Park, California,Ecology,Environmental Humanities,Environmental Racism,History,Nature & Civilization,Oyster Fisheries,Petroleum Industry,Picnics,Professors,San Francisco Bay,Social Ecology,United States History",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/89/Fishing_Community.jpg,Text,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Can You Imagine a World Without Birdsong?","In discussing Rachel Carson’s influence as a writer and activist, Williams notes the use of metaphor — the absence of bird song — as a means of conveying the profound impact of the widespread use of pesticides.
She further goes on to describe Carson’s ongoing influence on her own work as a writer and activist: “Her synthesis of science and art and lyrical language... she really set the bar for me as one who could never reconcile my love of the sciences and the humanities, and what Rachel Carson showed us is there is no separation.”
","In this video recollection, author and conservation activist Terry Tempest Williams describes her first encounter with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the ethical questions shared by her grandmother about taking personal responsibility for the natural world. As she says of this moment, “On that day, I became an environmentalist.”In discussing Carson’s influence as a writer and activist, Williams notes the use of metaphor—the absence of bird song—as a means of conveying the profound impact of the widespread use of pesticides.
She further goes on to describe Carson’s ongoing influence on her own work as a writer and activist: “Her synthesis of science and art and lyrical language... she really set the bar for me as one who could never reconcile my love of the sciences and the humanities, and what Rachel Carson showed us is there is no separation.”
",,"Silent Spring by Rachel Carson",,,"Terry Tempest Williams, author, conservationist, activist",,,,,,terry-tempest-williams-world-without-birdsong,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Activism,Books & Reading,Carson, Rachel,Conservationists,Environmental Humanities,Environmentalism,Ethics,Metaphor,Science & the Humanities,Silent Spring,Writers","http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/34/800px-Rachel_Louise_Carson.jpg,http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/34/western-birds-300.jpg","Moving Image",,1,0