"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Physical Dimensions","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Compression","Item Type Metadata:Producer","Item Type Metadata:Director","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:Email Body","Item Type Metadata:Subject Line","Item Type Metadata:From","Item Type Metadata:To","Item Type Metadata:CC","Item Type Metadata:BCC","Item Type Metadata:Number of Attachments","Item Type Metadata:Standards","Item Type Metadata:Objectives","Item Type Metadata:Materials","Item Type Metadata:Lesson Plan Text","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Player","Item Type Metadata:Imported Thumbnail","Item Type Metadata:Referrer",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured "Darkest Before the Dawn",,"Due to the oil and gas industry plummeting in 2016, my dad lost his job that he had for over 30 years, right before I was about to leave for college. I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and anxiety for the duration of that summer. In addition to this, I was unhealthily dwelling on all the new transitions that were to shortly come. Having to live on my own, find a new group of friends, and ultimately, adjust to the course load that university was going to demand of me were all weighing heavy on my mind. I was mindlessly listening to music one night when a particular lyric caught my attention. “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” from Florence + the Machine’s “Shake It Out” quickly resonated with me upon hearing it. Hearing these words at this time of my life helped me realize that just because things seem difficult and unbearable at the time, it doesn’t mean that they will always be that way. Hearing the right string of words at the right moment can have a profound effect and I am thankful that the Humanities celebrates such moments. ","Florence + the Machine","""Shake It Out"" by Florence + the Machine",,"Summer 2016","Natalie Huebel, 22 years old and a student at Texas A&M University.",,,,,,darkest-before-the-dawn,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Anxiety,Change,College Station, Texas,Families,Florence + the Machine,Hope,Music,Petroleum Industry,Shake It Out,Song Lyrics,Students,Texas A&M University,Unemployment",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/137/darkest-before-dawn.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 "Taking Russian and Other Happy Accidents",,"James Hackett discusses how a pursuit of the Russian language led him down various paths—and ultimately, to a career in the energy sector.",,,,,"James Hackett, CEO, Alta Mesa Resources",,,,,,taking-russian,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Heidi Camp","Business Leaders,Language & Languages,Petroleum Industry,Russian Language,Vocation",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/272/russia-1199330_960_720.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0