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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",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/463/1c87237f-a74f-4e08-a1ea-0f828425d293.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",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",https://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","https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/34/800px-Rachel_Louise_Carson.jpg,https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/34/western-birds-300.jpg","Moving Image",,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.