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"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",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/235/desert-3453545_340.jpg,Text,,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 "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.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 "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.