Tag: Environment and Nature

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…

From Aesthetic Shock to Ethical Awakening: How an Environmental Artist and Activist Found Purpose

Environmental activist, photographer, and teacher Subhankar Banerjee recounts a time, shortly after moving to New Mexico, when he walked out of his house to encounter a small dead…

Redefining Patriotism and Environmental Justice in Costa Rica

Randall Tolpinrud describes an extraordinary experience during a trip to Costa Rica to film a documentary series with the BBC in 1998. At a celebration to commemorate the…

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…

Nola

My Humanities Moment occurred in 2005, the year that hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. I lived in New Orleans pre-and-post Katrina and lost my house to the…

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…

Water Is Life: Thousands Have Lived Without Love, Not One Without Water

I remember visiting the Washington House in Barbados this past summer on a Virginia Geographic Alliance travel grant and being marveled at the dripping stones on the residence….

Sargassam & Barbados

At the heart of humanities are humans. This moment encapsulates the unintended consequences of human interactions with our environment. The picture was taken at Bathsheba, Barbados that shows…

For the First Time It Felt Like Someone Was Writing about Me

English teacher Justin Parmenter describes how his encounters with essays by Thoreau and Emerson, and later with the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” helped…

Can You Imagine a World Without Birdsong?

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…

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…