April.
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with the spring rain”
~TS Eliot, The Wasteland (ll 1-4)
April is a month of spring and rain, of freshness. The sun has come out in Portland, Oregon for the first time in months and dried the ground enough for Lewis & Clark students to lay out and play frisbee and put dandelions in their hair. TS Eliot wrote The Wasteland after World War I shell-shocked Europe into absurdity. The poem paints April as a rude awakening, mixing the memories of the war and before the war with a genuine hopeless about what the future will be. While the desperation of The Wasteland does NOT reflect my synthesis of ENVS 160, TS Eliot’s poem has a reputation of being a sort of environmental warning that reminds me of the apocalyptic classical environmentalism we began the semester by questioning.
April is a prime month to think about “the environment.” People go outside again in April (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) and watch as the trees in their backyards transform from gray branches to living blossoms that color the streets and coat the cars in pollen. Garden stores open the doors to their greenhouses and people start to overturn their old soil and buy flowers to plant.
April is the month where we get both Arbor Day and Earth Day. We pay our taxes in April, taxes that fund dams and carbon sequestration and agricultural subsidies and the EPA.
May is just around the corner. Summer is just around the corner, full of late evening light, perfect for bike commutes and electricity saving thermostats and light fixtures.
By April 26 2014, what have we learned in Intro to Environmental Studies 160 at Lewis & Clark College?
We talked about the fundamental texts that sparked the rich, and sometimes overwhelming, environmental movements of the 20th and 21st Centuries. We pondered how things may appear limitless even if they actually aren’t, but possibly they are because human ingenuity is so powerful. Controversies like nuclear power and uranium highlight and situate the debate about human capabilities to innovate and survive versus the tragic results of technology that many fear. In this vein, we read essays comparing technology to Frankenstein’s monster, and were asked to love these monsters that we drive and hold in our hands and blame for the ozone crisis, the destruction of rivers, and environmental injustices.
We have shifted our focus from hybrid THEORIES in environmental studies – political economy, market behaviors, social constructions, limitlessness, Malthusian crises, ethics, etc – to hybrid objects. We are looking at carbon, at trees, at wolves, at fast food, and my personal favorite, Grand Coulee Dam in the rolling Columbia River in the hydro-powered Washington State . We are finding that more and more, humans and nature and theory and water and dams and airplanes and bombs and Woody Guthrie and bugs and air and cars and economy and computers and Lake Victoria and Watzek Library are inextricably linked through a chain of connections. In other words, environment and society are intimately one and the same.
One of the most vexing puzzles we encountered this semester was the anomaly of scale. How come solutions that work in my household don’t make any significant difference on a global scale? Why is my personal life so abstractly removed from the actual decisions about recycling, carbon sequestration, nuclear waste? It seems that global institutions and systems are at such a scale as to limit our individual efficacy, as we remember from Lach et al, Maniates, and Guthman. French fries and tuna fish are among the hybrid objects which rely very much on large institutions which are too big for one or two humans to alter in any lasting way. This scalar disconnect limits the effectiveness of any action we can take as students, consumers and activists. However, certain individuals have taken matters into their own hands, pursuing drastic means to send a message to some unsatisfactory institutions, as we learned in If A Tree Falls, the story of the eco-terrorist group the Earth Liberation Front. But the larger systems were not significantly damaged in these attacks, and the struggle of scale is still a puzzle.
Currently I am also taking a course that briefly introduced me to the Romantic poets- Wordsworth, Shelley (the husband of the author of our pivotal Frankenstein), Keats. Much of what we talked about how nature and wilderness is socially constructed and vague, and how we need to become intimate with our problems and really become more comfortable NOT knowing the solutions to our problems can be traced back to many of the Romantic poems. Clumsy solutions are a way to piece together all the perspectives of an issue and recognize the incongruities that plague environmental action.
Like when we learned from the graduating, thesis-writing seniors about what our ENVS trajectory might looks like, be it Swaziland or double major or the Sierra Club or disillusionment, we now look towards the future- we have project deadlines in the past and a poster celebration in the works. We have delved into some of the many interactions within our world, on different scales, different continents, and different eras. Our contemporary mindsets are informed by our privilege, our histories, the literature and ideas we inherit, and where we come from. Before we can analyze or problem-solve or theorize, we must absorb the complexities that underlie the objects and the ideas found in our campuses and beyond.