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FEATURED EVENT
Graphic for Democracy and Public Health event
Mar 30
7:00 P.M.–9:30 P.M.
CUNY Graduate Center New York

The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the cracks in our social contract, both locally and nationally, yet it also renewed interest in civic engagement and rearticulated our common purpose. An examination of the diverse ordeals of New Yorkers prompts questions about the relationship between local health infrastructures, the American federal system, …

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Reading List: Community and Climate Change

This month, HNY’s Online Community Conversations will focus on “Community and Climate Change,” with a series of questions that focus on the collision of culture, science, and global warming.  We will be hosting this conversation on April 21st at 8:00 p.m. HNY’s Zoom-based Community Conversations are free with registration.  Register here. 

To complement this conversation, we have curated a selection of articles and books that explore the cultural and community impacts of the climate crisis. Like all of HNY’s Community Conversations, this one will use a single brief text to get things going. This text will be provided after registration. You are not required to read any of the selections on this list in order to participate in the conversation!

Articles

“I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too,” Roy Scranton 

Scranton reflects on the desire to “return to normal” after the pandemic, arguing that, instead of going back to yesterday’s fossil-fueled lifestyle, we should use the pandemic’s emergency mindset, its defining sense of rupture, to forge ahead with “a new ethos adapted to the chaotic world we’ve created,” leaving our complacency and denialism behind in order to finally confront the climate crisis.

“What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change,” Meehan Crist

In one of the earliest pieces on the relationship between coronavirus and the climate crisis, Crist argues that, for all its horrors, the pandemic presents an opportunity to reflect on long-term social and institutional patterns in the United States, asking what has worked and what hasn’t and what it would take to build a better society. 

“The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future,” David Wallace-Wells

Building on insights from his 2018 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (see below), Wallace-Wells discusses the links between coronavirus and the climate emergency and notes that we can expect more frequent and terrifying pandemics in a future of cascading crises.

“Gaia Versus the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Dorion Sagan,” Greg Ruggerio 

This fascinating conversation explores scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia theory” — the idea that the Earth is a sentient and self-regulating organism — and how it challenges Enlightenment-based anthropocentrism, including the theory of evolution and the idea of “the Anthropocene.” Proponents of Gaia theory urge humans to try to live more cooperatively with each other and with the planet’s biodiversity. 

“We Are Nature,” Beth Lord 

Drawing on the holistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Lord argues that once people see humanity — and its contribution to global heating — as an extension of nature rather than of its destruction, they will better understand climate change and the need to rethink humanity’s relationship to Earth and its biodiversity. 

“Climate Signs,” Emily Raboteau

Prompted by a public-art exhibit featuring cryptic messages about climate change, Raboteau travels across New York City’s five boroughs with a new friend, reflecting on family bonds, environmental racism, public policy, and community development in the context of rising sea levels. 

“The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make,” Jedidiah Britton-Purdy

In this meditation on what it means to raise a child amid climate breakdown, Purdy pushes back against the nihilistic strain in climate doomism, arguing that children must inherit a sense of wonder about the natural world, the belief that the Earth is indeed worth preserving.

 “Is It OK To Have a Child?” Meehan Crist 

Crist offers a radical-humanist rebuke to environmentalists who see population control as the key to limiting humanity’s carbon footprint, writing that the problem is not humanity itself but the fossil-fuel economy, which is far and away the leading source of carbon emissions. 

“Optimism has Never Been Cool but Even Covid and Climate Change Give Us Reasons to Be Cheerful,” Ian Leslie

This brief against climate doomism calls for sober-minded optimism in the face of compounding crises, suggesting that optimism is morally necessary if we are to escape the evasion and inertia bred by constant doom-mongering in the media. 

“Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks,” Julia Marcus

In this early analysis of our ongoing mask-wearing controversy, epidemiologist Julia Marcus zooms in on matters of trust and responsibility, arguing that public-health measures work best when they recognize and support people’s needs and desires without judgment. 

“How to Actually Talk to Anti-Maskers,” Charlie Warzel

Writing on how difficult it is to get some people to wear masks, Warzel suggests that our mask controversy is a proxy for deeper crises of trust and legitimacy in America and that calls to “mask up” will need to rely less on scientific evidence than on renewed trust and solidarity.

Books

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells (2019)

A terrifying glimpse into a torrid, inhospitable future, Wallace-Wells’s book could be seen as a touchstone of contemporary doomism, but its careful analysis of warming’s social and cultural implications is nothing if not humanistic, focusing on humanity’s intransigence and adaptability in the face of ecological breakdown. 

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

Reflecting on the depth and persistence of climate denialism in all its guises, author Amitav Ghosh writes that the sheer scale of the climate crisis is beyond our imaginations, that the cultural tools we’ve used in the past to explain natural phenomena — myth, history, politics, literature — fail to capture the magnitude of our present emergency. A stellar introduction to the fraught question of how culture relates to nature and the climate crisis.  

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020)

In this dystopian travelogue, Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell explores the dark heart of contemporary catastrophism — “prepper culture,” Mars colonization, Chernobyl tourism, disaster real estate — surveying it all with skepticism, a biting sense of humor, and a practical humanism grounded in fatherhood. 

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver (2012)

When an unlikely group of climate refugees — a swarm of delicate Mexican butterflies — suddenly descends on a small Appalachian town, the arrival prompts wonder and suspicion from the local population, who use science, religion, and conspiracy to make sense of the spectacle. An early and first-rate contribution to “climate fiction,” Kingsolver’s book shows how ordinary people interpret climate change through the prisms of place, class, and culture. 

The Yellow House, Sara M. Broome (2019)

In this epic memoir about the meaning of “home,” ownership and loss, Broome uses the destruction of her childhood home during Hurricane Katrina to explore her family history and the abiding patterns of dispossession in New Orleans East and the United States more generally. 

The Wall, John Lanchester (2018)

An accessible work of dystopian fiction that explores the human-scale experience of climate disruption, reflecting on the altered meanings of trust, responsibility, and friendship in an age of environmental catastrophe, in particular the generational tensions that emerge between the old and the young — between those who bequeath, and those who inherit, a broken world.

Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World, James Garvey (2008)

Philosopher James Garvey shifts the focus from climate science, which he accepts as indisputable, to the moral dimensions of the climate emergency, casting new and urgent light on familiar values of respect, compromise, responsibility and justice.  

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, Harriet A. Washington (2019)

In this data-driven story about the deleterious effects of toxic exposure (e.g., heavy metals, neurotoxins, bad nutrition) on cognitive development and intelligence in contemporary African-American communities, medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington argues that ostensibly “lower” IQ levels in such communities — itself a problematic claim — have less to do with “race” than with racism and class in America today. 

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)

Indigenous researcher and activist Gilio-Whitaker provides a history of Native American resistance to land incursion and environmental injustice, and calls upon the environmental justice movement to accommodate indigenous cultural practices and learn from these traditions’ history of activism. 

The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul, Belden C. Lane (2019)

Drawing on spiritual masters from a wide range of global religious traditions, theology professor Belden Lane offers a spiritually-centered environmentalism for our moment of ecological breakdown, showing that doomism is best countered with humility and solutions grounded in past cultural practice.  

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, Andrew Hoffman (2015)

Environmental scholar Andrew Hoffman argues that, in our polarized age, it’s not scientific data but opposing worldviews that set the terms of contemporary climate “debate,” with people interpreting the science through multiple cultural lenses — and only a significant culture shift will end the impasse and bring about decisive action. 

This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, Jedidiah Purdy (2019)

Legal scholar Jedidiah Purdy offers a vision of civic engagement for the “Age of the Anthropocene,” one that appreciates the interdependence of democracy and environmental stewardship and builds on America’s “long environmental justice movement” while acknowledging and transcending its flaws.   

The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, Adam Rome (2014)

A comprehensive, highly readable history of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 that focuses on the intellectual milieu and generational politics that gave rise to the environmental movement and a legacy of green consciousness and sophisticated eco-infrastructure in the United States.

Environmental Storytelling in the St. Lawrence Watershed

“The North Country Art, Land and Environment 2020 Summit,” held this past September, brought together individuals and organizations from across the Adirondack region, using art and the humanities to think about local solutions to a global problem. The summit was organized by Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo of Talking Wings, an environmental filmmaking and  storytelling collective, in partnership with St. Lawrence University, which hosted the summit. The project’s planning and implementation phases were funded in part by HNY Vision and Action grants, respectively. 

This interview, held in August before the Summit, by HNY’s Joe Murphy, is the second in a series of pieces with scholars and grantees exploring the question of how culture and science relate to one another in our public discourse and how that shapes the environmental movement today. Read the first interview here.

Photo: Aerial view of the St. Lawrence river by Abdallah Hussein

What brought you to your work in environmental humanities and film? How did the mission of Talking Wings bring you into partnership with St. Lawrence University?

The thing that most clarified for us the relationship between film and environmental humanities is education. One of us (Tzintzun) went to St. Lawrence University to study film, but never actually became a film major; instead, they were a liberal-arts student who deliberately crafted their coursework so that they could see film studies as part of a broader humanities tradition. The other of us (Blake) — who was born and raised in Italy and educated at a modern-language school, immersed in history and literature — has a background in art, strictly speaking, but the humanities have always been fundamental to their worldview. This pattern continued during our undergraduate years, Tzintzun at St. Lawrence University and Blake at SUNY Potsdam. Blake started with art proper but gradually moved toward documentary filmmaking, to the point where, now, their focus is almost entirely on documenting the climate crisis and the solutions put forward by ordinary people. 

This combination of film and the humanities, especially history, shapes our work to this day. Talking Wings is a storytelling collective that focuses on the environment. Our goal is to use various kinds of storytelling — conferences, summits, conversations, documentary media, contemporary art and dance — to communicate the history and memory of land and water and to work towards concrete solutions to environmental degradation. Our documentaries and public-facing events routinely blend art with history and public memory. 

The Summit, NCALE for short, is really a crystallization of our philosophy and public-facing work up to this point. We recently returned to St. Lawrence (after a period of living in Massachusetts) because we wanted to give something back to this community, preferably through a collaborative project with St. Lawrence University. Our purpose has been to tell the the environmental history of the St. Lawrence Watershed, through the prism of several key themes, such as land, water, food production, and social justice. The St. Lawrence Watershed has a very complex history. It’s an enormous region spanning 300,000 acres. The land is Haudenosaunee-Akwesasne, primarily Mohawk territory. Beyond New York State, it expands into the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec and of course, Akwesasne. The part of the Watershed inside New York State contains 11,371 miles of water from all the tributaries that flow into the St. Lawrence River. There’s just so much water here. The region’s history is bound up with that water precisely because so many people depend on it. This is true of the region’s aboriginal inhabitants as well as the settler-colonial communities that, after conquering the land, relied on the waterways for travel and transport of goods to market. In the twentieth century, massive corporations like GM, Renault, and Alcoa used the region’s damworks to power their respective industries, each one polluting the rivers in turn. So, given this history and our eagerness to delve into it with others, we reached out to some of our former professors and to organizations we had worked with in the past, and before long our network in St. Lawrence had expanded to include people and institutions from across the region.

What is the overall objective of the NCALE 2020 summit? What questions did it raise for you?

At this stage, what we’re trying to do is raise awareness about positive developments in the North Country, hopefully setting an example of community development at the regional level. We want people to start thinking about the future in practical terms. It is expected that, in the wake of the pandemic, this part of the state will see an awesome influx of new residents. This, in addition to the fact that the Akwesasne population has been growing rapidly and will continue to do so in the decades ahead. The question becomes, how do you plan for demographic change on this scale? What will the relationship be between people and the natural environment, especially the water, the region’s most valuable resource? How might everyone, natives and new arrivals alike, enjoy those resources without contributing to ecological disaster? We want to include as many people as possible in this conversation, not just students at the local colleges but also entire communities, including the Akwesasne Nation. 

A key part of this conversation is challenging what can be called the “doomsday narrative” on climate change, this apocalyptic tone that pervades climate discourse in contemporary mass media. Doomsday rhetoric is employed mostly by corporate media outlets to sow doubt and complacency in the general population. It’s this fatalistic idea that, since human extinction is pretty much “locked in” at this point, we might as well double down on the hyper-consumptive lifestyle that contributed to climate change in the first place. It’s like a perverse variation on that line you hear in TV commercials: “Get it now while supplies last!” Solutions to the climate crisis are almost never mentioned in this discourse. We hear the incessant drum of bad news—Marine life is dying! Polar bears are starving! Invasive weeds are strangling native flora! Solutions are rarely, if ever, put forward. The doomsday narrative systematically denies the proposition that, if humans have contributed to the problem of climate change, they can also contribute to its amelioration, if not its reversal. 

Not only is that narrative false, it also obscures the real work that people are doing everyday to discover and activate solutions to the climate crisis. There are solutions to the climate crisis. People all over the world are working hard to create technology that can slow down the systematic destruction of the environment and generally improve humanity’s relation to the earth. The solutions advanced in different parts of the world reflect the unique needs of their respectives community, but there’s no doubt that everyone is working together in the grand context of the climate crisis. We’re hoping the Summit will contribute to a shift away from problem-mongering toward problem-solving. We can start by changing our mentality, individually and collectively, by thinking positively about solutions to the climate crisis, not just the problems. 

Our goal is to connect the groups and individuals who are doing this kind of work in the St. Lawrence River Valley, and then cultivate those communities into a broader network that can expand across the country and, we hope, the globe. To this extent, the Summit is just one phase of an ongoing conversation among the people of the North County and between the North Country and the wider world. 

Climate solutions are being developed all the time, all over the world, and yet people tend to do this work in isolation, unaware of what other communities are doing along similar lines. We want to make people’s ideas — their work — more accessible to a broader audience, while at the same time building a sense of community and shared purpose. We also want to contribute to a growing sense of momentum in the climate movement, this feeling that things are indeed changing, that people are moving toward a better, brighter future. In this sense, we’re just providing the infrastructure for communities to share ideas and lay the groundwork for concerted action in the future. This is what the NCALE Summit is all about: bringing together people from multiple disciplines and contexts — environmental studies, arts, humanities, community activists — and placing under the same canopy, town by town, region by region.

Why is it important to think about local communities and solutions when addressing global patterns? What is unique about the St. Lawrence River Watershed in this regard? 

The animating idea here is to strengthen communities at the local level so that they can resist the imperatives of the global market — to imagine and take steps toward creating an agriculture and an economy that works for ordinary people and not just corporations. The paradox of contemporary economics is that, as the world becomes increasingly commodified, the environmental conditions on which the global economy depends break down ever faster. Society is broken down, too; people are divided, socially and politically, unable to resist the human devastation of environmental destruction. 

Our emphasis is on repair. We want to repair the bonds of communities in ways that plant the seeds of resistance to global ecological breakdown. The thing is, it’s impossible to start at the global level. To be sure, it’s a global crisis, but holistic societal and environmental repair becomes impracticable, if not impossible, if you tackle something of that scope and scale. Instead, we believe that fundamental change begins at the local level, with individuals acting in unison, first in their own communities, and then on ever-larger planes of resistance. When people engage with their own communities and create networks of support, then they discuss and implement practical solutions that reflect the community’s actual needs rather than the demands of the global market. 

Words like sustainability and revitalization get bandied about quite a lot in the corporate media, which contributes to a kind of cynicism about them, an emptying of content that is consistent with the doomsday narrative. But at the local level, with regard to things like regenerative agriculture, sustainability and revitalization are real, tangible goals that not only can be realized, but that contribute to this all-important sense of momentum, of turning the tide against the doomsday narrative and all that it represents. You can’t solve everything at once, but you can build momentum toward global solutions, town by town, region by region, nation by nation.

Why is it important to consider issues like the climate crisis historically?

If you’re like us and you’re trying to imagine the future, then you absolutely must know and use history. History and cultural memory are essential building blocks for a forward-looking, community-building project like ours. You simply cannot move forward with confidence if you lack a basic grounding in history. We don’t mean to imply that history “repeats itself,” but we do think that history imparts lessons about human behavior and societal patterns. You develop a kind of wisdom when you study history, and when you apply it to contemporary climate resistance, it gives the current work a weight rooted in precedent. There is a kind of legitimacy bestowed on these projects vis-a-vis continuity, when you situate climate pushback in the context of centuries-old traditions, some of which are dead, others of which are very much alive and kicking. 

Of course, you’ve got to work hard to distinguish actual history from the myths and misinformation, the twin pillars of the doomsday narrative. The dominant narrative about U.S. history, the one we all learn in school, was written from the perspective of colonizers, or at least the descendants of colonizers — the very demographic that peddles doomsday narratives today. That story is closely entwined with national myth, sometimes indistinguishably so, as we’re all coming to understand. Contrary to that story, our history is one of conquest, genocide, division, and exploitation. What we and our collaborators and countless other communities in New York State and elsewhere are doing is recovering the “hidden histories” occluded by that standard narrative. We’re looking carefully at cultures and traditions pushed into the background by settler colonialism and thinking hard about the lessons they impart for sustainability, revitalization, and general optimism about the future. 

Members of the Akwesasne community are a key part of your audience, and issues of environmental justice central to the project and that community. What can people learn from the Akwesasne experience about the links between environmental history, justice and ethics?  

First, we should acknowledge that neither of us are native to the region, having grown up in Mexico and Italy, respectively. But we’ve learned a great deal about Akwesasne history and culture by speaking with people and reading historical documents. It’s a truly humbling experience to have a tradition like that passed down to you. 

The history of the Akwesasne Mohawk is unique, of course, but it also fits into general patterns of North American and global history since 1500. The Akwesasne Mohawk have been defending their treaty rights against the federal and New York State government for generations. Their many victories for environmental justice are important in their own right, but they also exemplify the kind of institutional, spiritual, and intellectual momentum we need for a better future to be realized. Akwesasne environmental standards are far more stringent than those for New York State and certainly the federal government. They have a strong record of protecting their community from PCB’s and other contaminants associated with industrial farming. In several recent lawsuits, they’ve succeeded in holding to account polluters like GM, Monsanto, and Alcoa. They’ve used money from these suits to provide key services to their communities and force companies to clean up the tributaries of the St. Lawrence River. 

One ongoing project is the cleanup and revitalization of the Grasse River, whose bed was dredged by large companies who wanted to streamline the water flow. The companies eventually covered up the contaminants in the river bed, but in ways that failed to keep the chemicals from seeping back out and into the water supply. So now the Akwesasne are using new methods to decontaminate and revitalize the riverbed, including, fascinatingly, the use of freshwater mussels to feed on the biomass. It’s the second such project in the Northeast. A few people who are working on it will participate in our regional Summit to share information about the project. 

The Akwesasne are now at the point where they are able to buy back huge swaths of land — a controversial notion, to be sure, given that the land was theirs to begin with. Their example contradicts the settler-colonial image of indigenous communities as perennially oppressed peoples, divided and powerless before the march of “progress.” This is yet another pillar of the doomsday narrative. Contrary to that view, they demonstrate that indigenous peoples—indeed, all minority communities — have real agency in the climate fight, real power to change things on a structural level. Even after a brutal history of conquest and violence, the Akwesasne have managed to preserve an ecological tradition that centers sustainability and revitalization. They have cleaned their rivers and restored life to their communities. If they can do it, then imagine what all of us can do together, as an ethnically and intellectually diverse community? They are an example to us all. It is a history that should be taught in our schools. 

How has the pandemic affected your planning for the Summit, conceptually as well as practically? What advice would you give to other organizations planning a conference of this scale? 

At first it was a real setback. Initially we had planned for six in-person events, one of which was a full-day workshop on organic farming and preservation, with a concluding roundtable discussion. After the lockdown, we knew that none of this would be possible, that we would lose the dynamism of in-person programming. This was a real problem, not only in terms of project implementation, but also because the pandemic seemed likely to dissolve the social bonds we were trying to strengthen. 

We adapted quickly, realizing that we had the technology for a public-facing virtual event. We could use digital platforms to reach as broad an audience as possible, in ways that were unimaginable before the lockdown. We reduced the number of events from six to four, and reframed our discussion in the light of the public-health crisis. For instance, we already had a panel on food production lined up, but now we’re going to talk about the ways Covid has disrupted markets for industrial agriculture. Similarly, we’ve added a panel on environmental justice in the North Country in light of this summer’s uprisings over police brutality and systemic racism. We’re happy with the balance we’ve struck between the local and the global, between the universal experience of climate change and the particular solutions developed in the North Country. 

Our main events will take place on Zoom, but we’ll also stream them live on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Of course, Zoom and other communications technologies have their limits. Not everyone has access to the internet, and we all know that social media erects as many barriers to civil dialogue as it tears down. But our hope is that we can mitigate the intrinsically divisive qualities of social media and use this technology to bridge gaps and share ideas. 

Finding common ground on climate science and/or pandemic science requires not just better communication but a restoration of trust, too — between individuals, groups, and the institutions that represent them. How do you think ordinary people might contribute to that restoration of trust? 

The first step toward rebuilding trust is for individuals to get involved in public life, to take responsibility for things that we’ve long assumed would be handled by our institutions. Institutions are only as effective as people make them. For far too long now, people have delegated responsibility for environmental stewardship to state and federal authorities, and while those authorities often do good things, they are no substitute for active civic engagement or local, rooted knowledge of one’s community. Now is the time to learn about and engage with those institutions, to work through them so as to bring about the change we all know is needed. 

Reaching consensus is neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, diversity of opinion actually militates against conformity of thought and tyranny of the mob. Our priority with this project and future ones is to foster dialogue. At the very least, you should be open to engaging people with whom you disagree. It takes courage to reach out and communicate with others. But it’s the very act of reaching out that can kick-start the process of trust-building. 

And this has to happen on a personal level: you have to incorporate another person’s life, their thinking and their material circumstances, into your own vision of a shared community and a common future. It’s very similar to what we said before regarding local versus global approaches to climate change: the strongest and most effective coalitions begin at the human level and gradually expand to encompass ever greater portions of the globe. The same principle applies here: wide-ranging, productive dialogue in our society depends on trust, and to build trust, you first have to make human connections, at a personal level. Only then can you begin to agree on the basic questions, before building bridges and talking strategy as the dialogue continues. 

Climate change may be a global crisis, but the dialogue that gets us thinking about solutions is actually quite local and personal, as we’re discovering here in the North Country.

Interview by Joe Murphy, Humanities New York.

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Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo are part of Talking Wings, an environmental filmmaking and  storytelling collective. They are currently working on “Burning or Breathing: A Series about Regenerative  Solutions.” The multimedia project follows Earth Guardians from across Turtle Island/North America as  they create a sustainable and restorative future. Talking Wings stands in solidarity with the communities  and indigenous nations on the front lines of this climate emergency. Their films and works of art/resistance call for a renewed consciousness for the land, its inhabitants, and their collective memory. 

In the Fall of 2020, Blake and Tzintzun organized the North Country Art, Land and Environment Summit. During this month-long series of events, community members from the St. Lawrence  Watershed (Haudenosaunee Territory) came together to discuss regenerative solutions for the climate  crises. The Summit featured a series of outdoor exhibitions and online panel discussions. Throughout  these vital conversations, the environmental future of the St. Lawrence Watershed was highlighted. 

Previously, Blake and Tzintzun also collaborated together on Memory Flow / Water of Boston. The  project explored the layers of history hidden under the Quabbin Reservoir, source of Boston’s drinking  water. During this project, Tzintzun and Blake coordinated multiple exhibitions and organized a weekend-long conference/conversation with native elders.  Tzintzun and Blake’s short films and installations have been exhibited in a number of venues, such  as the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, The ROAR Magazine, the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, the TAUNY Center, the Godine Family Gallery/MassArt, and the K&P New York Gallery.

How Do We Talk About the Environmental Crisis?

Reflections on “Turning the Tide: Communicating Climate Change.”

In 2017, as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival, HNY convened some of the most brilliant minds in New York to examine how the language and conversations around climate change have shaped our understanding of it, and why the divide between people is so vast. This year we revisited the conversation with one of the panelists, environmental historian Adam Rome, to reflect on where we were then and what the world looks like now.

This interview, by HNY’s Joe Murphy, is the first in a series of pieces with scholars and grantees exploring the question of how culture and science relate to one another in our public discourse and how that shapes the environmental movement today.

Above: Youth march down Madison Ave for 1970 Earth Day in New York City. Courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archive.

What has changed since 2017 in the climate “debate”? 

The word “debate” kind of ticks me off, because there is no debate! The notion that we’re having a “debate about the science” is completely fictitious. A real debate would see a Republican conservative like Bob Inglis, the former congressman from South Carolina, in conversation with a Left progressive like Bernie Sanders, joined by a business-school professor whose views are somewhere in-between the two politicians. All would agree on the basic premise that climate change is real and that it’s a civilization-threatening problem. But they would disagree on how to tackle it, on the concrete steps needed to mitigate the problem. That’s a debate, and we haven’t had anything remotely like that. 

The reason why is complicated. When I did that HNY panel on climate communication in 2017, I hadn’t yet read Andrew J. Hoffman’s 2015 book, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. Hoffman is a professor in the business school at University of Michigan who writes on environmental sustainability. His starting point is that you’ll never convince climate skeptics with more scientific data. He reviews a huge social-science literature about how people form their views and change their minds and argues that this is essentially a cultural and an ideological divide, which is what makes it so hard to find any kind of common ground. 

We know that many climate skeptics are driven purely by economic self-interest. The most powerful economic force in history, the fossil-fuel industry, has no interest in seeing a real debate about this because it would endanger their profits and their very existence. There are other industries, too, beyond fossil fuels, that have a vested interest in maintaining business as usual. But there’s this even more important ideological debate that’s largely independent of pure economic interest — “more important” in the sense that so many more people share this ideology than directly work for an industry with a stake in the matter. There are a lot of people who think the “the free market” can do no wrong. They’re incredibly proud of the ways that the market has been a dynamic, constructive, liberating force. 

But climate change — and many free-market economists will say this — is a huge market failure. The market has not prevented climate change. If your whole life has been devoted to the idea that the market is infallible, that it’s the greatest thing ever, then it’s truly disturbing to reckon with the reality of a profound market failure that could jeopardize all of civilization — not just wreck the economy, but destroy society and the planet as we know it. And free-market ideology goes hand in hand with other assumptions. A lot of people dislike government regulation; they don’t want people telling them what to do. Some of that’s human nature; I feel it too sometimes, even though I believe that the government can do a lot of good. The bottom line is, you’re not going to change someone’s mind about any of this by giving them some data about temperatures in Hawaii or glaciers in Greenland. 

There’s a great phrase in Hoffman’s book: We have to separate the problem from the solution. If the way you discuss climate change implies that the only solution is massive government regulation, then anyone who doesn’t like government regulation will find a way to cast doubt on the problem itself. But you can open a dialogue with them if you open the door to say, look, we just have to agree on the nature of the problem, but as far as solutions are concerned, there might be more than one approach.

Is the country stuck in “problem mode,” unable to envision, or even articulate, solutions?

It is a “vision problem.” And in a way, that, too, is cultural. Environmentalists are terrible at offering positive, can-do visions of the future. And it’s not just environmentalists. There are a lot of people who take climate change very seriously but try to scare people into taking action. Their strategy boils down to: “This is what we’ll lose if we don’t do something! This is all the bad that will come if we don’t do something!” Sometimes that is the only way to think about a problem. But it’s an inherently limiting way of thinking about it. There are a lot of other people who, in order to be motivated, must feel like they’re building something with a team. For them, the question should be: “How will the world be better if we address climate change?”And that takes a positive vision. To be sure, in the short run it might not be better; we’ve already baked in a lot of really damaging changes that we’ll have to deal with over the next decades. But if all you ever talk about is staving off catastrophe — which is what a lot of environmentalists have fallen into — it’s really hard to convince people whose temperament is more optimistic, who like to believe that there will be progress. 

Do you see an overlap between the climate and pandemic contexts? Are the same values clashing now in the debate over Covid-19, the lockdown, and mask-wearing? 

The answer is yes, but I want to qualify that, because I see a few counter-trends. 

The pandemic seems like such an easy problem compared to climate change. Yet the cultural beliefs and political ideologies that have long held up climate action are now making it harder to contain the epidemic, too. There are several themes to both the pandemic and the climate crisis. There’s radical individualism, dislike of government regulation and dearly-held notions of personal liberty. There’s the free-market ideology of putting the economy above everything else. There’s the very human reluctance to sacrifice in the near term for some future benefit, and the difficulty of acknowledging issues of equity, of who is going to bear a social burden. There’s also distrust of expertise, or really, a kind of cynicism that prompts people to ask about others’ motives rather than actually engage with their ideas. Both sides exhibit this kind of cynicism. It’s not happening all at once, but I do see encouraging signs, on both sides of the partisan divide, that people are finding common ground on the need for action. That’s something which I just don’t see with climate change. 

What, in your view, has contributed most to the collapse of trust and the spread of cynicism? Do you think the pandemic will disrupt current trends? 

Some of the causes are fairly straightforward, though hardly anyone ever talks about them. When I was growing up, television had something called the “fairness doctrine.” Because the airwaves were owned by the public, a private company’s right to use them was subject to a public assessment that it was indeed in the public good. That assessment was enforced by a government agency. They had a rule that, if you talked about anything controversial, you had to give time to both sides. During the 1980s, the fairness doctrine was abolished as part of a broader push for deregulation. On the one hand, we have a zillion more kinds of media than we had when I was growing up. There are so many more places where you can get information. But none of them are bound to pay any attention to views other than those they want to promote. Giving equal time to opposing views is not an economically sound model compared to the alternative.

The shift started with television, but obviously now we’re dealing with the entire media landscape, including the big social media conglomerates. These companies thrive by telling you again and again what you already believe and gives you more evidence as to why your view is right. Modern media doesn’t encourage thought or reflection, it encourages certainty. If we’re honest, we have to admit that it takes a conscious effort to hear voices that are radically different from our own, to circumvent all the algorithms that social media sites use to know how we think. That’s one huge problem in itself that we don’t talk about very much, though there’s a lot of interesting social science research on it: we have very powerful institutions now that benefit financially from keeping us in partisan silos. It would take a conscious effort not just by us as individuals, but by society as a whole, to begin to break that down.

When I first read about the fairness doctrine, I thought this is another great example of why history matters. If all you know is the media today, it doesn’t seem weird that Facebook, Google and Twitter are the way they are. That’s just the way they are. But if you know the history, you know that they don’t have to be that way, that there’s nothing inherent about any of this. It’s not the way people thought that the media should be even as recently as thirty, forty years ago. History is incredibly helpful, not only for understanding how we’ve gotten into the bind we’re in, but also for reminding us that the current state of things is not etched in stone. It’s the result of choices and unintended consequences that involved real people rather than abstract forces. 

How might ordinary people contribute to a restoration of trust? What kinds of conversations would move people closer to common ground? Are there any lessons from the history of the environmental movement? 

This idea of history as providing alternatives is really valuable when it comes to trust. We have to think like the opposite of Facebook if we want to create a better society and get past these partisan divides. More and more people will have to say, “You know, distrust isn’t really profitable for me.” And I don’t just mean profitable in dollars and cents. I mean that it doesn’t advance our sense of the Good, of individual or collective happiness. People will have to say, “You know, it’s actually in my interest to find ways to overcome this distrust.” 

You have to start by getting into a problem solving mindset rather than a click-and-momentarily-feel-better mindset. If you really want to solve problems, you have to think about how to actually reach people with whom you disagree. Where might you possibly find common ground? That requires thinking about how they view the world. You can’t just preach to them, “This is what I think. This is what I value.” They don’t necessarily care about that. Instead, you have to say something like, “OK, I know you really care about this and I’m sensitive to that. So I’m trying to find a way that we can talk about this without violating that assumption of yours.” Maybe that’s impossible. But it’s certainly impossible if you don’t even make the effort to understand why people think what they do. 

The worst case of this, in the climate discourse, is the idea that science by itself can solve these problems. Science has become a bludgeon that one side uses against the other. But all science says is that there’s a really serious problem. It doesn’t set up a dialogue about the solutions. If all you do is emphasize the scientific data, people who disagree with you on how to approach the problem will think you’re chastising them. All they hear is, “You arrogant so-and-so!” And they’ll react defensively, saying, “I don’t want you to tell me I’m stupid because I don’t get the science. I do get the science, I just happen to think there’s a different way of solving the problem than you do.” The liberal side of the climate discourse really has to figure this out. Why has it been so hard for liberals to talk about climate with conservatives, or with people who don’t really care about politics at all, who just care about business?

I think empathy is a key part of it. You can’t have trust without empathy. You have to be able to enter into other people’s roles. And that’s the bread and butter of the humanities. The humanities help you understand how people quite different from yourself look at the world. That’s a very valuable asset if you want to solve problems, if you want to bring people together, because it brings the issue down from the abstract level of ideology to, well, the human level. Hoffman’s book made me realize that. Sometimes you have to say to a person, “Hey, I know that you’re against this solution, and that may make it harder for you to admit there’s a problem. But let’s forget the solution for the moment; I think there are actually many different solutions, and we can have an interesting discussion about that. But can we just talk for a moment about the problem?” 

I’m not sure what that would look like in practice. But the point is, people will just deny the problem if they think that your solution is something they’ll hate. Building trust means hinting to your interlocutors that you’re open-minded about what approach to take, even if you have very strongly held ideas about what’s probably best. If you’re worried that the other side will deem your solution unacceptable, you’ve got to defuse that if you want to have any kind of conversation.

What lessons do you draw from the young Earth Day organizers? What do you tell your students about them? 

One of the things I like about being a professor is that my students teach me stuff all the time, especially on climate. I know a lot about how we arrived at the present. But my students have much more to say than I do about the next steps, because they’re thinking more imaginatively about the future. Young people don’t have decades of opinions holding them back from new thinking. They feel like there’s a lot at stake, that their whole lives are ahead of them, and they’re a reminder that we all need to step back and say, “What do we really care about? What can we do to make things better — not only to avoid bad outcomes, but actually make things better?” There are many answers to these questions, not just one. 

When I read your chapters on the young Earth Day organizers almost a year later, I recognized some of the dynamic Greta Thunberg is driving at, this attempt to wrest control of the future and with it, the terms of debate in the present.

I assigned Thunberg’s little collection of speeches to my students. It really helped me think differently about the climate movement. Thunberg talks about science all the time, but her real message isn’t scientific. It’s about urgency. It’s about her phrase “Your house is on fire.” It’s a reminder that the expertise we really need now is from people who understand psychology or economics or social movements. It’s not science. The most useful writing on climate talks about psychology or sociology or political science or economics. Once you get past the science, there are so many more important, interesting, essential questions that we would have to answer if we really want to change society, the economy, our energy system.

Learn more about Earth Day in our previous conversation with Adam Rome.

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Adam Rome is professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo.  A leading expert on the history of environmental movements, he is the author of the prizewinning The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001) and The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (2013).  He also is co-editor of Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (2017).  From 2002 to 2005, he edited the journal Environmental History.

Into the Rainforest with Community Conversations

Starting with one conversation on the environment, Mambo Tse has seen how Community Conversations can bring people together, and how those conversations can lead to other fruitful projects. From discussions on immigration and food insecurity came an idea for project exploring the community’s relationship to African history and how it impacts them today, which was funded by an HNY Action Grant.

In this interview, Mambo shares how public humanities programming has helped her group engage with youth across New York City, in classrooms and afterschool programs, as well as the general public and elderly populations at senior centers discussing topics related to the environment, immigration, and more.

HNY: How did you first learn about Humanities New York, and what motivated you to get involved?

Mambo: In high school, I had a teacher who called herself a “humanities expert.” I never really knew what that meant. Of course, I was in her humanities class and all that. She had a dance company I was in, and she used to take us to the Senate in Austin, Texas (I grew up partially in Dallas). We would perform and then she would do these speeches, from the African-American perspective, on whatever was happening at the moment. It didn’t fully click until I started my work at Sirens and started thinking about doing something outside of just dance.

HNY: Right, so, tell us about Sirens, and why the company has that poetic name.

Mambo: Sirens–Protectors of the Rainforest was started by five first-generation African dancers at the P.S. 261 school with the idea of of giving back to the community through dance. The use of “Siren” comes from the West African and South African regions, in these stories there is a creature called Mami Wata who is usually described as a female water deity associated with healing and fertility, but is also known to lure people to her, much like the Greek Sirens. The name Protectors of the Rainforest came later from our conversations in the community. The school is located in a food desert, and the children were very disconnected from the food they ate, so we started a small garden on the property. People in the community walked by our garden and told us it was like “a little rainforest in the desert.” So we decided we would be the protectors of it, and what it means to the community.

The dancing we do is a great way to share culture, but people need to start talking more to each other too, especially here in New York. We have a sense of a protected, personal space in New York, but when you get people together, they start talking, no matter what. We started thinking of ways to present history to the community, specifically African history. And we started looking for funding to produce this sort of work and, lo and behold, Humanities New York pops up and we thought: This works for us. This does exactly what we want to do.

My partner said let’s do an African history conversation so we can introduce the people who live in this neighborhood to better understand black history and heroes and get away from negative connotations of black history. Because it can be traumatizing at times. We have to find a way of not just having conversations but healing people, so to speak. The best way to heal people is letting them get whatever is on their chest, off. I think a lot of problems, physical and emotional, stem from suppression. So we scheduled an appointment with Humanities New York and we thought the appointment was at your office [laughs] and not a phone conversation. So this guy was calling us on the phone and I was like, “We’re coming up in the elevator.” [laughs] I think it was you actually.

HNY: It was me. [laughs]

As we learned more about HNY’s Community Conversations program, I knew that was exactly what we were trying to do. Our first conversation was on the environment. People think that low-income people don’t care about the environment, which is a huge fallacy. Poor people are the ones that have to live in the houses with lead paint, the neighborhoods that used to be landfills or chemical plants. They face pollution every day, from plastic bags on the street to the factories spewing out toxic chemicals. They are on the front lines of what we are doing to our environment in cities, so for them the environment is something they have to think about every day. It wasn’t surprising to me that this conversation has been, by far, our best attended. Something we didn’t expect, though, we had people come in from other zip codes to Bedford-Stuyvesant who wanted to know about the food supply. I think that what the environment is, means very different things to different people.

HNY: You used the term “food desert” earlier, can you say a bit more about that?

Not only was our environment “Conversation” held in a food desert, but the neighborhood also has one of the biggest community gardens in NYC–right where many of the residents are on SNAP (food stamps). That’s a big disconnect. We wanted that garden to be an oasis for the kids and the parents that came. Participants were talking about not having fruits and vegetables in the neighborhood. I come from a carry-your-food kind of family. So I always have a healthy snack on hand. And I had never really thought deeply about how a lack of healthy options affected the neighborhood. The best part about the conversation was that it wasn’t just people from the neighborhood. It was also people from co-ops, people from community gardens. It wasn’t just about the problem that way! It was also: well here are some solutions, these people have some small answers. They said: you can come to our garden, we have fresh fruit and vegetables. If you help us with the garden, you get food.

HNY: Solutions actually arose from the conversation?

Mambo: Yes, exactly. That was amazing in of itself and I really valued that. It was a very diverse mixture of people and everyone left feeling better after the conversation. After the success of that conversation we applied for a Vision Grant from Humanities New York for ARISE – African History, Past to Present, a project to build self-awareness by breaking down immigrant stereotypes in the Bedford Rehab Houses. There had recently been five shootings in the area, and several people had been assaulted so there was a lot of tension. We decided as part of the conversation to do a mural together to start the conversation, and with the help of the New York City Housing Authority, the NYPD Community Officer, and others we were able to get permission for the mural. The idea for painting a mural as part of the healing process come from Ghana, and South Africa, where after one hundred years of war they used community painting as a way to process the history and as a way to heal. And that was interesting. Over thirty people contributed to the wall mural. There were police officers, gang members, multi-generational families. It was normalizing the conversation, cops could talk to the gang members in a completely different context. It was about healing through art and conversation. That was incredible. The event was supposed to start at noon, I was told there were people who’d been waiting since 10:00 a.m. The excitement came from people lacking a space to turn for meaningful conversation. It creates what we call, in dance, a “cipher”–a space for people to just put out how they feel.

HNY: Could you tell me about the project you organized at Glenwood Senior Center?

Mambo: The immigration stories? That project was so amazing! Again, the perception you have of people, whether it’s your own personal bias or stereotypes, can be so different from the truth. My mind was completely blown away by all the different stories people shared at the Center. The people that come into these senior centers have lived these incredible lives, but they are entering this phase in their life when society doesn’t think they should have any input. What really brought about the immigration stories project was one of the Community Conversations we had on immigration. The number of people that showed up grew every time we held them; we used to host it in this small room, but we had to move it to the cafeteria to fit everyone in.

At the Senior Center they hold breakfast and lunch programs and they try to keep people interested and active between meals but mostly the seniors just come in, eat and leave, so we started the Community Conversations as a way to keep them here. Out of that we heard so many stories from many generations of immigrants, you could even see the historical changes in immigration policy and understand them just from listening to the stories told by participants. From all different perspectives, from the islands to overseas.

At first the conversations got very heated since few people in the conversations knew each other. We had Haitians, Dominicans, Native Americans, Asians–there was this one lady from St. Lucia, she got up and she said, “When I’m talking, you hear my Lucian accent, but you don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know where I’ve lived. I speak Spanish, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at me. And the reason I speak Spanish is because when I left St. Lucia, I left with a Venezuelan family.” And that’s when I knew we needed to do something more with this, to talk to more people about their immigration experience.

HNY: And how did those conversations then lead to the “immigration stories” project?

Mambo: Out of the work we had been doing through HNY, I was able to get a mini-grant from Brooklyn Arts Council to record people’s personal stories. We’re in the process of finishing them and I’m excited to make them available soon. These are people who, well, no one had ever asked them, and now their story can be listened to by people all over the world, so for them, this is really empowering. We need to share more of our history, especially to the younger generations. They’re so enthralled, on computers. They don’t know who their neighbors are or where they come from.

Interview by Connor Goodwin, Program Officer and Nicholas MacDonald, Communications Manager

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Mambo Tse is known as a choreographer, artistic director and performance artist. For seventeen years, she has conducted many community engagement workshops on African dances, histories, music, and cultures globally. She is the founder of Siren–Protectors of the Rainforest and has taken her group on corporate sponsored tours around the United States and Canada. Siren–Protectors of the Rainforest is a private non-profit dedicated to preserving culture using music, dance, arts, and history as a platform to educate people about the benefits of reducing, recycling, and reusing.

Place and Story

By Rick Bass

We are pleased to share the introductory essay for our newest Reading & Discussion theme: “Place and Story.” Humanities New York commissioned noted novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Rick Bass to curate a selection of texts that explore the manifold ways the American landscape influences our experiences and way of life. As with all R & D groups, the texts selected–which include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–explore the theme from a variety of perspectives. We also ask our R & D Scholar-Advisors to pen an original essay contextualizing the selected readings. Below, in the “Place and Story” essay, Rick discusses each reading in the series within the context of the American environmental myths that persist in today’s culture, whether problematic or enlightening. If you are thinking of hosting a conversation, or need some book recommendations, this essay abounds with inspiration.

At the risk of sounding like an old hippie, railing against the cultural paradigm—which is to say, The Man—I believe that stories matter more than money, and that heart’s desire can matter more than brawn. That in dreaming there does lie responsibility, to paraphrase Delmore Schwartz. I’ve selected texts—though there are so many more than these!—to remind us of the vast differences between dreams of selfishness and bounty and the duty to realize, and act upon, limits: as if there burns bright yet in the genetic templates of our species the almost always-present recognition of how tenuous our existence is. And through it all, to remember how we all belong to what the poet Mary Oliver calls “the family of things.”

It is the dream of excess, I think, which has done the most damage to the American landscape, particularly in the often-vulnerable West, where resilience can often only be measured in geological terms rather than human-years. I have no quarrel with Genesis. I find it soothing in its loving, and, to this scientist’s eyes and ears, accurate, explanation of how the world came to be. And I do not find it ironic, only bittersweet and instructive, that the same text that instructs us to be stewards in our new and briefly empowered arrival to this green earth (and even in the story of The Flood, of getting a second chance), also presents, in its evocation of Edenic bounty, the idea that there are but two original inhabitants in the story: not seven billion-plus of us, now.

One particularly damning American myth is that one can cut all the timber in a forest, or a country, and that it will grow up so fast behind the cutting that the sawyer can turn around and work his way back, ceaselessly cutting, the forest replacing itself as fast as it is cut down. This is the myth that the rain will follow the plow, and that nature bends itself to our desires and our machines and even our primitive tools. These are, among many other flawed and failing myths, myths of technology. So, as William Kittredge reminds us, stories matter, hugely. Right or wrong, true or false, we tend over time to believe them. This is both a great power and a great danger.

Bounty and excess versus scarcity and paucity. How we think of ourselves—and others—determines our destiny. These texts have been selected in the spirit of James Joyce’s admonition that literature should forge in the smithy of one’s soul the consciousness of one’s race. And yet, as we know, evolution, like history, is alive, ever rising and falling—”Descent, With Modifications,” Darwin initially called his treatise on the matter.

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is an underappreciated masterpiece, if such a thing can be said of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It may well have sold a million copies across its now half-century lifespan, but because it is one of the foundational stories of our country—how we got to where we are—I feel it should be read by hundreds of millions, across generations. It will be relevant for as long as we dig and scratch at the earth for sustenance, and then dig for more than sustenance. It will also be relevant for as long as we dream, and hope; for although the book is about many things—masculinity and femininity in landscape; serving-the-self versus service to others; friendship and family—as it travels east to west, the Atlantic to the Pacific, it is perhaps most about what it states itself to be in the title: the balance between uplift and erosion, between mountain and plains; between the frenzy of ambition and the contentment of rest. A settling-out occurs with the dreams and passions of Susan and Oliver, one which it might be argued our country has not yet achieved.

 How much further, one wonders, must we go, to reach that restful, tolerant condition that might be said to be a kind of wisdom?

Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, pushes the edge of loneliness and estrangement even further than does Angle of Repose. It’s a triple-braided evocation of cultural, economic, personal, and familial fragmentation, loss, diminishment, absence. This is a perfect slim book—the small, eloquent novel in its way as wondrous as the big sprawling adventure-book of a novel—with writing so spare that metaphors travel through it like birds, and as distinctive, if ever-fleeting.

Of course Virgil’s prize relic, touchstone to his family, must be a rifle, the instrument which, paired with alcohol, more than any others destroyed his birthright and ushered him into the new one, wrought with violence and dissatisfaction.

In 1989, I was fortunate enough to explore a story that was making itself, and not so much in need of a writer as instead simply an observer and a landscape to provide room for all the elements of story: structure, space and time, and, always, active characters—protagonists who want something and go after it.

The characters in The Ninemile Wolves all wanted pretty much the same thing—ecological restoration, recolonization of lost territory, recovery of lost identity—but were coming at it from decidedly different angles, and with plenty of obstacles between them and their goals.

One lone Rocky Mountain gray wolf, filtering back into the U.S. after sixty years’ absence, and then another, somehow finding her. One lone biologist, Mike Jimenez, committed to their recovery, and to the human community. The mother wolf, and her mate, chose to first return to the Ninemile Valley, to one particular meadow owned by two old cattle ranchers, Ralph and Bruce Thisted, who had the humility and curiosity, and the stewardship ethics, to not freak out when the wolf showed up in their pasture one day, green eyes blazing as it stared at their cattle. Not to give the story away, but it was the biologist’s creativity and determination, the ranchers’ tolerance and compassion, and the wolves’ ferocious fire to do more than survive–to prosper, and raise their young—that allowed this to be somewhat of a rarity in environmental sagas, one with a happy ending, or at least a happy middle.

The foundational business of life is one of the pursuit-and-gathering of calories—energy—and of territory and its resources. It’s how we treat one another that makes the journey and struggle worth the price of admission. Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park, by Marie Winn, brings this paradigm to Central Park, a small island within a small island. The rapture, and hunger, not just of the hawks themselves, but of humans finding a single long-eared owl existing amongst pigeons in a quadrant of the park with no permanent water and very few trees, speaks to the need by all of us to glimpse, taste, know, that filaments of the rank or even feral are still alive in the world, pursuing the ancient skills by which all have arrived at this point in time.

There’s so much else I want to recommend that’s not in here. To possess an ecological awareness, wrote Aldo Leopold, is to know that we live in a world of wounds. John Graves’ Good-bye to a River, as clear-headed and bittersweet an elegy as exists yet.  David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction, which expands on Darwin’s and Wallace’s observations about the perils of fragmentation, took me a full year to re-read, but is well worth the investment.

As Doug Peacock—whose voice, says Terry Tempest Williams, is the ethical benchmark for wilderness in the American West—reminds us, big wild country is the healthiest, and the more of it there is, the healthier it is, often still capable of holding that most iconic of American megafauna, the grizzly bear. I consider Peacock’s Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness (along with Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place) to be one of the two most important works of place-based writing in the canon. I do not find it coincidental that both these books twine illness (PTSD and cancer, respectively) and grief with the restoration, even salvation, to be found in wild country not yet broken. These latter two artists are especially noteworthy in our times for their incredible commitment to activism, not merely as writers, but as front-line battlers in the daily grind of meetings, lobbying, protesting, resisting. They are active. (For more information and examples of their activist work, visit www.savetheyellowstonegrizzly and @TempestWilliams on Twitter).

A burning world elicits, from those who love it most fiercely, an impassioned, creative, and determined defense. None is more inspiring or impressive to me than Diane Wilson’s, as chronicled in An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos and Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas. Victories can be few and far between, and hers—a one-woman wrecking ball defending her home-place of Seadrift (what a name for our times!), against a multinational corporation, with Wilson teaching herself on-the-fly everything she needed to know about courts and law–is so fantastic as to at times read like a dream.

Deep soul’s beauty in the presence of what many might call bleakness is, if sentimentality can be avoided, as it is in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” evidence of strength of character. This poem’s beauty is an earned one, and what in the hands of a lesser poet would fall prey to sentimentality is instead presented, line by line as if in cinematic frames, as a humbled existence-in-the-moment, and awareness without nostalgia. Instead, we are led to understand, between the lines, the hard-gotten realization of time’s progression, and time’s and circumstances’ shaping of those lives.

I continue to be fascinated by the manner in which place shapes things: first an individual, then the larger population, then the culture, and from that, its destiny. This is again why stories matter. In Pattiann Rogers’ wise poem, “Animals and People: ‘The Human Heart in Conflict With Itself,’” which is written, in my opinion, with just the right amount of indictment, an aggrieved lamentation that takes its power not even so much from the usual source, specificity, but instead the accruing litany, Biblical in voice—like Commandments in reverse—we are hypnotized by the incantatory style into seeing the true nature of a relationship and then, from that, through her artfulness, the transformative understanding of the why of things. There are entire books, thick books, that accomplish far less than this amazing poem.

“Circle, Montana,” by Carter Walker, is, among other things, a heart-filled contemporary examination of the way distance affects individuals—the physical distances of open space often in tension or conflict with the emotional, personal, and familial distances—and, again, affecting ultimately the cultural distances. It’s not “simply” a portrait of two cultures—Native and Anglo—in conflict, but conflict at so many other levels: affluence versus poverty, parent versus child, the fragmentation of divorce, the conflict between friendship and lovers. All these explorations are given space to roam in the expanses of eastern Montana, and yet are compressed by season—winter, of course, and a blizzard—and, again, by place, the predominant cover of darkness that is one of the northern tier’s geographic primary signatures.

The selections in this curriculum are stories of land, and of the wild current that runs through healthy land. An entire other semester could and should be given to stories of the sky, in these carbon-heated times, as the forests burn, and to stories of water, as the oceans rise and the snows and wild creeks and rivers disappear, in a plot and destiny familiar to any reader of the Book of Revelations.  In this series, however, we begin at the foundation: the stone, the land, across which the water flows and the air moves and the characters in the stories of life—people, and other animals—first traveled, and still do. Some of our culture’s stories possess deep ecological as well as artistic integrity—including those listed here—while others, coming at us daily, and still others passed with toxicity across the generations, are just whack. They all matter, however, some for better and others for worse, more than ever. It is past time to deny the flawed and failing ones, and to rebuild a culture with the stories that will endure: stories which possess in their center an ecological rightness, an ecological integrity, with its ever-present and animating spirit of all that which is wild—not entirely able to be controlled or even always known, but respected, even revered. And nurtured.