I recently came across a hip hop artist from Canada named Baba Brinkman. He has created a peer-reviewed (meaning the science checks out) hip hop show about Darwin and evolution. It’s pretty amazing stuff and worth checking out:
When I attended the Joni Adamson,”Rethinking the Commons” lecture, she discussed many topics. Some of them were more in depth than others and some were very confusing. Due to this variety of topics, I have chosen to write this blog about one topic that I felt most familiar and interested by. The topic I chose was the issue of “who has access to the global commons”. The specific example that she gave was that the Amazon forest is considered a “global common”. She mentioned how many people in Northern America view the Amazon rainforest as the “lungs” of the planet. While the people in Northern America and other more industrially developed countries are rather passionate about the conservation of the rainforest, this often pits them against the native people who reside in the Amazon.
The lecture by Joni Adamson on “Rethinking the Commons” was very intriguing. Adamson focused her lecture on what is considered “the commons” and how the word has changed drastically since it was first coined. “The commons” was first described as a type of resource or land used by the community but now in modern day use it is considered an overgrazed pasture. She described how environmental justice focuses not only on the environment but also social justice in literature. She explains how amaranth or pigweed is actually considered a very durable plant and has been quite resourceful for people during depressions. Adamson goes on to describe Monsanto, a corporation known for its agricultural biotechnology and its production of genetically engineered seeds.
The woodchuck is also known as a groundhog. Here’s a site that has more info: http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/woodchuck.htm
I am quite fascinated with the use of biblical typography in Mary Rowlandson’s “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Rowlandson.” According to Rowlandson, God’s will is what kept her alive during such a difficult and challenging time; “yet the Lord by his Almighty power preserved a number of us from dying” (311), and God’s will restored Rowlandson after the captivity.
Rowlandson’s narrative is broken up into ‘removes’ and in each of these ‘removes,’ we are shown the trials that Rowlandson had to overcome. Each ‘remove’ provides us with a better understanding and insight of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity.
The passage starting in paragraph two on page 81 in the Norton Critical Edition of Walden by Thoreau clearly shows tension between nature and society as a train cuts through Walden Pond. However, I believe even Thoreau feels conflicted about the meeting of these two opposing forces.
The chapter is Sounds, and, early on, Thoreau establishes his intimate knowledge of this meeting ground by saying the men who work on the freight trains bow to him as to an old acquaintance. This seems to give Thoreau credibility in the eyes of the reader. Immediately before that Thoreau explains how he commonly walks the railroad causeway, using the word often, and he even says he is “related to society by this link.” The two key words that stand out here are often and related. Thoreau is careful to express the habitualness of this walk through the use of the word often and the descriptions of his mutual comfort with the men of the train. He then uses the word related, a word commonly used to describe a familial connection to refer to the track. I believe this paragraph shows Thoreau’s uses for the meeting of the two worlds and paints them in a positive light. Continue reading
In Emerson’s essay “Nature” it is stated that adults are unable to see nature, and that what they do see is purely superficial. A person might see the sun, but they will not consider its warmth, illumination, and incredible significance. I find it magnificent that what he says here continues to ring true with the present day, as it seems fewer people truly embrace the beauty and glory that is the natural world. I believe this essay is attempting to show how nature should invoke these emotions, and that those who do not feel so are not only numb but also blind to the beauty of the world around them. Might this be why Emerson equates himself to a transparent eyeball? He sees and feels the world with no reservations and no barriers. By seeing the world through the eyes of a poet he is able to experience the earth the way it was intended and the way many adults cannot. There is, however, a place where one might remove this blindness and see firsthand the beauty of the natural world.
The transcendentalist movement was being formed by Emerson and people with similar interests in the 1830s, with the majority of ideas being presented at the Transcendental Club. It consisted of a hand-full of members that originally met to talk about their critiques on societal institutions, among many other things (American Transcendental web). Thoreau was born 14 years after Emerson, and was not part of pioneering transcendentalism in these formative meetings, but was greatly inspired by Emerson’s essay Nature as a youth. He went on to refine the movement with a different voice than Emerson, one that’s particularly engaging, at least to me. Thoreau, the contemporary, was less poetic than the master, Emerson, but only by default. Emerson was abstract to an extreme, in order to push the limits of the movement he was a part of… the transparent eye-ball passage speaks for itself. His language was highly stylized, using regular rhetorical statements, like when talking about stars, “Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!” As well as backward-Yoda-speak, “But every night come out, these envoys of beauty…” Both examples of this stylized language are found within the first paragraph of the first chapter of Nature.
When reading Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze and focus on the connection that links humans and the environment. There were many connections that played a part between the two topics, one in particular stuck out to me. I noticed that Mary Rowlandson used “leaving farther my own country, and traveling into a vast and howling wilderness” (318, Rowlandson) to describe the unknown territory that the Wampanoag people were taking her to. I found this interesting because it showed that Mary considered the wilderness and unknown to be a negative thing and that she was not willing to leave the comfort and familiarity of her old town, Lancaster. She wanted to return to her town even thought she knew that it was not the same place anymore and that she had no choice but to move on, she even relates this emotion to a biblical story, “…I understood something of Lot’s wife’s temptation, when she looked back” (318, Rowlandson). Like in the Lot’s wife, Rowlandson was leaving her familiar environment and going the new wilderness that she was not familiar with and to her this was a negative and dangerous thing. Rowlandson did not think of the new territory as a good and healthy environment but rather the wilderness as dangerous and scary, especially since she was being forced to go against her own will like Lot’s wife.
Another part in Rowlandson’s narrative where she talks about the wilderness and unknown environment in a negative way was during the second remove when they Indians moved them out again and she referred to the land as “the vast and desolate wilderness” (312, Rowlandson) again. During this particular part of her story she seemed to have given up for a moment when being taken from her familiar environment. There was a point where she quotes herself, “I shall die, I shall die” (312, Rowlandson). She clearly did not think that she was going to survive the new territory and that she was going to die like the rest of her family and town. These connections stand out to me because they display the clear sense of fear and negativity that the environment plays with Mary.
Henry David Thoreau, born July 12, 1817, is today considered to be a major influence in various domains in the United States. His works are widely spread, read and studied in a number of different contexts and he was a source of inspiration for a lot of people. He did multiple things in his lifetime, but he mostly dedicated his life to work. Looking to know more about his life brings a few things to my mind. I might be stating the obvious, but this is what strikes me when learning more about him.
