The novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena Maria Viramontes deals with the idea of environmental injustice and how people of low-socioeconomic status and/or of color are unfairly forced to deal, first-hand, with environmentally unsound and damaging situations, such as pesticide exposure and toxic water. In response to this phenomenon a movement called environmental justice, supported by writers such as Helena Viramontes and Rachel Carson, has taken root.
There are two landscapes depicted in the opening chapter of Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring: “A Fable for Tomorrow.”(Carson 1) the idealized, but typical “town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” and the diseased version of that same town after an “evil spell had settled on the community” (Carson 2). Carson uses idyllic, fairytale type imagery to get the reader invested in the town’s welfare, setting the scene as one of peaceful tranquility. Through the use of a mysterious antagonist she encourages curiosity in origin of the negative outcome of that same town, while imposing a feeling of adversity. When we discover, in the second to last paragraph of this chapter, that this is only a possible future, we are meant to feel a need to prevent the described dystopia from occurring. Continue reading
The woodchuck is also known as a groundhog. Here’s a site that has more info: http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/woodchuck.htm
Rowlandson effectively uses the wintery season she was captured during to portray the bleak and desperate mood felt in this excerpt. Her having had to “sit all this cold winter night upon the cold snowy ground,” portrays a lack of control over her environment. For her captors, the Wampanoags, would not provide shelter to her and her sick child, and she had no ability to affect that. This exposure to the elements also sets the scene as cold, which is something she puts emphasis on by using it twice in that one phrase. That coldness can then be transferred to the Native Americans in a symbolic gesture, further portraying Rowlandson’s situation as bleak. And if her captors, her environment, and her mood are all cold and bleak, what will keep her motivated?
People can resonate with photographs in a way that isn’t common with many other types of works of art. A picture is able to show the viewer what was present at the time it was taken in no uncertain terms. When a landscape is portrayed as something powerful and moving and beautiful it can connect with the viewer in ways an abstract description never can. Ansel Adams was a wilderness photographer during the early to mid-twentieth century, who was able to capture the essence of a place. His ability to capture the sublime essence of the wilderness, the wilderness that is both beautiful and awesome, can bring about a desire to preserve these qualities, to preserve the sublime, before they are lost to us.
