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:
As a follow-up to our brief discussion of the Pima “Story of Creation,” here is some interesting information about how termites (aka “white ants”) function in the desert ecosystems of the American southwest:
“In the warm deserts of the American Southwest, termites are perhaps the greatest earth-movers. Subterranean termites transport a tremendous amount of relatively deep soil materials to the surface when they construct their mud-covered tunnels on the soil surfaces and on the cellulose-containing foods they consume. In this way, desert termites accomplish the same kind of ecological role as do earthworms in soils of moister regions. In the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico, a group of ecologists estimated that termites annually brought over 1760 pounds (800 kg) of soil materials per two and one-half acres (1 hectare) to the soil surface.” (http://www.desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_desert_soils.php)
If you are interested in taking another look, here are the videos we watched in class on Thursday. Stories, metaphors, and images of the environment often come to seem deceptively transparent through long usage. It is our job as literary and cultural analysts to uncover how they are working and to make them strange again. And if you watch these commercials enough times they definitely start to seem really strange. Kids dressed up as trees and flowers blowing in the wind. Making garbage disappear simply by holding a beautiful poster in front of it. A car that transforms into animals in order to navigate a rugged landscape. Weird stuff! Environmental and literary tropes — like the sublime, the pastoral, harmony or the ecological web, and wilderness (see the Buell glossary of terms for explanations of these) — are everywhere; you just have to keep your eyes open for them. Where do you see them in your day to day lives?
Welcome to our course blog! I’m Stephen Siperstein, the instructor of this course and I am excited that we will be using a blog as a primary assignment in our class. One purpose of the blog is to widen our discussion beyond the classroom. Blogs are also great because we are all so immersed in media in our daily lives, and a blog helps bring the questions we discuss in class to bear on a wide range of media, texts, and other conversations. We’ll use the blog posts to generate discussion in class, and to open new directions of inquiry that are not necessarily in the syllabus. Here are a few examples of blogs from other environmental literature courses. I would suggest taking a look at some of the posts on these sites to get an idea of the many possibilities and different kinds of blog posts:
http://eng4301f10.wordpress.com/
http://aml24101614.wordpress.com/
If you ever need help with technical questions relating to the blog, email me (siperste@uoregon.edu), or contact the Information Services Help Desk at 541-346-HELP or helpdesk@uoregon.edu.
