When studying the Bible scholars tend to split it up into the Old Testament and the New Testament. Both canons were written at different times and reflect different types of Gods. In the New Testament God is seen mostly as a loving, kind God who sends his only son to save his people. To show how much he loves his creation, and is willing to sacrifice for it. Conversely, in the Old Testament, from which we read for Monday’s class, God is seen as an omnipotent being who has total control over the life and death of the population. This type of God can be paralleled with the God that the Pima story portrays. In the Pima adaptation the Doctor of the Earth sees that his creation is flawed and thus decides to start fresh by simply destroying all the life that he had created. The Doctor of the Earth does this several times because of the imperfections his creations portray. A similarity between Gods can be seen from the Christian story about Noah and his arc. In this story the God also sees that his creation had become flawed and corrupt. God is so disgusted that he only decides to save Noah, his family, and two of each animal. Although, both gods are omnipotent beings, they decide to save something from their original creation.

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I’m intrigued by the balance between God often being portrayed as omnipotent and omniscient, yet will also display human-like flaws, emotions, and shortcomings. This leads to an interest in the internal methods in which people reconcile these double standards with the non-faith side of their intellect. In the Pima creation story, The Creator tries to make something, like ants, but it turns out that they don’t accomplish the purpose he put them there for. The same thing happens when he tries to make people, his recipe went wrong and all they want to do is smoke.

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Big oil has a problem. The industry suffers from a bad reputation even as their product remains in high demand as fuel for modern life. Headline-dominating environmental disasters have included the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, rupture of Alaskan pipelines, and most recently, the Deepwater Horizon debacle that spilled nearly five million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this negative publicity, how do petroleum companies manage public opinion to keep the majority of Americans on their side?

The answer is millions in ad spending every year.

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I have read the creation story in the Bible numerous times throughout my life, but have never read it from a literary standpoint until this class. Doing this, and paying even closer attention to how the environment plays a role on the story and towards the characters, I found that the story had more meaning and symbolism than I had ever realized. The story also incorporates a direct relationship that the environment has with Adam and Eve. The role of power in this story changes throughout the two chapters. In this story, God created the world and everything in it and saw that it was perfect. He then gave humans the power over the environment, “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth” (Genesis 1:26). To me, this means that God created the world and everything in it for humans. Later in the story, God also gives Adam the power of naming all living things, “So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:20). To me this led me to believe that God wanted humans to hold the power on earth over the animals, until he created the Garden of Eden. Continue reading →

There are many people who have contributed great literary works, specifically in the area of environmental literature. From Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” to contemporary writers such as Emily Dickinson, critics of ecology have contributed a sense of how the environment should be viewed. In particular, there is one quote that really shows the importance and definition of the word environment as a noun.

“Two roads diverged in the woods and I-I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost

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When God first created Earth, it was a place of freedom for all creatures. In fact, there wasn’t anything that appeared to have the desire to exercise their power over the land and all of its organisms. Even after the creation of man, as described in the Genesis, there was a natural balance of power. God created creatures to accompany Adam because he believed that “it is not good that man should be alone” (Genesis, 2), while He created the plants so that Adam could eat from them. However, after the woman, Eve, was deceived by the serpent, life on Earth changed drastically. Suddenly there was suffering and death, and man was forced to work the land in order to stay alive. It appears that man was supposed to live off the land, not control it and everything that lives off it as well.

Nonetheless, in the future humans began to create civilizations. Places where the land was altered and “civilized.” The wilderness was no longer the place God once intended. In fact, it appears that humans began to think that the natural world, places that weren’t inhabited by humans was considered to be unfit for human presence. This point is present in A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson when she describes her trek across the country with the Native Americans. She constantly uses words that are associated with nature to describe evil. For example, she considered the swamp she was forced to cross as “a deep dungeon.” Why would she consider something within nature in such a way, especially when the one she called on for help throughout her whole narrative was God? God was the one who created the swamp, and yet she despises it. She wants the comforts of the man-made place. A place of civilization full of European settlers. Does Mary Rowlandson believe that human civilizations are better than what God originally created? In fact, she even goes on to say that she had to “travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness.” Ultimately “desolate” means to be empty of inhabitants and visitors. It is with certainty that it can be said the wilderness is not an empty place. It is an ecosystem, full of animals and plants. It appears that Mary Rowlandson disregards His creations and everything that He spent the seven days creating as unimportant.

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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/

http://eng670.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.