Produce a creative visual (or multisensory) response to one of the course texts and an issue in sustainable development engaged by the text. Select the text to which you respond and present your response to the class on the assigned days. The response could be something you find that was created by someone else, such as a photograph or a sculpture, or it could be something you create, such as a drawing. The response must be accompanied by a brief written explanation (1 page) of the points of contact between the text and the particular artistic representation.
SD 3800 Voices in Sustainable Development 
From the Sound to the Sea, Pine cones falling near the Bayberry,
For the love of the Sand, pick it up and feel it fall through your hand.
The Sandpiper’s song, has always matched the Ocean so strong.
For years and years, these Beaches have been here!
These Live Oaks we call Home, Where Cardinals, Foxes, and Folks all roam.
Beauty so fair, salt in the air. It is our responsibility to care.
Do you believe these Beaches will last? Even with our careless past.
It is up to us to save this place.
They make the laws, then we watch our lands fall into the Sea at a quickened pace.
These Sands run in my bones, but I am not alone.
Please realize what you decide, will destroy or save our Home.
The other day after class I was inspired, oddly enough sitting in the beautiful Appalachian forest I was inspired by my hometown. This is just a cheesy poem that came to mind addressing my community & law makers local, federal, and worldwide. With this piece, I wanted to highlight our connectivity. We are all connected. This is not just a poem about the loss we are experiencing in Corolla NC, but It is about the loss we are all causing and experiencing collectively worldwide. Many speak of climate change hurting our grandchildren and future generations. I believe that this is disrespectful discourse. Anthropogenic climate change caused by the extraction and burning of our ancestors, the exploitation and destruction of the lands and animals to produce food that doesn’t feed the soul, as well as the endless need for growth and consumption our affluent society participates in is not only condemning our future, but has destroyed thousands if not millions of different plants, animals, native & minority communities already. The deregulation and business as usual that many law makers and the prosperous preach is not ignorant but deliberately disrespectful to the creatures previously destroyed as well as the current communities experiencing the destruction of their homes and the displacement or death accompanied with that.
Many classic SD authors could be tied to my poem. I draw from Carson, in knowing that “In nature nothing exists alone, but man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself”. I believe we are all connected in a profound way, and life force or energy is what connects us all. When the smallest member of our natural community is hurt it will inevitably hurt our largest member (who some humans have decided is us, while others feel differently). We as a species, since we preach our intelligence so often, should be able to value the importance of a healthy earth. Nature, life, love, energy, change, magic, consistancy, flows through us all and there for we should care. I draw from Butler with her theme of empathy. Her main character is hyperempathetic, and thus has a problem hurting others and can value other humans through understanding their pain. I urge all to feel empathy towards the members of our global community currently experiencing very real consequences from climate change. I draw from Bill Neidjie who speaks of the land and everything on it as a relative. He personifies the land, as do I. I urge all to not only feel empathy towards your own species but to feel the loss and pain of all creatures especially the land we are all living on. I draw from Silko, in respects to ceremony. She highlighted the importance of story-telling to pass on traditions. I want everyone to know the story of Corolla and use it in the most positive way possible. Not only communities around the world, but communities in our own country and even state are being affect by climate change today. People are moved by stories, let us keep telling our own and listen to others to incite a profound change in humanity!
“When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars — the few stars that we could see — were windows into heaven. Windows for God to look through to keep an eye on us. I believed her for almost a year.” (Parable of the Sower, page 5, Cory talking to Lauren)
I am not sure when I first heard the idea of stars as being a tool for God to watch over us, but I have believed that for a long time. When I would think of this, I always thought of stars being God themselves eyes. I feel a sense of protection when I can see a lot of stars, which is a lot different from how Cory feels about being able to see the stars. Before the apocalypse, the stars were not visible because of the Los Angeles. Cory saw that as a sign of success, but Lauren prefered to have the stars.
I chose to paint the Los Angeles city skyline and eyes in the sky instead of stars. The yellow glow around the city shows the light pollution that would otherwise block the stars. I chose to leave a lot of distance between the dark sky and the city to emphasize this difference. I put eyes in the sky instead of stars to act as the windows for God to look through. I chose to write the text in Spanish because that is the language Cory’s mother would have told her that in.
“Most of the people in this country don’t eat acorns, you know. They have no tradition of eating them, they don’t know how to prepare them, and for some reason, they find the idea of eating them disgusting. Some of our neighbors wanted to cut down all our big live oak trees and plant something useful. You wouldn’t believe the time I had changing their minds.” ( Lauren’s father speaking, page 64)
For my creative response I chose to bake acorn bread. We live in a society that is very disconnected from the specific environments we each reside in, and more connected to the foods and items that places far away provide us. For example, depending on a year round supply of avocados from Mexico makes us more vulnerable to food instability because we can’t seem to live off the land around us. In Parable of the Sower, they live in a post-apocalyptic world where food is unbelievably expensive and it is more sensible (as it always is when given the resources) to learn to produce food off the land; it makes them more resilient.
Their use of acorns to make flour and bread based off the knowledge and recipes they found in a book about California Indians and the plants they use, really spoke to me. Sustainable Development to me means having a healthy, and a mutually beneficial relationship between our society and the environment/planet. In many ways I believe Native American culture does this very well with their respectful relationship with nature That’s why I choose to make acorn bread, because in a very practical way it represents how we can get in touch and live locally with our environment, allowing for a sustained relationship between ourselves and nature.
Acorn Bread
To make bread, you will need the following:
6 Tbl. cornmeal
1/2 C cold water
1 C boiling water
1 tsp sale
1 Tbl butter
1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 C lukewarm water
1 C mashed potatoes
2 C all-purpose flour
2 C finely ground leached acorn meal
Mix cornmeal with cold water, add boiling water and cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add sale and butter and cool to lukewarm. Soften yeast in lukewarm water. Add remaining ingredients to corn mixture, along with yeast. Knead to a stiff dough. Dough will be sticky. Cover and let rise in warm place until doubled in bulk. Punch down, shape into two loaves, cover and let rise until doubled in bulk. Bake at 375 degrees F for 45 minutes.
For my creative response, I decided to make a real estate type flyer based on Thoreau’s way of living. Thoreau respected nature and did not exploit it for monetary gain. Another general theme within Thoreau’s writing was to live life simplistically and ultimately, he secludes himself in the woods in order to connect more deeply with nature and himself. Thoreau feels as though we should only focus on the bare necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. My creative response chimes into this by listing accommodations as fertile land, firewood, seclusion, and being near a pond. However, the disclaimer that I put on the bottom of the flyer also touches on an issue of the reading. Thoreau was all about submerging himself in nature; however, Walden pond was very close to a town with people and he even noted that he could hear trains. The disclaimer is a way to not falsely advertise that you will be in total seclusion if you were to buy this house. The flyer supports the readings of Thoreau because it keeps with the theme of self-reliance and simplicity. The accommodations section of the flyer gives the audience the idea that if they were to rent/buy the cabin that they would have the capability of being self-sustaining.
This also ties into the themes of sustainable development due to how consumption based our society is. We live in a world where people always have to have the latest iPhone or other pieces of technology. This constant development is resulting in climate change at an alarming rate and leading to the degradation of nature and the environment. My creative response is not trying to say that everyone should live the same way that Thoreau did. I am trying to tie into some his core beliefs such as simplicity (not to the extreme he did) but to an extent where our highly consumption-based society gets reduced a little. As sustainable development students, we see how the actions of people are impacting the world. Especially with the IPCC report, we need to take action in order to ensure that the environment is not degraded to the point that it is unsuitable for life. Thoreau supported nature and wanted to preserve it. If he saw how the world is now, he would be disappointed at the current state of affairs. He would want us to further support the sustainable development goals pertaining to the environment.
I was inspired by the recurring theme of humanity’s relationship with the earth as a method of cultivating societal values and livelihoods based on geographical relationships. This theme is reflected in both Silko’s book Ceremony as well as Bill Neidji’s set of poems in Gagudju Man. Both cultures are based on native or indigenous methods of interacting with the earth and understanding how to manage resources. Each are haunted by the overpowering historical events that unfolded and victimized both land and culture under the influences of modernization and industrialization. Due to the poaching of resources, power, and wealth by colonizers, and later, by modern government agencies, there has been a deep disruption of cultural traditions and land management. This disruption has simultaneously led to the dwindling population sizes of tribal communities. In an effort to revitalize traditional customs and preserve them for future generations, both authors engage in using literary methods to carry on cultures that face extinction. The piece I created, wood burned and infused with mixed media, reflects the correlation between the dismemberment of ancestral land with the threat of disappearing cultures.
I used the wood burner to burn in trees, one of which is cut, as well as a depiction of the ocean and landscape. This is used to reflect the threats that the land faces through intensive agriculture and deforestation. I later glued on some smaller rocks that depict the disruption of the land through mining practices which were mentioned in both Ceremony and Gagudju Man. I also used the seeds of a flower commonly known as Forget-Me-Not. The reasoning behind was to focus the strong connection between the land and the culture that organically developed under the influences of regional and spatiotemporal boundaries. It has been shown throughout the literature in this class that when there is a disruption involving the environment, traditional cultures and sustenance of livelihoods become at risk. Even Bill Neidji felt forced to write down his culture’s traditions, despite its law prohibiting literary endeavors, due to the disruption of land management and dwindling tribal population. As a result of indigenous people losing their land, they simultaneously lose part of their cultural identity.
At the top of my piece I burned a quote from Bill Neidji’s poem Land that reads “That leaf he pumping, growing…” (40). I picked this quote out from the rest of the poem because it shows a unique way of personifying nature. Neidji illustrates that each part of the tree is filled with the will to live and grow, and uniquely connects humanity with the natural world. The “pumping” that the leaf is doing also shows that the same vital life force that resides in humanity through the movement of blood also resides in the flora and fauna, both of which are sustained by the land. A similar representation of this dynamic is illustrated in Ceremony through the character Ts’eh. Ts’eh embodies the connection between indigenous people and their knowledge of the land. Ts’eh shows Tayo how to care for the earth and feel connection to it, therefore passing down traditional knowledge of land management.
Destruction of the earth on a global scale coupled with lost knowledge of traditional land and resource management threaten the existence of indigenous cultures. This conception is expressed through written word as a method of preserving cultures that face the threat of extinction. It represents their desperation for future societies to “Forget Us Not”.
Not caring about the quality of the beaches in low income areas when there’s a big press to keep tourist beaches clean makes room for an argument based on Rachel Carson’s environmental justice movement, though at its core is a movement for people’s rights. One thing that is important that relates to carson’s work on the environment is the planet isn’t put before the people which has been happening more as sustainability becomes more mainstream. While it’s important to care and work towards a better environment but to me this is only to achieve development focused on people or to allow a greater number of individuals to achieve the good life. Which is exactly where the intersection of Schumacher and Carson’s work tie into my creative visual response. This image is from Zak Noyle and represents a love and movement that got me into sustainability and lead me to where I am now. But also connects with the key principles of sustainability. For me the love of nature came through the beach and ocean instead of the forest like Thoreau. But ultimately the love and respect is the same. Being held under by a wave vastly more powerful than you and pressed to the point of starting to drown is comparable to Walden Ponds harsh winter and the utmost respect for nature you have after surviving. You can shape your own board out of “borrowed resources from nature” which is seemingly your cabin that wouldn’t have been possible to build without the wood from the land. Maybe I am stretching things but this is truly how I see it. Surfing is truly a decentralized movement or story. It is powerful in the way it allows any partaker to create their own story through surfing. Every wave is a blank page that can be filled with anything your heart desires. As partakers in surfing or people who support the sustainability movement we are obligated to protect what we love and ensure that it the future generations have the capabilities to meet their needs and seek their good life. This image calls to question whether we are doing that or not. If this was your home break that was filled with heaps of plastic and other non biodegradable products would you care more?
Sustainable Development requires one to think outside of what you were taught, to be willing to lay all the facts down and make an informed decision. It asks to think from an angle of both the village and villager instead of an educated well informed first world citizen. This has changed my thoughts on knowing what’s best for those in third world countries to hearing their problems, wants, and needs. It has taught me to respect the land and others when I am in foreign soil and to make sure I leave the place better than how it was if I got there even if that’s just picking up one piece of trash on my way out. This makes tackling issues like waste distancing more accessible and easier to manage though that trash still has to go somewhere which is another problem for another time. In the end, regardless of your stance on consumption and waste its hard to disagree that the outcomes of production, consumption, and waste totally ruin this photo op and the surf spot in general. Who wants to surf in trash?
For my creative response, I decided to write a fictional narrative weaving in aspects of our SD classes throughout the story. The book is tentatively called Lideri & Kita, after two of the central characters. It follows a series of villages living on an isolated plateau that is roughly 600 square miles across. There are steep cliffs on all sides of the plateau, so this area is essentially the entire world to the villages living here.
I was inspired by how Octavia Butler could depict generational changes within the society of her story. That is something I am going to try and capture within my story as well. I plan on trying to achieve that with the small scale of my fictional world. This small scale helps to “speed up” the visible effects of the environmental disturbances that the villagers are causing with their new methods of production they employ. The story will take place over a few decades, which should be enough time to allow the environment to degrade enough to add tension in the story and keep it moving forward as one of the main focuses.
A point of comparison between the Parable of the Sower and my story is the disintegration of society, with the central protagonist simply trying to do their best to survive, and making considerable positive impacts along the way.
As Butler said in an interview in 2000 at Balticon 34, part of her inspiration for writing is that you can make stories where “the world is a little bit more as you wish it were in some way.” For her, she always read fantastic stories about space-prince saviours and super high-tech cyborgs, but she never found herself in these stories. So she started to write those stories from her point of view as a source of empowerment. I am seeking to do the same thing. I read the news on a daily basis, and try to learn as much about our society in an attempt to make it more just and equitable. However, that very same process often leaves me feeling weak, small, defeated, and like a part of the problem against my own will. The main character of my book, Lideri, goes through the same process of seeing problems in his society, trying in vain to try and change it over and over again, eventually falling into a defeatist and apathetic attitude towards himself and others with the same problems. Eventually, he sees the error of his ways and learns the value of patience, persistence, collaboration, and humility.
I have about 20 pages written in my first draft (probably about 5% of the final story length) if anyone wants to check it out and give me some feedback!
To go into detail about SD concepts I weave into my story:
-A “new” society develops as an offshoot of the protagonist’s village. This new society closer resembles our current consumerist culture, whereas all the other villages are simple agropastoralists. This new society is suspended off the side of the steep cliff on the edge of the plateau. They do this for defence purposes and to flex their impressive technological capacities. However, the society grows too quickly and unchecked, and eventually crumbles off the edge of the plateau at the end of the story.
-This new society increases hunting and harvesting for the purpose of technological improvement and fashion rather than sustenance.
-I try to show the viewpoint of the animals on the plateau as well as the people. In fact, the first chapter of my book is from the point of view of a boar. (I tend to think about Ceremony, and Tayo’s adventure to retrieve his uncle’s cattle during this point. Specifically the part about the mountain lion which helps lead Tayo, and lures away the ranch hands that capture Tayo. The way the ranchers view nature, and the way Tayo comes to understand nature is a dynamic I want to include in my story).
-I will try to add in concepts such as slow violence, generational effects, delayed environmental degradation. (as much environmental science as possible)
-There are aspects of cultural clashes, bubbling almost to the point of genocide.
-I will try to construct a history of the villages present in the plateau, to show how their historical precedents and cultural values allowed for the conditions which lead to this new consumptive and hegemonic society.
I’ll leave it here, because if I go into any more detail, I will inevitably start rambling.
“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”
This quote is from Rachel Carson’s novel Silent Spring and I chose it to be at the heart of my creative response. I have always felt strongly about how mankind has looked down upon everything around them. I was raised to think this way, with no fault to my parents of course, that is how they were raised and that is how their parents before them were raised. We have been taught how to dominate over nature and also, other humans. We are raised in a system that eats up the Earth’s resources and eats up less fortunate people. We take these resources and create plastics and metals and poisons that we then bury back into the Earth so it can continue to infect and kill organisms. Usually we are unaware of the lethality of the things we make, we are too focused on the immediate satisfaction of killing an insect or a weed that we don’t take the time to research what we are eating and breathing.
Silent Spring is one of my favorite books because Rachel Carson is not afraid to write the truth and tell it to as many people as she can. I remember when I read it I was agreeing with everything that she was saying, but also horrified that we as a people would allow these things to happen right in front of us. We asked for it, and we still do in many places, but more often than not we just turn a blind eye to the whole situation and hope someone else will step in to fix the problem of pollution.
My creative response is a painting of a forest scene with toxins running all throughout it, killing the wildlife. I wanted the toxins to represent human actions and the forest scene to represent nature. What we do as humans affects every aspect of nature in devastating ways, and as long as we are producing these pollutants, nature is going to suffer.
“White European can’t say,
‘Oh, that Aborigine no good.’
Might be that Aborigine alright.
Man can’t growl at Aborigine,
Aborigine can’t growl at white European.
Because both ways.
Might be both good men,
might be both no good.
You never know.
So you should get understand yourself.
No matter Aborigine or white European.”
– Bill Neidjie
This poem (He can’t Move His Country) from the collection of Bill Neidjie connected with me in a way that made me think about the ways in which we sense our belonging. Before our ability to travel great distances, humans remained in the areas or within the barriers of the continent they were born on. This stationary style of living created a sense of connection to the land which over time influenced stories of the land and for the people who inhabited it. Bill Neidjie seems to tie in to his poems the importance of Aborigine practices that created mutualistic relationships between man and nature. In the poem above, the ending he says that it is important to find and understand yourself no matter what kind of person you are. This quote is what gave me the idea to paint a picture for my creative response. Taking a canvas, I hope to create an image that combines the connection man has to the land he is born on as well as how his practices benefit it. I am aiming to include both Aborigine practices of land use as well as European practices.
The creative response that I have formulated can be considered to portray elements of how human rights abuses have been perpetrated amongst indigenous, aboriginal and native people through uranium mining, nuclear weapon testing, and radiation exposure. The creative response connects with the texts of Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, and Gagudju Man by Bill Neidjie. Each connection with text is illustrated through symbolic images within the creative response, which was created from sketches using pencils, pens, and crayons on a sheet of resumé paper. Additionally, the represented themes from the text combine with images inspired by other creative works by Jimmy Pike’s painting, Two Men at a Waterhole (1986), and Parks Reece’s painting, One Night Near the Nuclear Plant.
The textual connections are both explicitly obvious within the drawing, but some require a closer visual assessment to depict underlying messages that relate to the author’s themes. To begin, Bill Neidjie’s yam is included in the foreground. The significance of the yam is dependent upon the viewers perspective, but the yam was included to connect with the following quote, “You leaving hole. You killing yam. You killing yourself. You hang onto your country. That one I fight for” (25). Bill Neidjie understood respect of the land, and how continued care for the soil and crop produced sustainable harvests for years in the future. Yet, the yam is starkly contrasted by the depiction of a uranium mine on the bottom left of the creative response, where the land was not cared for, where the hole was left uncovered.
Furthermore, the majority of the creative response significance connects with Ceremony, which effectively portrays one of the ways in which native land has been stolen and abused with the nuclear testing done at the Trinity Site as explained by Tayo’s grandma on page 228, “Strongest thing on this earth. Biggest explosion that ever happened…”. Additionally, on the wolf’s back, there is pictured a uranium atom underneath the Eye of Providence. Both can be used in combination to represent the white man’s idolatry of science, power, and money, in addition to how the white man could be considered to have been manipulated by witchery with the quote, “…they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought” (177-178). Lastly, Parable of the Sower connects with the quote, “Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba – or like a cancer. Chaos” (26). Despite the chaotic nature of the creative response, I hope that the perceived mixed emotions can lead to an ongoing personal pursuit of understanding regarding human rights and the future sustainability of the land and its people.
On the first day of class, myself and the other students were asked to describe where we feel our strongest “sense of place”. This concept was something I honestly never put much thought into. What did that mean? What did it mean to me? What does it mean to sustainable development? Why is a sense of place important to us? I haven’t quite figured out the answer to those questions yet, but this semester helped me think them through. My creative response is my version of my own “sense of place”. Throughout the semester, this theme has been prevalent in Thoreau’s Walden, Silko’s Ceremony, Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and A Day, Neidjie’s work, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. All of these stories represent how strong our place and home are integrated within our identity and vice versa. Additionally, sense of place and our identities often come into play with how we respond to change in our homes or where we have that strong identity with a place.
Such strong identity with the land, environment, and home is most obvious in Ceremony and Bill Neidjie’s Gagudju Man. The indigenous cultures discussed in both represent strong relationships with the environment and land the main character/writer have had throughout their lives. Both discuss the land as something they have grew up having a relationship with and a sense of kinship with. Neidjie equates the land he lives on as family, and Tayo, in Ceremony has such a strong, sensual relationship with the land through Ts’eh. Through both of these strong, significant relationships with land, we see aspects of their identity develop: Neidjie as an advocate for his rights, his community’s rights, and the land’s rights, and Tayo as he sorts out his struggles as a veteran with PTSD struggling with the traumas of losing his mother, Josiah, and reclaiming his identity as a Native American. Land and place are so explicitly tied with our identity, and Bill Neidjie and Tayo are just two examples. Henry David Thoreau was exploring his identity as a transcendentalist, a non-conformist and individualist at his cabin at Walden Pond through his experiences with the land and the seasons there; Saro-Wiwa was an activist for his land and community in Nigeria; Lauren, in Parable of the Sower, must come to terms with losing her home and what her community once was before economic, political, and climatic catastrophe that ravaged her home city.
Sense of place and how that shapes and influences our identity is an important concept in sustainability because it shapes how we view and value the environment around us. Our attachments to a place may be reason for our need to protect or conserve it. For me, my sense of place is all over, but I feel connected to the places and land I call home. I chose to make a booklet of photographs of some of the places that mean the most to me as a person and have shaped my identity. Most of them come from the relationships I had there, the things I experienced there, and the landscapes themselves.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed. Permanence is incompatible with a predatory attitude which rejoices in the fact that ‘what were luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us.”
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 34
My creative response is a collage I created using old magazines, newspapers, and random paper clippings. Modge Podge created the glue, and the poster I used was made in 2017 for a walk-out held by Divest Appalachian after Trump was elected. The first magazine I went through led me to first cut-out “Who does this to people?” and “Villainous Ideologies”, which began the theme of what I wanted to address. What’s being done? What have we been doing? How is our world interacting within itself? Who, or what is dominating? I was keen to cut out words and images that made me think of common themes in our society and our globalized world’s influence verses the influence of the less-invasive environment around us. This influence is of capitalist, patriarchal, and magnate manifestation.
The poster is supposed to engage you to think about what is done to people and earth. Very broad, but it considers actions, essences, and entities that have an influence on people. The top represents nature; its beauty and pureness and mindfulness. It provides us with medicine, food, shelter, survival, happiness, clarity, resiliency, perspective, and being. Also tools, fuel, sustenance, curiosity, reflection, and natural consequences. It holds infinite benefits and ecosystem services which we know hold a link to our existence and the health of the environment correlates with our welfare as dependent earthlings. We need the earth to survive yet we are constantly battling with it, suppressing it, and irreplaceably damaging it. The gradual flow downward begins a pretty distinct line of the good of the earth transitioning to the actions and creation of man, capitalism, and disconnected living. Many of the phrases and images held positive connotations in the media I was searching, but the meaning they convey only aids in supporting the ideals of a disparate society. The poster is majority comprised of visuals that corroborate the anthropogenic lifestyle which is intrusive to nature, exploitive of its resources and benefits, and fuels the competitive hostility between humans (racism, sexism, bigotry etc.).
All of our texts could be applied in some fashion, but I decided to respond to Schumacher and his work which emphasizes the value of nature while addressing man’s bureaucratic tendencies which embed violence and destruction in society. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful addresses modern production and explores the ways in which humans have fabricated wants to become needs and consumerism’s role in the realm of human and nature interaction, bringing pollution and irreversible effects. “Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side” (Schumacher, 14). This helps begin to express how man is intrusive to nature on a more radical scale than nature is intrusive to man in current time. Nature responds to us and our actions however the human response to nature is bred on greed and desire for more, expressed with violence and extractive measures that literally rape the planet. We do things to the earth that no other being can! Schumacher attributes the structure and values of our economic system to the dehumanization of society and destruction of nature.
[pg. 108-109 “Man, whether civilized or savage…his civilization declines.”]
For my creative response I chose to respond to Ceremony and, more specifically, the ways in which Tayo’s view of the New Mexico landscape differs from the white people’s overall view; I chose to focus more on their view as it pertains to uranium as I found it interesting that Tayo reached his final conclusions about his ceremony after stumbling upon the uranium mine.
“But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.” (229)
The painting I created is of two separate views, meant to appear like they are being seen from binoculars since each binocular lens shows a slightly different image that are supposed to create a combined, three dimensional image when viewed at the same time by the same person. Since the audience is viewing such different perceptions of this particular scene in New Mexico, the images appear nothing alike, showing the discord between Tayo and white people. The left image, painted in grey scale, is fragmented by bright yellow veins of uranium running through the mountain. This is meant to highlight the importance of uranium and other money-making ventures over appreciating nature in its own right. The left image also lacks the texture of the right image, which is a visual representation of how environmental degradation decreases heterogeneity in nature, thus reducing its richness and texture. The following quote is what inspired me to represent this loss through texture: “In the twenties and thirties the loggers had come, and they stripped the canyons below the rim and cut great clearings on the plateau slopes… The loggers shots the bears and mountain lions for sport. And it was then the Laguna people understood that the land had been taken…” (172).
The two images are situated on top of the star formation described by Betonie in Gallup. The images are placed among the stars to show that they have a deeper context within the painting and the world. Stars and space may often make us feel small and transient, but they also have the potential to make us feel important through recognition of the extremely unlikely chance that we even exist at all. This painting asks the audience to question what the stars make them feel. Betonie’s stars are important because they mark the beginning of a journey of self-discovery for Tayo, allowing him to finish his ceremony on his own and hopefully heal from his pain after the war. I tried to represent many of the main themes that appeared during Tayo’s journey, navigating his changed world while living alongside “wickedness” caused by the Native American curse on white people. My image represents many things, and remains somewhat vague so the audience can hopefully see what was most important to them in Ceremony.
For my creative response, I made a yarn wall hanging/weaving. It is meant to represent the environmental degradation leading up to the eerie “silent spring” referred to in chapter one of Silent Spring; “A Fable For Tomorrow”. I wanted to represent the theme of the interconnectedness of nature as well as the damages nature suffers as a result of human thoughtlessness. As Carson says in the opening chapter, “The people had done it themselves.” (pg 3).
Carson warns about the impacts of chemical pesticides on nature and that it is foolish to believe that we humans can manipulate nature with no repercussions. She deeply recognizes nature as a complex system and therefore, is more deeply saddened by the carelessness with which humans often regard the environment.
“The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.”(pg 64)
Man has broken his relationship with nature by taking no precautions to protect her when she has done nothing but given man life. This weaving is a demonstration of this relationship between humans and nature being broken down until ultimately, life ends in a silent spring. All of this, as the result of human disregard for the protection of the environment and arrogant notion that nature is something to be tamed.
The braids and weavings on the left side of the hanging are meant to represent the intricacies and essential relationships which make up our ecosystem. The degradation of different ecological elements such as the soil, migratory birds, plant life, rivers, seas are discussed at length in this book and, it is made clear, their destruction is inevitable. The colors and different weavings and textures are meant to represent the different forms of life and intricacies within. The way the hanging becomes more mangled and less colorful and intricate, is meant to represent the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecological elements due to human lack of appreciation and regard for the complexity and beauty that is life.
My creative response is a painting based on Bill Neidjie’s Gagudju Man. There is a boulder with a crack in it, with a tree behind it that has been cut down. A figure that represents Bill Neidjie sits next to them. The boulder and tree are both bleeding where they are harmed, and Neidjie’s heart is bleeding too. On page 40 he says “If you feel sore, headache, sore body, that mean somebody killing tree or grass.” This also relates to Octavia Butler’s concept of hyperempathy, where Lauren cannot help but feel the pain of others that she observes in pain. A key difference here though is that for Neidjie this pain is experienced in a more complex understanding of space and time, where the pain may not come immediately, and also does not have to come from direct visual or auditory observation of another being’s pain. It also is different in that for Neidjie, some of the beings he feels with would be considered more as objects to Lauren, such as a tree or the earth.
The whole image is made up of dots to represent the way that Neidjie describes himself to be made of the land on page 30: “We need this earth to live because we’ll be dead, we’ll become earth.” I made the dots out of the head of a screw because it happened to be the perfect size that I needed, but also to juxtapose this object that could be seen as a symbol of development with the image of land and nature. This also brings up the question of what counts as nature. I would rather read this not as the land being made up of a symbol of development, but as a kind of representation of how settlers need to realize how we are affecting the land, and how we will also be affected if we are made up of the same stuff of it. On page 39 Neidjie says “I feel it with my body, with my blood. Feeling all these trees, all this country. When this wind blow you can feel it. Same for country, You feel it. You can look. But feeling… that make you.” Here it seems that Neidjie is speaking to settlers to feel, especially with the part about looking, because we often value what we can see as the ultimate truth but don’t even take the time to feel or experience.
Overall the point of this piece is to bring attention to how all of the aspects of the painting are connected and to visually represent the shared feeling with the land that Neidjie describes.
For this project, I decided to focus on the theme of man’s relationship with nature. This theme was common in readings throughout the semester, but especially in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Both of these books emphasized the importance for man to connect to nature and how a developed sense of place can impact one’s life and mindset. Ceremony focuses on the connection Tayo has to his homeland and his journey to self-discovery through that connection. Tayo learns to respect nature and its patterns as the novel progresses. He learns that people have to respect the earth in order to maintain a healthy balance within themselves as well as with the natural elements. Walden takes a similar approach in terms of personal development through nature and viewing nature as a gateway to personal enlightenment.
I decided to emphasize the importance of sense of place discussed in Ceremony and Walden for my project. Growing up in Boone has given me a unique attachment to the mountains and has heavily influenced who I am today – specifically in my decision to major in sustainable development. I used photographs I have taken over the years that I think emphasize my experience growing up in Appalachia (as well as a few photos taken in other mountain regions). These photos remind me of the importance of respecting and protecting the places that we love and feel connected to.
“From that time one, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.” (pg. 228)
This quote is what inspired me to create my collage. In particular, the phrase “circle of death” is what began to illustrate the image for me and it expanded from there. I think it also parallels the writings of Bill Neidjie and reminded me especially of one of his quotes I used in a previous weekly discussion question. Neidjie states that “White European can’t say, ‘Oh, that Aborigine no good.’ Might be that Aborigine alright. Man can’t growl at Aborigine, Aborigine can’t growl at white European. Because both ways. Might be both good men, might be both no good. You never know” (pg. 21). Instead of concentrating more so on the “might be both no good” portion, I wanted to center on the good of both men in light of the passage from Ceremony. The centerpiece of the collage is a racially ambiguous man on his knees held within a red tissue paper circle or “circle of death” and the man is peering out into the images of death and destruction held within the circle, all of which are from the infamous LA Riots.
As a film nerd, I made a couple of connections between readings throughout this semester and films I really appreciate. The first of the films is a 1971 film called Walkabout. The film follows two white children who have been abandoned in the Australian Outback after their father attempts to kill them and then turns the gun on himself. Being from the city, the two kids struggle to find proper, food, and shelter until they are met by an aboriginal boy who is currently on his walkabout as an initiation to become a man. There are certainly quite a few flaws in this film but I think A.O. Scott of The New York Times says it best in his Critics’ Picks video on the film in which he states “it condemns the brutality of western civilization, while celebrating the nobility and vitality of native people.” Bill Neidjie’s work has helped me shape a new perspective of this film and points like this one made by Scott. Furthermore, the scene shown in the New York Times video where the young boy motions to his mouth and makes the glugging sound reminds me of the Jimmy Pike quote provided in the course presentation on Bill Neidjie which states “The Queen never bin fugging walk around here. Bring her here and I’ll ask her: ‘All right, show me all the waterholes.’”
The second fill I included in the collage, and more prominently, is easily one of my favorite films, 2011’s The Tree of Life. The film doesn’t necessarily follow a linear storyline throughout but the parts that it does follows a young boy who struggles with the relationship of his father who relies heavily on discipline. The film flashes between his young self and his now adult self who is now experiencing something of an existential crisis. The film is intertwined with beautiful shots of nature and a depiction of the creation of the universe. I believe this was the filmmaker, Terrence Malick, attempting to convey our interconnectedness with nature and the creation of our universe. I’ve included some of the more beautiful shots in my collage. I could attempt to make every connection to our course readings to delve into our interconnectedness to nature but that is quite a time commitment and I’ll settle to say it’s easily an overarching theme of this course. Overall, this is basically just a long winded movie suggestion. Go watch it.
For my creative response I drew from our readings from “Parable of the Sower” as well as the words of Bill Neidjie. I created a collage, different pictures, all of “non-living” or “non-human” things such as trees, wildflowers, mountains, animals, etc. I was inspired by the conversation in class that we all had about empathy and the emphasis that Octavia Butler and Neidjie both put on empathy in their writing. Octavia Butler mentions hyper empathy, burdening her main character with a disorder in which she shares the physical pain of those around her.
“Tree and grass same thing
They grow with your body,
With your feeling.
If you feel sore,
headache, sore body,
that mean somebody killing tree or
grass.
You feel
because your body in that tree or
earth.
Our story is in the land.
It is written in those sacred places.
I feel it with my body,
with my blood.
Feeling all these trees,
all this country…”
In the words of Bill Neidjie, we do share empathy with other beings rather than only human beings. He explains that we are the trees and the soil, that we come from the land therefore we feel what the land feels. In the context of my project, I included the words of Bill Neidjie as well as Octavia Butler, intended to make the audience consider what it would be like if the norm consisted of humans considering the feelings of the land and possibly even physical pain that “non-living” things may have to endure. If humans started to feel empathy towards the land, could one imagine how things could change? And in the words of Octavia Butler,
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.”
The impacts of humans have been felt for centuries and will continue to be felt, if this idea of humans sharing empathy with beings other than humans was to be accepted, imagine the change that would take place.
I chose to do a multi-media visual project for my creative response – I incorporated photos that I took with two linoleum block prints that I created, as well as several leaves that I pressed. The photos, which I took out in the forest on the Blackburn Trust, were intentionally chosen because they incorporate both a high density of tree-matter and human-matter (however that is to be understood). I also chose to do the two block prints as a representation of a leaf that I found on campus and my own hand. This was inspired directly by Bill Neidjie’s stanza “But that leaf,/he pumping, growing/growing into the night,” from his piece “Land.” This to me suggested that the leaf is a dynamic and expressive part of the tree, and so in comparing the bodies of trees and humans I felt that a hand would be the most appropriate corresponding image. Hands are also often our first interface of physical interaction with a tree (aside from other sensory modes like seeing the tree, or perhaps hearing it).
I decided to consider trees and our relationships with trees as the primary focus of this project because trees are a prominent “non-human” paradigm (so to speak), whose existences are highly entangled with our own. I have also spent much of this semester (and the previous semester) developing what I consider a more active relationship with trees, where I do more than just see them or climb them. Many of the authors that we have discussed have written about trees in the course of their considerations of place and being, but I chose specifically to focus on Bill Neidjie and E.F. Schumacher.
In “Small is Beautiful,” E.F. Schumacher specifically emphasizes the teachings of Buddha in relation to trees, saying on page 63 that “The teachings of the Buddha… enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also… to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established…”. He then goes on to talk about the “genuine economic development independent of foreign aid,” that this would cause. He is connecting with trees on a spiritual level by incorporating Buddhist teachings, but he seems to be primarily interested in their advantageous use for economic development. This goal of sustainable economic use for trees is echoed in several of the forestry-related classes that App offers, and has been one of my primary method of engaging with trees. In the most physical way, chopping firewood and felling trees for sustainable harvest seems to fall under this category. While this is in no way invalid, I was interested in exploring in this response the differences between approaches that see trees simply as resources and approaches with other understandings.
Bill Neidjie says in “Land” that “I feel it with my body,/with my blood./Feeling all these trees,/all this country.” By “feeling all these trees,” he is extending an emotional, or intuitive, or empathetic approach to trees. Or perhaps something different than any of those concepts. For me, the point is that Neidjie clearly has a different relationship with trees than Schumacher does, who suggests in the quote above that trees don’t have sentience. This seems to stand in contrast to Neidjie’s idea that “Feeling make you./Out there is open space,/he coming through your body./Look while he blow and feel with your body;/because tree is just about your brother or father/and tree is watching you.” This quote specifically connects human and tree bodies together, uses familial language, says that the tree is watching. This is a main reason that I chose to specifically focus on bodies in this creative response (the images of tree bodies, human bodies, overlapping). I thought that it was also interested to note that scientific knowledges are beginning to “discover” that trees are highly sensory and have networks of interaction between each other. For scientists to “discover” these things suggests that these are new developments, never before known. Yet Bill Neidjie clearly already knows that trees can see him, as I’m sure that many different kinds of people and peoples all over the world can. Trees grow in many places.
“Dark and foreboding, I float upon a wave; the life I touch most often dies.
Some from the poison in each kiss I gave; my burning fumes can blind their eyes.
Others I seek out with viscous tendrils; suffocate, smother, I steal their breath,
Pour sticky darkness into their gills; wash them ashore on a sea of death.
On Pelicans, otters and seals I prey; hold them tight in my tarry embrace,
On nearby beaches by the thousands they lay; shivering, wretched in their dying place.
If you light me on fire, toxic smoke fills the sky; now let me ask you, what am I?” (Rose Whelan)
“That search for oil has caused severe land and food shortages in Ogoni, one of the most densely populated areas of Africa (average 1,500 per square mile; national average 300 per square mile). That neglectful environmental pollution laws and sub-standard inspection techniques of the federal authorities have led to the complete degradation of the Ogoni environment turning our homeland into an ecological disaster” (Saro-Wiwa, Page 47-48).
I was drawn to write about oil because I was looking up emotionally-moving pictures by national geographic and half of the photos were of animals and beaches covered in oil. Oil gives us fuel, but leaves our oceans and environments destroyed. I chose this picture above because the colors are oddly beautiful, but the scene is heartbreaking; an ocean on fire. This picture relates to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month And A Day & Letters, because the oil companies were essentially the root of all issues for the Ogoni people. Like stated in the poem above, oil spreads like poison, it kills so much wildlife that almost nothing is left in its wake. There is a saying with oil that “where you drill, you spill”, accidents are going to happen no matter what and communities such as the Ogoni are stuck amid it solely because of their location. They have no say in what happens to their lands because of the strong corporations and the Nigerian military dictatorship working hand in hand. Even over the course of my lifetime I have been able to see the negative effects humans have had on the environment, oil spills touch my heart deeply because I love the ocean, and I love to fish. I want to protect our environment and oceans so future generations have the chance to go fishing like I did. So, to reduce this issue we need to find alternative energy sources, rather than being so reliant on oil as a source of energy, because the extraction/transportation/and use of oil is all negatively impacting the environment. As an SD student I have the education to change the future for the better in terms of the environment, and one way I help now is by reducing my oil usage by riding my bike and walking/jogging places instead of driving my car. I ride the bus as a last resort when the weather is too bad to get places by my own means. We can all make a difference
“Contrary to the belief that there are no indigenous people in black Africa, our research shows that the fate of such groups such as Zangon Kataf and Ogoni in Nigeria are, in essence, no different from those of the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand and the Indians of North and South America. Their common history is of usurpation of their land and resources, the destruction of their culture and eventual decimation of the people. Indigenous people often do not realize what is happening to them until it is too late. More often than not, they are the victims of the actions of greedy outsiders” (Saro-Wiwa, 90)
The first media that I chose to write about is a YouTube video I found that relates to the quote from Ken Saro-Wiwa above, in particular the first minute of this video. In the first minute the man being interviewed talks about how large companies have come onto his land and taken all of his resources for centuries now. He states that now his land is completely destroyed and that he is left with nothing. What is happening to this community is the same thing that is happening to the Ogoni people. Indigenous people are being taken advantage of because of their resources and given almost nothing in return. People are forced off of the land that they have lived on for centuries so that big companies can destroy the land and move on., Even if there is monetary compensation for the land that they have destroyed this does not change the fact that you are destroying peoples homes. The video goes on to show the destruction of the Papa New Guinea’s land. It explains that when the indigenous people first signed over their land they were forced into it and did not know what they were signing because they had no education. These people have been suffering for decades at the hand of big business.
“But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?…A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all”(Butler, 115)
The Second media I chose to display is one that revolves around the idea of hyperempathy that was talked about in Octavia Butler’s book, The Parable of the Sower. I chose to find pictures of human destruction that is occurring on the earth, such as mining, carbon dioxide production, and pollution by way of litter. I paired these pictures with feelings that humans can have or pain that can be caused to them. For instance, I paired the picture of mining with a cut on a man’s arm to symbolize the way we are harming our earth. This representation allows us to see exactly how our earth would feel if it had human emotions and allows us to relate more easily. I think Butler was right in the quote that she wrote above. If we could feel other people’s pain, or the earths pain, who would do harm? If we stop to think about how our actions would affect another human being, and put ourselves in their shoes, I think the world would be a different place
In this creative response assignment I wanted to create something that touched base on the course themes of the connection between identity and place, the passage of wisdom from one generation to the next, storytelling, and connection to the natural world. Going off these themes I decide I would create something using the skills and knowledge I have gained from hanging out with my grandfather in his small woodworking shop. My grandfather is a talented woodworker and when I was a teenager he taught me some of the basics of wood carving. He showed me the various gouges, the different types of wood best suited for fine detailed carving, the finished and paints you can use, how to hold the knife and gouges correctly etc.
While researching what to carve that would both connect to course readings and my own personal identity I ran across the symbolic meaning of the Raven in Native American Pacific Northwest lore. Raven is a creature that symbolizes metamorphosis, and symbolizes change/transformation. Moreover to Native peoples of the pacific northwest Raven Tales were creation stories of how there people came to be. These raven tales give us a glimpse of the customs and life of a people who depend on and respect their environment. Tribes of the Northwest coast include the Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl, Makah and Quileute-Hoh, and the Coast Salish (to name a few). They were and still are closely connected to both forest and sea.
One of these many Raven stories describes the creation of the Sun:
“Before Raven came, the earth was dark and cold. When he saw people living without shadows, he began a search for light. He finds it at the house of Sky Chief, who does not want to share it. Raven changes himself into a pine needle and floats down into the water that Sky Chief’s daughter is drinking. In her stomach, he turns into a baby, to Sky Chief’s delight. When the baby asks for and receives the shiny ball in the box, he turns back into Raven and flies into the sky, placing the ball where all may enjoy it”.
How does this connect to me? Obviously I am not a Native to this region and make no attempt to try and pretend I am. However, I was born in the Pacific North West and feel very connected to the forest and the sea of that area, deforestation in this region saddens me and is one of the reasons I have gotten interested in SD over the last couple of years. So In context and inspiration of this semesters course readings I set out to carve a Pacific Northwest inspired Raven head. To me this connection between using the knowledge I learned from my grandfather and the carving of this Raven head connects myself to identity and place, the passage of wisdom from one generation to the next, storytelling as a means of connection to community and self, and respect of the natural world.
For my creative response I was inspired by our reading of the “Parable of the Sower”. This book resonated with me because while I enjoy dystopian and apocalypse stories. I was reminded of the raging wildfires that are happening in California right now. I have been reading about the fires on the news and the book captures how vulnerable a state like California is to fire. I have rarely painted anything but decided I would take this opportunity to try it out again. My painting is of the city of Olivar with ocean on one side and fire on the other and in the background. I chose to paint Olivar because it is described as place people desire to go. With outside investment from companies from countries such as Japan, Canada, and Germany the nonexistent environmental regulations are very appealing to these businesses. In the book many people go into debt to move and work for the company in return for security. In the background of my painting is fire where I imagine Robledo would be either before or after it burned down. I noticed that fire was a pervasive aspect of “Parable of the Sower” with it being ever present in most scenes of the book. Lauren described in one section where it does rain that it had not rained in the previous 6 years. So I wanted fire to be present in my painting as well as the ocean that has risen and is threatening to destroy coastal cities. My painting shows environmental destruction on a large scale drawn to the best of my ability. On the left side the ocean is threatening to engulf part of the city. In the sky I have the moon and Mars drawn to represent the place Lauren, earthseed, and many other people long to be. Off of the messed up planet. As a student and reasonable person I hope that this kind of destruction of environmental processes never occurs, however, I like this book because it describes a reality that is not that hard to imagine happening. Actually, it is a very real possibility and this realization could help people plan better for the future and be more ecologically conscious. Book like this are a good reminder for me what we are working to avert as Sustainable Development students.
In the Bill Neidjie poem entitled Law our author tells us how interconnected we as humans are to the lands that we came from. The first time I read this poem I was astonished by Neidjie’s dedication to honoring his lands. Our author tells us that when drought comes, every animal is affected the same:
“People look for food,
animal look for food.
Lizard look,
bird look,
anyone look.
We all same.”
Bill Neidjie tells us that the rains are important, everything comes from the rains that fall on the land. Neidjie says that rain is good for everything, the creatures small and big, in the waters and on land.
“Rain for us, for anybody.
Rain give us everything new.
Yarn, fish, everything.”
Our author tells us that the rains come in the wet season and go away in the dry season because it is the law, and when the rains come everything flourishes, they bring yams and fruits and honey.
This inspired me to paint this little landscape of the rain in a the flourishing valley.
Neidjie ends the poem by talking about the frill-necked lizard and how he spoiled the sacred ceremony. Our author says that the frill-necked lizard was cursed from that point on to be skinny and ugly because of his disrespect to the ceremony: Ubarr.
“You know frill-neck lizard?
He look funny.
Used to be good smooth animal.
He was man. He done something wrong.
Look ugly now … skinny leg, arm,
big one ear, frill-neck.
What he done?
Break law.”
I think Neidjie’s Law is a great representation of how we should all feel about our environments. We should treat them with as much respect as we treat our elders and ancestors, because Neidjie says that we all came from and will return to the Earth in the end.
Neidjie basically says we should treat our lands right not only because we need them to give us food, we should treat them right because they made us. and this is the law.
I knew as soon as the creative response was explained that I wanted to create my own rendition of one of the god-like women featured in the poems within Silko’s book, Ceremony. I ended up choosing Reed Woman, or Iktoa’ak’o’ya. I chose to use pencil and watercolor as my medium. The poem that she is mentioned in portrays her as being directly connected with nature and its ecological systems. She is said to have always been taking a bath and relaxing rather than working or being “productive.” Her behavior frustrated Corn Woman, and when she acted upon her frustrations Reed Woman disappears; causing crops to die. Reed Woman’s peace of mind is correlated with the health and success of the nature around her.
This message can also be interpreted in a more ecological way, which is another reason I was so drawn to a focus on Reed Woman. Corn Woman believed that Reed Woman did not do anything and that she was lazy but in reality something as simple as her peace of mind maintained the functionality of nature. I immediately connected this with the fragility of nature and the ecosystems that comprise it. The smallest alterations made to the systems, such as losing or gaining a species within a food chain, can totally throw off an ecosystem.
For instance, when an invasive species comes in it takes over and alters the way that ecosystem functions. The introduction of just one new species has the potential to cause the extinction and/or relocation of another. There are also a lot of anthropogenic activities which we humans do not think too far into that have huge impacts on surrounding ecosystems. One example is the nitrogen run-off from large scale chicken farms. The influx of nitrogen that enters waterways causes algal blooms which take oxygen away from the fish causing them to die off. The smallest changes in or around an ecosystem can have a huge impact on its functionality.
Out of the texts we’ve read this semester, I feel most drawn to Olivia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Perhaps because it’s the first climate change novel I’ve read, or because it is more specifically told from the perspective of a girl close to my age, or because I truly see its happenings as a possibility in our real future, I’m not sure. But, in combination with the current political climate and the slew of record breaking natural disasters, reading Parable of the Sower only increased my curiosity, frustration, and passion for the world and Sustainable Development. My creative assignment, a mixed media poster of sorts, aims to reflect concepts of the interconnectedness between humans and nature as expressed by Rachel Carson and Bill Neidjie, particularly with regard to our role in climate change in avoiding a society as depicted in Olivia Butler’s novel.
I used a combination of natural and manufactured materials including paint, pastels, paper, coffee grounds, and leaves. I wanted the background mimic the chaos and violence of fire, a recurring theme in Parable of the Sower, to represent climate change’s potential for destruction, comparable in speed and extent. It surrounds a representation a human head silhouette, as well as trees and city skyline to highlight that everything will be impacted if we do not make drastic changes. The skyline is a representation of “modern” society. I layered it over the leaves of the hair and below the idyllic scene and hourglass to signify its dependence on nature. Additionally, it is highly exposed to the flames to signify both its contributions and vulnerability to climate change.
I chose to make the face figure a central part of the piece to signify that we are the cause and must also be the solution to climate change and its consequences. I made the hair out of leaves to represent humanity’s dependence on and general relationship with the environment, keeping in mind this quote by Bill Neidjie:
“Tree and grass same thing
They grow with your body,
With your feeling.
If you feel sore,
headache, sore body,
that mean somebody killing tree or
grass.
You feel
because your body in that tree or
earth.
Our story is in the land.
It is written in those sacred places.
I feel it with my body,
with my blood.
Feeling all these trees,
all this country…”
As Neidjie says here, we are the land, and as we kill it, we kill ourselves—even if its not obvious in our daily lives. One critical thing we often forget is that fundamentally, we are animals, and thus we are no more protected than any other species against climate change, give or take a few technological bandaids. With business as usual, we will destroy ourselves and any hope for the survival of humanity. Is that too dramatic?
Where the face should be, I painted a vibrant, lively image of an ideal scenic view. This part is inspired by a quote from Olivia Butler, “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back…People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back” (57). I like this quote because it speaks to the copious ignorance in response to climate change, which I feel is exacerbated by the fact that most places are not yet experiencing climate change (even though they may acknowledge that the weather is “weird” or some might even say…“extreme”).
Similarly, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson says, “We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard.” With the background, this scene in my picture is meant to represent the disconnect between regions that have yet to see impacts of climate change and those that are concurrently experiencing disastrous consequences. Additionally, it can symbolize a future where these scenes are only in our minds, such as in the world described by Olivia Butler. The water flows into an hourglass filling quickly, representing that the resources we carelessly exploit are not renewable, and will one day run out. The hourglass is almost full to portray the fact that we are running out of time.
In the end, I hope this picture is a reflection of a time when we responded promptly and efficiently to a huge wake up call instead of a memory in the midst of Olivia Butler’s 2024.
The issue of placing victimhood onto native peoples that have or have not been colonized is critiqued in sustainable development, as is the issue of generalizing diverse groups of people as “natives”, lumping them all together into one foreign term or concept, their knowledge being disregarded as primitive and useless for our “modern” ways. Bill Neidjie’s Gagudju Man engages with elements of this issue, teaching his people’ ways of knowing and the urgency in which this knowledge; deep connection and care for the earth, should be passed down as earth is being destroyed more so than ever before. My creative response to Bill Neidjie’s Gagudju Man is based on “I Give You This Story” and “Land”. I referenced several lines, in my response, from these poems, mostly from these stanzas:
People.
they can’t listen for us.
They just listen for money.
Money. (30)
Goanna is dead
because they cutting its body off us,
cutting our mother’s belly,
grandpa’s bones.
They squash him up.
No good,
And carve up our earth.
No good. (31)
We come from earth, bones.
We go to earth, ashes. (31)
I wrote a poem titled “in noxóchiuh in nocuícauh” translating to “this flower of mine this song of mine”, which is a metaphor for a poem in Nahautl. I must note I am no poet, my attempt was mostly out of how much Neidjie’s poems have made me think about my own culture and roots. Neidjie being the last surviving speaker of the Gaagudju language has made me reflect on my own mother tongue, Nahautl. This was the language of the Aztec Empire, vernacular since the 7th century up until the 16th-century Spanish conquest. I, however, do not speak this language, neither does my mother, nor did my mother’s mother, but my great-grandmother knew short phrases and words that she would mix into her Spanish. I also am unaware of what dialect she or my ancestors spoke, but I was surprised to find out that about 1.5 million people in Mexico still speak it today, with many dialects still being used. Knowing this also saddened me as I realize this number will only dwindle as older generations die and younger ones are not taught. This, alongside many other factors, such as the massacre of Aztec people that drastically decreased the number of speakers and the burning of their histories by the Spaniards, being forcefully replaced by the Latin alphabet and Spanish, has contributed to this decline.
In this poem, I aimed to incorporate Bill Neidjie’s poems, my own cultural roots, and current problems I find to be urgent, such as the toxic greed by those in power, disregarding the lives of others for the sake of land and oil. I referenced the Mexican counterculture proverb: “Quisieron enterranos, pero se les olvido que somos semillas” which translates to “They tried to bury us. They forgot we are seeds”. This phrase has been used by many Mexican movements, such as the Zapatista. I wanted to use this because it’s not only a glory-full cry but its origins root from the queer community which I also identify with. This phrase has been wrongfully attributed, it actually comes from the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, “what you didn’t do to bury me but you forgot that I was a seed”. This was from the 1970s in reference to him being queer. I know I am going all over the place now but hopefully this description has given some background on my creative response.
in noxóchiuh in nocuícauh
Money
Money
Sweet as honey
That’s all They listen to
Before They cut my tongue
Hear my flowers
Hear my stories sung
We must die in this life
This is true
But my mother’s belly
should not be carved into
They will try to bury us
with our dialect
and we will bleed
but later resurrect
For They don’t know
we are seeds
And everyone is rooted in the same soil
If it is gone
There will be no use for His oil
So listen closely to those around
Before everything they know
Is 6ft underground
Hear my flower
Hear my song
Use to empower
And get along
Be warned of what will be
And what won’t
If my mother’s entrails
are spilled and left
While They lick the sweet honey
from Their fingers
that caused this death
As also a part of my creative response, I stitched onto a piece of cloth, the beginning of my poem. I tried making it look like handwriting, for the most part, the beginning more so neater than the rest. I did this to hopefully come across as the beginning of someone writing their history and being interrupted, someone else coming along and stripping away their tongue. I left the needle, or the “pen”, in the puddle of blood that has formed from this, leaving the rest of the cloth as unwritten knowledge that has been erased.
For my creative response I chose to make a collage. To create the college I pulled ideas and concepts that I felt Bill Neidjie poems were stating. My collage took many human faces and then natural worlds, rocks, trees and other things and incorporated that into a tree. I used the idea of the trunk being mostly people because we are apart of the earth even without wanting to be, we help shape what is occurring in nature. I then choose to put the leaves and branches as things from nature, also adding people into the leaves because humans hold such a strong roll in the nature today. Two of the stanzas truly stood out to me when thinking about Neidjie writings.
Environment
“Those trees,
they grow and grow.
Every night they grow.
That grass,
No matter it burn.
When it drink,
It grown again.
When you cut tree,
It pump life away,
All the same as blood in my arm.” (Page 42)
Conclusion
“I die and put my bones in cave or earth.
Soon my bones become earth,
All the same.” (Page 54)
The idea of being one with the earth and not in control. How humans are present in the earth and then become the earth. Neidjie’s idea of not controlling the systems of nature stands out to me. In my collage I hope I portrayed the idea of that Humans are more apart of nature than we want to realize. In the first stanza he discusses the idea of the tree being the same as humans, that when cut down it dies and just like when something happens to humans they die. Putting the overall goal that humans are apart of the earth’s systems. Then in the second stanza the concept of once you die you are back to earth. Again the idea that humans and earth are one. The use of the people in the trunk of my tree and in the leaves in branches shows how intertwined people are with earth and how we are the base of the process even if we do not want to be in control.
I wrote a poem called “Esse Quam Videri” and along with it I recorded a loop that I created with an electric guitar. Esse Quam Videri is a Latin phrase that means to be, rather than to seem. My poem is centered off of this powerful concept, because I wanted to focuse on being what human truly is, rather than what it has been perverted into. Humanity is a beautiful thing. One of my lines in the poem, inspired by a quote in Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth, is that we are the universe made self-aware, which is a great responsibility, but a great opportunity for us to represent what is beautiful and magical about creation, but ‘human’ seems to have become something associated with destruction, hate, and separation. My poem was inspired by basically all of our readings, but my main focus was on The Parable of the Sower and Ceremony. Lauren, from the Parable, experiences a condition of hyperempathy, where she physically feels others’ pain. My poem strives to express the reality that although we may not all feel one another’s physical pain, we are one world and one story, and the pain of others indirectly is pain for ourselves. The pain of the Earth, is pain for us. “If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things” (115). If we all directly felt this pain, we would not be in the position of hurting others, but since we are able to indirectly hurt each other without having the effects suddenly aware (throwing away trash, driving cars, using plastic…) we are unattached from the pain that we most definitely feel and cause. Another theme that I drew from this novel, was one of finding connectedness.
“Embrace diversity.
Unite-
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed. (196)
To be connected, rather than ‘connected’ (social media, news broadcasts…), is what allows us to see how we all have impacts on each other. When we are divided, it is easier to hurt, because we think we are hurting something else, something other. If we keep trying so hard to rip each other apart from ourselves, disconnecting in any way possible, we will destroy the very things that are meant to keep us together, the things we are meant to share.
Ceremony inspired my poem with the theme of story-telling and also a similar theme of connectedness. The reason I really wanted to include the recording of the loop, was to emphasize how we all build upon one another to create a story. A melody needs all of the pieces, small or big, simple or complex, long or short, to make it complete. Each sound builds upon the next sound, which must build upon and work with the next sound, to ultimately create a melody. The melody we are playing is the sounds of life on Earth, we are all part of it, and we must decide whether we will be cacophonous or euphonious, beautiful or destructive. We are all united by death, by our returning to the Earth, this is a part of every single living beings’ story, and it is something that connects us the very most, “There was no difference when they were swollen and covered with flies” (7). We all become the earth, with our physical bodies, but also with our stories. “An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years from the oldest times, when the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were; they recounted the actions and words each of their clan had taken, and would take; from before they were born and long after they died, the people shared the same consciousness” (68). Every moment, every event, every word and every action of those before has led to us now. Everything we say and do, our mere existence, is a part of the overall story of every living being on Earth. When we realize how connected we are, we realize how our stories matter to those before us, those now, and those after us. The reason I chose Esse Quam Videri as my main idea, was to emphasize how we must be careful when we tell stories, and tell the truth of the stories, because we have to actually BE what happened, rather than to seem to be, because the stories we tell about ourselves, about our world, will be the stories that last longer than our lives. Our stories are immortal, they will live beyond us, so we must actually be what we are saying we are being, we must create a history of truth, a world of truth, or our lies about humanity on the earth will contaminate it, and contaminate us.
My poem can also relate to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I speak of universal rights, and that we all share the Earth so we must be careful as to what toxins we contribute to it. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful was also an inspiration for this poem, with themes that question the humanity of capitalism, such as being human over being consumer, measuring true success over measuring GDP, and having interactions over transactions.
Esse Quam Videri.
To Be. Rather than to seem
To be connected, rather than to connect superficially
To create a history of truth, rather than a story for glamour
To be human, rather than to be consumer
To grow, rather than to accumulate
To keep, rather than to throw
To think twice,
To think deep,
To think of Us.
To measure success, rather than to measure GDP
To have interactions, not mere transactions
To create trust, rather than boundaries
To become, rather than to succumb
To be creative, not just innovative
To experience.
To be present.
To endure.
To build trust, rather than to build walls
To understand, rather than to ignore
To be united, rather than divided
To care, rather than to pretend
To accept, rather than tolerate
To see, rather than to glimpse
To help, not hurt
To love, not hate
To remember we all feel each other’s pain
To aim for the stars, not the streetlights
To be the universe made self-aware
To accept the responsibility
To be stewards
To sustain
To listen
To seek out something other than misery, rather than to continue to live with it
To be deliberate.
Intentional
Conscious
To have rights for all, rather than to have rights for some
To share the sun
To share the earth
To share the moon
To share the stars
To be the sun
To be the earth
To be the moon
To be the stars
To find what binds us, rather than what separate us
To be a species worth saving, rather than to die not trying
Esse Quam Videri
Nothing is created nor destroyed
We are all part of each other
We come from the same womb
Let us be,
Rather than to seem, to be.
Our stories build upon each other
We are one, but we are all
My story is yours, as yours is mine
Its called Life On Earth
To be peace is to Be.
Esse Quam Videri
For my creative response I wanted to connect my creativity to the novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. In the novel Silko shows the importance of storytelling for Native American tribes.
“I will tell you something about stories, [he said]
They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
Illness and death.
…
He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here.
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it
See, it is moving.
There is life here
for the people.
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.”
(Silko 2).
I wanted to parallel the importance of storytelling to the importance of food and the story food tells. I have prepared a traditional meal for Puebloan tribes in the southwest region of America in New Mexico. Due to the dry and hot environment little food could be grown besides the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash which were the main components to the dishes they would prepare.
I have prepared Posole, “the Sacred Stew” a popular Pueblo Indian dish, sometimes referred to as Pozole in it’s Mexican version. The dish is a stew traditionally made from hominy, pork and spices and it is typically served around the holidays. The main ingredient in Posole is corn, the corn is prepared by soaking hard kernels of field corn traditionally white in powdered lime water, a method thought to mimic the ancient preservation of corn in limestone caves. After several hours the corn grows in size and the liquid evaporates and what is left is the dry corn kernels.
The stew is typically combined with meat or game meat but has changed overtime by the Spanish conquistadors. Hominy is also sometimes used as a substitute for Posole in stew, but the flavor is much different.
The Zuni Pueblo serve this dish in the early winter when all of the crops are in during the Winter Solstice which emphasizes healing, conflict and fertility. The Shalako ceremony is held on this night, traditionally on the full moon, where they await the arrival of the Shalako or messages to the gods. The ceremony now invites many outside visitors to come and watch the ceremony and eat the Posole.
For my creative response to the course material I wanted to do something expirencial with the class, sorry to anyone who isn’t there today. I focused on healing and change which are two major themes in Ceremony and Parable of the sower. In Sustainable Development we learn to open our eyes to the problems of the world that otherwise we may never know about. This process of learning is painful and I know it is sad for many SD students, we get the SD blues. This is when we can’t stop thinking about a certain topic ie. environmental degradation, deforestation, environmental racism, mountaintop removal, exploitation of developing nations, the oil and gas industry ties to government, climate change, ocean acidification, the world bank, the IPPC report, biodiversity crisis, agricultural systems, predatory development, toxic biocides, wars, famine, disease. These topics are interwoven and when we start thinking of one all the others can easily come in and overwhelm us. It leads to a state of fear, anger, sadness and strangely enough hope. After we take in all this information we have a choice to either stay in that state of paralysis or get the fire under our feet going. This conscious change is what I am pulling from Parable of the sower, to retake the locus of control to within ourselves and to recognize god as change. In this case to see god as our change in outlook from bleak to bright as we focus on the positive social awakenings.
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
In my perspective change exercise Ill be doing with the class Ill be trying to show the power of choosing this change can have. To reclaim our agency in our emotional state.
In the healing aspect of the experience I want to offer am opportunity for the class to release some of these negative emotions into their papers and give the papers to the pot where ill be transforming them into positive affirmations. This transformation will take place through the addition of things that I use to combat the same negative emotions from topics listed above. Ill be grinding up lavender, camomile, pepper and coffee along with positive emotions Ill have the class call out. Ill then have the class come grab a new piece of paper on which are messages i’ve written for people. The goal of this portion is to allow for the release of negativity and the acceptance of positivity. This is not a healing ceremony but rather an act of group healing from the SD blues. Silko writes about the importance of healing for Tayo not just for him but for the whole community. I feel that this is important for us as SD majors as well. We must heal ourselves/ each other if we expect to be able to heal the world.
Ill add pictures after the class, needs to happen first 🙂
For my painting, I based it off of the writings and poems by Bill Neidjie. What inspired me was Neidjie’s connection between people and the land that he always discussed so I wanted to combine man and land together. Some communities and people believe that where they are makes them who they are, and I somehow wanted to show that in a painting. What I want this piece to show is that we are all connected to the land both in life and in death. Some people have “roots” in certain places of the world where they are tied to living with the land and Neidjie is one who believes that. That is the reason that I chose to give my person roots reaching into the dirt from their hands and feet.
I included the fish skeleton and bones because throughout Neidjie’s writing he references death or returning to the earth in some way. I wanted to show that somehow so I chose to incorporate rebirth into this work. I chose to give the man green hair to match the grass because I wanted him to be additionally connected to the earth. I wanted the person to appear almost like a tree that grew there and had been there, similar to how some communities are closely tied to place. Some people don’t ever want to abandon their way of life or their place, so I made this person a tree, who cannot leave.
Earth. Like your father or brother or mother because you born from earth. You got to come back to earth. When you dead, you’ll come back to earth. Maybe little whole yet… then you’ll come to earth. That’s your bone, your blood. It’s in this earth, same as for tree. (Neidjie 38)
Three. He watching you. You look at tree, he listen to you. He got no finger, he can’t speak. But that leaf, he pumping, growing, growing in the night. While you sleeping you dream something. Tree and grass same thing. They grow with your body, with your feeling. (Neidjie 40)
Excerpts from Bill Neidjie’s Land-
“People.
they can’t listen for us. They just listen for money. Money.
We want goose, we want fish. Other men want money.
Him can make million dollars, but only last one year.
Next year him want another million. Forever and ever him make million dollars. Him die.
Million no good for us.
We need this earth to live because we’ll be dead,
we’ll become earth.
This ground and this earth, like brother and mother.
…
All my uncle gone,
but this story I got him. They told me.
They taught me
and I can feel it.
I feel it with my body, with my blood. Feeling all these trees,
all this country.
When this wind blow you can feel it.
Same for country, You feel it.
You can look.
But feeling…
that make you.
Feeling make you.
Out there in open space,
he coming through your body.
Look while he blow and feel with your body, because tree just about your brother or father
and tree is watching you.
Earth.
Like your father or brother or mother, because you born from earth.
You got to come back to earth.
When you dead,
you’ll come back to earth.
Maybe little while yet…
then you’ll come to earth. That’s your bone, your blood. It’s in this earth,
same as for tree.”
Within the last few weeks, I have fallen into the most wholesome thing I have ever been a part of. It is called the Tree Message, a group with over 50 people (and still growing) all loosely connected socially while being spread out geographically. All it is pictures of trees. No Talking, just trees. Since joining the group, I have realized how second nature it is for me to grab for my phone and snap a quick picture when I am seeing something beautiful. The pictures are usually crappy but they tether me to that time. They create a sense of place. Looking back at my picture reel, the most pictures I have are from the place where I feel most at home. The feeling of presence overwhelms me and I take a picture to capture that feeling of home, the delighted disbelief of getting to be in this place.
The place that I feel this awe most strongly is at home. I grew up surrounded by water, on the Sea Islands or the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Sometimes, I would numb to the beauty because it was everywhere, outside of my bedroom window and my drive home and my high school doors. But every once and while, I would snap into reality and be overcome by the physical richness of where my home.
The Lowcountry has been represented in the House of Representatives by a Republican representative since 1981. This midterm cycle the seat was flipped, to a Democrat named Joe Cunningham. This historic flip was based solely on one thing, offshore drilling for oil off of the coast of South Carolina. The thought of our delicate and precious salt marsh ecosystems being polluted united people from all walks of life across the entire Lowcountry. This area is filled with people whose families have lived on this water for hundreds of years, subsisting then and now on the bountiful resources of the water. The water and everything it brings is an inescapable part of life. Niedjie’s poem land speaks eloquently into this. He speaks of an intense spiritual, familial connection with the land and the disconnect from people who only view it as a capital producing resource. The way that his people feels about leaving open holes in the ground is, in a way, the way that inviting in offshore oil drilling feels. It feels as if we would be courting death, starting a dangerous dance that cannot be undanced. And to kill the land that raised me? To poison the water I learned to swim in and catch fish from and clog up the beaches with trash, the same beaches where I learned to ride a bike and be still and meditate to the sound of waves, the beach where I have laid out and read a billion books and made all of my best decisions? That may as well be killing a family member.
This is a theme in Sustainable Development discourse, what value do we assign land and its resources. How do we reconcile with land in a cultural moment geared toward development? How do we refocus on intrinsic value rather than extrinsic value? How can we protect our land, our water, our trees in a hostile climate? For me it starts with picture taking, a moment of awe and togetherness with the land, trying to keep a glimpse of that place with me always.
Below is the link to the slideshow of photos I will be presenting.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aU1UdFpOtrEMnpZpyF70pDYvxSD6s3uXiA-qmv8SOS8/edit?usp=sharing
As an introduction on the first day of Classics, we went around the room and shared where we feel the deepest sense of place. One feels a true sense of place when a connection is made within themselves to a geographical space, a climate, a group of people, a culture. For many, a sense of place is bounded within the biological environment of a space. Plant and people relationships are abundant through the authors works of Ceremony, Walden, Bill Neidjie poems, and Parable of the Sower. Thoreau and Niedje both find connection through trees and Silko through seeds and grasses.
Tree and grass same thing,
They grow with your body,
With your feeling,
If you feel sore,
Headache, sore body,
That means somebody killing tree or grass
You feel
Because your body in that tree or earth.
-Bill Neidjie
Neidjie’s poem speaks to many points in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. This poem in context, warns of “disaster ensuing” if bones of his ancestors, fossil fuels, are removed from the Earth. Fast forward to 2024, Lauren Oya is living in the disaster Neidjie precautioned. Neidjie speaks of a common hurt between the destruction of the Earth and people who feel a deep connection to it. This echoes Lauren Oya’s sharing. She hurts along others, feels the pain they are feeling. She hurts with those who are living a life salvaged by environmental degradation.
On canvas, I used the unbiased base color of cream, with a tree split into two. On the left side, the side I associate closer with one’s heart, is lush, lichen rich, green, thriving tree. Split down the center, to the right, is a dead, yellow- brown, half of a tree, portraying a world ravaged by climate change. The right side represents Lauren Oya’s displacement in a chaotic world due to a collapsed environment, as well as Tayo’s struggle of his dismantled homeland in the South West. Like Parable of the Sower and Neidjie’s poems, this piece of art’s purpose is to be a cautionary tale.
In each novel we have read, the main protagonist has built a story around his or her deep connection with the a place they called home, a physical place on the Earth. Particularly, Parable of the Sower and Ceremony, these characters live in a world on struggle from a shifting climate that surrounds them.
Tayo’s inner turmoil was centered around a blurred connection to his home. The grazing lands he once remembered were infertile due to drought, he was deeply troubled by this lack of life, it brought him back to the wreckage of war. In conclusion of Ceremony, the reader sees that it is not post war delusions, but a true link between the uranium mined out of Tayo’s native land of the Laguna Pueblo reservation and the destruction he witnessed overseas.
Lauren Oya feels the brunt of southern California’s drought and unescapable fires. Octavia Butler does an immense job of illustrating a climate ravaged country, in effect from industry and lack of environmental virtue. The setting is only 6 years in our future, and touches on events, 21st century inhabitants are familiar with. Lauren Oya writes of more intense storm patterns, “tornadoes smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people” (Butler 54). As well as the social degradation“there are too many poor people—illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted” (Butler 53).
For this project I decided to write a few short poems that reflect my thoughts on different pieces of literature that we have studied this semester. I felt that it was relevant to put these authors works into my own words and show appreciation. The main points of these authors works, and the general themes are what I focused on. I put these themes into rhyming poems that were each six lines. I picked three books that we have read throughout the semester. Walden, Silent Spring, and Ceremony were the books i chose to focus on. I chose to go with this route for my creative response because i felt that it correlated the entire book into a short poem. I felt that this showed the overview and broad generalization of each book into my own words.
Walden:
In the woods without a peep
he had somewhere to sleep
making due with what he had
turns out it was pretty rad
in a small cabin by the lake
making change for society sake
Silent Spring:
The spraying of DDT
it shouldn’t affect me
where did the birds go?
Rachel Carson should know
harmful outcomes of pesticide
please not where we reside
Ceremony:
coming back from a world war
Tayo had a new battle knocking on the door
being home with severe PTSD
not the man he wanted to be
the Pueblo people needing a ceremony
hoping it works and isn’t a phony
For my creative response, I was mostly inspired by Parable of the Sower and the repeated use of fire. In Parable of the Sower fire is mostly seen as a destructive force in the beginning. Something that could completely alter and destroy people’s lives. By chapter 14, fire was a means to escape.
“ In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn” (pg. 153)
I took this as inspiration for making a pit fired clay bowl and a small clay acorn. The idea was to hand build (coil method ) a bowl that could be hardened by fire (not electric kiln) and hand build a small acorn and harden it with the same method. This required me to sand down and burnish (rub the dry clay with a stone until it was glossy) so that the finished product would look glazed. During this process, I also felt a connection to the Bill Neidjie poem, Law (stanza 4). Making this pottery by hand, while also using a primitive firing method made me feel more connected to the ground in which the clay came.
The bowl and acorn were originally supposed to represent the concept of being forged by fire, similar to when Lauren used fire as a means to escape and grow. But after the bowl exploded, it seemed to taken on a new significance. This bowl started as beautiful and perfect, but the fire shattered and changed its form, still beautiful, but different. This also resonates with Lauren’s belief that “God is change”.
Slideshow of pit fired clay bowl
For my creative response, I chose to turn to Thoreau’s Walden; specifically the dynamic between Thoreau and how he views his place in the greater picture. The diorama I created illustrates Thoreau’s cabin in the woods, secluded from the rest of society, symbolized by the gray corner with the train tracks. The train itself is a symbol for the “illusion of progress,” as Thoreau is highly critical of advancement, which is illustrated by the contrasts between the zone of “society” and the rest of the diorama, which symbolizes Walden Pond. This isolation demonstrates the divide between society and nature, and how Thoreau loses himself in nature in order to fully isolate himself for reflection.
“Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” – pg. 162, The Village, Walden
The cabin itself is bland on the outside demonstrating the concept of minimalism, while the fact that it has no windows illustrates the further seclusion on the part of Thoreau. On the inside however, are designs on each of the four walls that are crucial to Thoreau’s overall experiment. The smaller two walls facing each other stand for nature, and the individuals role as an observer and seer, which Thoreau stresses as being important for self realization and his challenge to readers to not be simply a reader, but a seer. (Sounds, Walden) These two walls make up the two corner supports of transcendence, which is illustrated on the largest, third wall. The fourth wall, being non existent, is meant to symbolize the manner in which Thoreau writes his book, breaking the so called “fourth wall,” and speaking directly to the reader, portraying his ideas in a way similar to that of a teacher lecturing his students. Finally, the ceiling of the cabin has a depiction of numerous cats in Zanzibar, which is a reference to the relevance and viability of the experiment’s scope. This is mainly because, despite all Thoreau’s reflection and thought, the current state of society as a whole has remained largely static; but it also considers other factors, such as the public’s willingness to accept such ideals, or the tangible impact of such philosophizing. It also serves as a tongue in cheek reference to the impact of such an experiment, while the contrast between the blankness of the outside and the complexity of the inside is a subtle criticism of Thoreau’s teachings of simplicity, despite his writing style and conceptual material being anything but.
I have loved spending time outdoors for as long as I can remember. As a little kid I did not know why I liked being outside, I just knew that I did. As I grew older and became more observant of both the world and my own thoughts and feelings I started to realize that being out in nature had a calming effect on me. I spent a lot of time camping as a kid, through Boy Scouts, and as I got older and my life became more stressful I noticed that after a weekend camping trip, I would come back feeling significantly less stressed and just generally in a better mood. I never could put what I felt into words, nor did I try very hard. But while reading Walden, I began to figure out what was that I was feeling when I spent time outdoors, because Thoreau seemed to be having a similar experience. Thoreau was already a very thoughtful person, but by leaving society behind and committing to a life of simplicity, it gave him an opportunity to think about the world from a different perspective.
For my creative response, I created a collage/slideshow of some pictures I took two summers ago when three friends and I drove across the country and camped for about 3 weeks. Obviously my experience was nothing like Thoreau’s two years in the cabin, but after reading Walden I found a lot of what he wrote about could be applied to my experience on the trip. The first thing that came to mind was when Thoreau writes about sitting still and just letting the world pass him by. He writes, “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,… in undisturbed solitude and stillness” (105). We naturally did a lot of driving on my trip so when no one was feeling very talkative and we would for long stretches in silence. During these times I would watch the scenery go by and I spent many hours just thinking about everything and nothing at the same time.
Another big thing that Thoreau emphasizes is the idea of simple living. He lived in a different time so he could live with very few material belongings. I felt this in a way because everything we had between the four of us had to fit in my car, and there was not near as much room as you would think there would be. I learned a lot from having to live with very few items to my name. I felt like I became more deliberate with how I used my stuff, because I knew that it was all I had.
These were a few of the ideas from Walden that stood out to me and I could relate to my experience. While I was looking through the book for quotes to use and thinking about my trip this one song popped into my head and I think it applies pretty well in this situation. “Watching the Wheels” by John Lennon is not only one of my favorite songs, but I like to think that Henry David Thoreau himself would appreciate the song. John Lennon wrote it during a time when he was very unconventional and a lot of people questioned what he was doing and his response was to step back from the constantly spinning wheel of life and to “watch the wheels go round and round”. And he really did love to watch them roll.
Private Property: No Breathing
The very first week of class we read “Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation” by Linda Clarkson, Vern Morrissette and Gabriel Regallet. The chapter was taken from Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation: Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Development, a 1992 publication by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The chapter articulates the indigenous belief that each generation has the responsibility to ensure the survival of the seventh generation by sustaining a harmonious relationship with the planet. This responsibility shapes our interactions with Mother earth and is derived out of “the original law”. The concept is beautifully articulated on page 41,
“There is a teaching passed down from our ancestors that crystallizes our sense of responsibility and our relationship to the earth that arises out of the original law. It is said that we are placed on the earth (our Mother) to be the caretakers of all that is here. We are instructed to deal with the plants, animals, minerals, human beings and all life as if they were a part of ourselves. Because we are a part of Creation, we cannot differentiate or separate ourselves from the rest of the earth. The way in which we interact with the earth, how we utilize the plants, animals and the mineral gifts, should be carried out with the seventh generation in mind. We cannot simply think of ourselves and our survival: each generation has a responsibility to ‘ensure the survival of the seventh generation”
In choosing the basis for the creative work assignment, I felt that the quote by Oren Lyons found on page 49 was particularly moving. Lyons states, “We native [Indigenous] people did not have a concept of private property in our lexicon, and the principles of private property were pretty much in conflict with our value system. For example you wouldn’t see ‘No hunting’ or ‘No fishing’ or ‘ No trespassing’ signs in our territories. To a native person such signs would have been equivalent to ‘No breathing’ because the air is somebody’s private property. If you said to the people, ‘the Ontario government owns all the air in Ontario, and if you want some, you are going to have to go and see the Bureau of Air’, we would all laugh.”
I see the jarring orange Private Property signs as a poignant visual representation of the difference between the way many Americans view the environment and the original law that dictates the way Lyons, and other indigenous people relate to mother earth. The concept of land ownership the way we understand it today was introduced during colonization, when indigenous americans were told by white settlers that the ground they walked on, the air they breathed, the water they drank, the crops they grew no longer “belonged” to them. Of course the first nations did not feel these things belonged to them to begin with, and this profound disconnect is at the heart of the onslaught of violence, and land grabbing experienced by native people throughout history and even today.
The original law observed by Lyons and others requires humankind to be caretakers of their environment, and to interact with all elements of the natural world “as if they were part of ourselves”. This is a far cry from the domination, extraction and manipulation of the environment prevalent across much of the United States. But how different would the world look today had we as a species always acted with the seventh generation in mind?
The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode;
the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring. Cultivate property like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts… Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When I read this first phrase of this quote, I immediately remembered a picture of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I saw this image when I was at the beginning of my SD career, and it’s left a lasting impact on me. Wealth inequality which is exacerbated by consumerism and development made me question what a “good life” is.
When I was young I went to India with my family and saw similar disparity between rich people and their servants who lived on their land in slums/shacks. It made me angry, and I wanted to fix it. I read many articles in high school about “fixing slums” and ending poverty through developing slums… little did I realize that this actually was a euphemism for displacement of the poor.
While reading Walden, I found his rejection of consumerism and the pursuit of wealth/superfluities to be quite moving. I, like many others, admit to regularly falling into the trap of wanting to buy the newest styles or update my utilities for sheer convenience. Joining the SD program has transformed the way that I see the world… seeing that pursing wealth is not only leading to destruction of society at large.
Greed is a poison to society.. the photograph I included of Sao Paulo in my creative project just shows how easy it is to fall into the trap and isolate yourself from the world’s ills. There is definitely a balance that needs to be struck when it comes to creating a “good life” and while Thoreau experimented with this idea in Walden, as an SD major I hope to spend my life trying to explore that balance.
Empathy has always had a meaning of value in my life. Growing up in a hypermasculine, macho family, I was told it wasn’t normal to be so sensitive. Comments from peers, friends, and even family made harsh comments like, “grow a pair” or “be a man”. These types of statements became normalized in a sense. I learned to mask my feelings and when they would arise, I would hold them in. I began to internalize my thoughts and my feelings for the fear of coming off abnormally sensitive. I found it easier to isolate myself, and I became rather good at it. In grade school, the majority of my friends were girls, and is the same today. I found it easier to relate on different aspects of life, especially when it came to expressing my emotions. Through the years, I have found different outlets for expressing my emotions, and through that, I understood the power and significance of emotion. Even then, I would ask myself similar questions that Lauren Olamina would ask, “why can’t I do what others have done ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.” This quote reminds me of the cliché, ignorance is bliss. Perhaps it would be easier to put on blinders and go about life as if nothing is wrong. It does not work, in fact, it perpetuates and allows for the evil in the world to grow. Personally, it created identity issues within, and I started to become insecure. Thankfully, as I matured, I realized by not expressing my emotions, I was not able to be my true self. The main character says, “They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it”. My enlightenment was the realization that emotions are power, change, and when embraced, emotions used with true intentions save.
I wrote a song to express the power of emotion.
EMPATHY
Have you ever looked back
Have you ever looked forwards
Wondering what to look for
High and low and in-between
Something of a scary dream
Emotions are meant to be embraced
Emotions are meant to change
Emotions are mean to stay with you
You can sit down
And you can feel
Because anything you feel is real
Come with me, and you will see
The change that comes with empathy
Emotions are meant to be embraced
Emotions are meant to change
Emotions are meant to save the world
For my creative response I did a quick and dirty banjo lesson on some of the techniques that are used in old time music. The connection between my creative response and class was inspired by both parts of ceremony and parts of parable of the sower. Old time music is a traditional music that has been passed down through generations. It was normally learned from relatives by ear with nothing being written down. This made me think of Tayo, a lot of the traditions and native knowledge was handed down by elders to him in a similar way as the music. A big problem with the oral tradition of passing down knowledge is that without someone willing to learn the ways the knowledge get lost throughout the generations. The vast majority of native knowledge has been lost through the destruction of their cultures because of racism and other factor and without a written history those oral cultures have been lost. Some of the songs are influenced by traditional Native American songs. Old time music is also similar to Native traditions in this sense in that a lot of it was never written down which has led to some of the music being lost. Although a benefit of this is that these songs are ever changing through the generations giving them a fluidity that they would have never had had they be written down. Another thing that inspired the teaching part of my response was Laura teaching in Parable of the Sower. She taught the young kids skills that would be helpful to them later in life. Although I wasn’t teaching anything that would really be useful it was me trying my hand at passing information that I had onto someone else that normally unless you were seeking it out wouldn’t otherwise learn.
Traditions are ceremonies, passed down through generations of people, tying us to our ancestors and to the world around us. During the holidays these ceremonies are seen more often than other times of year. When families gather and we hear stories from grandparents and great aunts and uncles. We see old pictures and hear about the war heroes, the mothers, the tragedies, all the stories that weave together the fabric of a family. Then we perform our ceremonies, we say our prayer, watch our game, share our stories.
This thanksgiving my family preformed our ceremonies, and new ones were born. My dad is the patriarch, the oldest male in the family, he is still strong and tough, even though he walks unsteadily and with a cane. We had a fire pit with a strong flame going outside on the patio, there was my dad, with a big piece of cardboard that had come as packaging for some appliance. In his lap was the youngest member of the family, my second cousin, only 15 months old. She had crayons in her hand and so did dad. I watched as he sketched, as he so often does, and as she scribbled, on this huge piece of cardboard.
We ate dinner, we went around the table and gave our thanks, we went through bottles of wine and tons of food, we hugged, we cried, we called the family members who were far away and told them we missed them.
That night my dad showed us old pictures of his dad, a marine fighter pilot. He was a strong man, with handsome features and a big grin. My dad told us stories of his parents and his aunts and uncles.
These are our ceremonies. We are the collection of those who have come before us, we echo their actions in the future. The earth is a never ending stream of consciousness that connects us to our past, and future. Through each generation we pass the stories of who we were and we discover who we will be, these are our ceremonies.
For me, this project wasn’t just about the piece of cardboard my family all drew on, it was about the connections between generations. We are given the painting our parents have created, and we add our own colors and shapes to it. We are our ceremonies, our stories, and our parents actions.
Gagadju Man talks about the connections with the land and he often uses personifications of mother earth and father animals. Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote to his family and leaned on them for support and understanding. In Ceremony, Tayo struggles with his identity and his place in his family. Family is more than the familiar connections we have with those we are born into knowing, it is the connections we have with the Earth itself. Our family and our ceremonies are tied to the land that gives us life.
I’ve talked about my process in some detail during the presentation, but my creative response was to the near entirety of the Earthseed religion, and Lauren’s journey within Parable of the Sower.
I made a book, and in depicting the visuals I had throughout reading the novel, I had one verse of Earthseed remain my constant caution; “Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is change- seed to tree, tree to forest…..the universe is God’s self-portrait” So I knew right away that I couldn’t come up with some snazzy iconography for Earthseed, it had to be just…that. The seed of the earth. An image already provided by the God of this world/her world/our world. So from seed, a seed planted kind of by the empathetic blood Lauren shed, that the seed in my illustration took root over the pages, growing, changing, hurting, and coming out of it a fully realized mature tree.
“Create no images of God” also spoke a bit to my Christian upbringing (current relationship with the church and organized religion is a bit…strained), where we were told from scripture very explicitly to create no idols of of our God, no symbols (That didn’t seem to work out so well), even the appearance of Jesus was left vague and plain. Taking from that a bit, I didn’t have Lauren’s face show during the actual Earthseed verse pages, though she can be seen facing the viewers in an extra page- how to pack your backpack. Though she is its prophet and champion, I didn’t want her to become the “icon” or the “idol” of Earthseed, because her intentions are to create community and spread amongst the stars, not to paste her face as a new world leader.
Other illustrations involved either a direct interpretation of the verses, or a glimpse into what the chapters delved into. When I copied that “God is pliable- trickster, teacher, chaos, clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change”, I saw that a bit literally. God is a piece of clay, a perfect allegory for “change”. It exists to be shaped, its purpose is to change. Into a pot it did, and into a pot it broke, “…a shaper of God…a victim of God…”. When “Drowning people sometimes die fighting their rescuers”, I took the chapter content at face value. Lauren’s friend Joanne doesn’t want to see or talk about the things Lauren is warning her about, so she’s literally encompassed in a bubble of her own intentional cluelessness. Lauren gets the high ground, teaching from a book of plant identification and surrounded by acorns and oak leaves. But she’s drawing from books and theories, not practice, so her face is obscured in the small source of her knowledge. Other illustrations are just as literal, like the two rams butting heads straight from the text, Lauren fleeing from the fires of Robledo, or pictures of Lauren, Harry, Zahra, and their community growing. Others are a little more obscure, like the page starting with “Changes. The galaxies move through space…” I took the opportunity there to just play around with the concepts of the little seed of earth as a heart, its roots becoming veins and arteries. A lone body amidst the galaxy, starts where life starts from and must return to.
For my creative response I drew a picture of Leslie Silko and painted green and orange- colors that represent life. The sun is orange and represents where all living things get their energy from in different ways. Green represents growth and life in many ways as it is the color of so many plants and chlorophyl is what also gives us clean oxygen to breathe. I used pop-tabs to decorate the canvas. This is supposed to embody the idea that Betonie in Ceremony reinforces. He lives on a the foothills of ceremonial grounds, not typical for a medicine man. Through story telling, Betonie emphasizes that although white people think they own the land, they don’t because no one is able to have this kind of power. Tayo is angry and frustrated with the world and how white people have dominated everything but Betonie critiques ideas of power and how they may not mean as much as we are conditioned to think.
Betonie emphasizes the fact that just because land is believed to be owned by others does not mean natives can not have a sacred relationship to it. Where he lives initially makes Tayo nauseous. It looks over a town where tourists come once a year and many Indians sleep on the street. White men own everything in the town. It is filthy. When he notices Tayo being disgusted with where he lives, He explains
“It strikes me as funny, people wondering why I live so close to this filthy town. But see, this hogan was here first. Built long before the white people ever came. It is that town down there which is out of place. Not this old medicine man.” (109)
Abandoning a landscape that is not aesthetically pleasing or has been infiltrated is actually succumbing to the norms of capitalism and patriarchy. Betonie does not allow the filth of town to disrupt his relationship with what is still considered sacred around him. This is why I incorporated pop-tabs, which are trash, into my painting. Forgetting sacred landscapes that have been negatively affected by climate change, greed, ect is unsustainable and results in a constant chase to find new. Being able to maintain a relationship with a place like Route 66 despite everything not only deepens your raw connection with what is sacred but also could drive change to fight against what has happened. In my opinion, this is much better than guarding oneself or abandoning that which is displeasing.
I tried to carve you.
Mold you.
Manipulate you in to something else
in order to present you as you are.
A plaster cast of a phantom
You are there.
I can see you,
feel you,
but any attempt to reach out and touch you is
lost in your wind.
I tried to see you through the eyes of a dog.
Me, through the eyes of you.
But it rang false.
For I am not a dog, nor a tree.
Those eyes are not mine to look.
Those perspectives from mine to share.
I came up with therums.
An attempt to explain your elusive nature
through science.
As if anything logical could conceive and
encompass your spectacular, awe-inspiring gradeur.
I tried to cook you,
bake you,
break you off into little treats.
They say the belly is the way to a person’s heart
and that’s where I want you.
Your life blood running through my veins,
as mine does yours,
beating along side me.
I walked with you,
in you.
Longing to feel your presence.
Hear your voice.
To understand better what it is everyone speaks of.
What, when experiencing your glory,
brings people to their knees.
But what I found was only myself.
Heard only myself.
Felt only myself.
Because you are not a sculpture,
a poem,
a theory,
or a baked good.
You are me,
at my most pure and vulnerable.
Naked and bare for all to behold,
glowing with magnificence.
We are one.
And we are everything.
I don’t really have an artistic medium, in fact I’ve never really attempted to “do art”. So, this assignment was a tad daunting for me. I went in all kinds of directions (baking, writing, weaving, hiking), including staring at a pile of sticks to “become inspired” for far longer than I am willing to admit. It was coming down to the wire and nothing was working out, and the few things I did manage to create felt contrived and forced. The morning the assignment was due I woke up quite early (around 4am) in a bit of a panic, dreaming about the assignment. It was like the story of the kids dreaming about Christmas “as gumdrops and candies danced through their head”, except for me it was all my failed attempts at the assignment shuffling around in there, sending my dormant state in to a bit of anxiety.
But it was during this weird lucid dreaming situation that I came up with the idea to write a poem about all those attempts to incapsulate a theme of almost all the books we read, which was man’s connection with nature. The very topic that was eluding me over the past few weeks. I couldn’t figure out how to put in to words the feelings that come over me when I connect with the natural world. So the poem above is an attempt at telling the story of my process, while also coming up with a way to kind of describe what it is I’m feeling. Most of the poem came to me during that weird fever dream. I wrote it down in my phone quickly, then went back to sleep for a few hours and arranged it in a way that made sense to people once I woke up, adding necessary punctuation. This was my first attempt at writing anything, including a poem, so I hoped it worked out! The process was definitely interesting.
“Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that God has provided.
They are everywhere,
in everything.
God is Change—
Seed to tree, tree to forest;
Rain to river, river to sea;
Grubs to bees, bees to swarm.
From one, many;
from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving—
forever Changing.
The universe
is God’s self-portrait.”
-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower pg —
I was profoundly impacted by this quote while reading Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler subtly points out some of the most troublesome issues revolving around aspects of evangelical and orthodox religions–its depiction of God and the control over our culture that it produces, dividing rather than uniting. In her religion, she states often that God is not simply a man, or a woman, or a tree, but is the multiplication and the sum of all that is living, changing, morphing on this planet. God is the essence of and the meaning of change, and we are the change in motion. We can see this as a religion displaying a deeper connection with nature, as this erases the power one individual can have over another, as we all work as part of a whole, with each piece mattering. By deepening one’s connections with their own self and their others, a more unified culture and society can be formed.
For this project, I wanted to not only provoke the essence of change that Octavia Butler mentions, but also show the seamlessness of our earth systems–its morphing, shapeshifting, and connectivity. I painted 52 mini-paintings on a deck of cards and then bound them to create a flip-book so as to show more visual and active change than one painting can produce. The imagery created by this Earthseed passage was inspiration for each painting: it starts with a seed which then grows into a tree, this tree creates multiple branches, which then morph into several trees. These trees then create a forest. As clouds form in the sky in the background, and rain begins to fall, the trees sink lower and lower into the distance, and the water rises to form an ocean. This ocean produces waves rising and falling, and the rising of one particular wave then shapes into mountains. Above these mountains are what appear to be stars. However these stars begin to swarm together, changing shape, emulating a swarm of bees. This swarm, in the end, shapes together to form the shape of a heart, representing the empathy that Lauren carries with her. The great thing about this concept is that really you can start the flip book at either end, and the message is essentially the same. We are the seeds of change, and our compassion can guide us there.