Medieval Ecocriticisms: CFP

Medieval Ecocriticsms at ICMS: CFP

Medieval Ecocriticisms seeks submissions on the theme of “ecological embodiment” for a roundtable session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, May 7-10, 2020. 

How do human differences impact how individuals and communities interact with the environment? We seek position statements on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual identity and orientation, and/or dis/ability.

Please note that individuals can present at both a roundtable and a traditional paper session at Kalamazoo.

Expanded papers will be considered for submission in Medieval Ecocriticisms, the journal published by Amsterdam University Press.

Contact: Heide Estes, hestes@monmouth.edu, or medievalecocriticism@gmail.com

Deadline: August 30

Environmental Commitment Project

Dr. Heide Estes, Professor, Department of English, and Dr. Catherine Duckett, Associate Dean, School of Education, Monmouth University

This project is assigned in our team taught First Year Seminar, Humans and the Environment, which combines literary study with climate science to help students to understand climate science -- and how they can be part of the solution.

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Rationale: Your development as a citizen is one of the many goals of a liberal education. Taking responsibility for one’s contributions, both positive and negative, is part of being a citizen and an adult. In this course, we want to encourage civic engagement by asking you to think about how you can make a contribution to improving the environment. Habits require practice; your project involves making a semester-long commitment to changing some aspect of your daily or weekly activity in a way that is environmentally constructive. Because feedback and support from others is helpful, we have structured this assignment as an ecampus discussion and hope you will use this as an opportunity to get to know one other.

Instructions: For this project, you will choose a project involving making an environmentally informed commitment to change your habits. You will document this project during the semester by posting updates on eCampus in September, at the beginning of the project, and in October, approximately at the midpoint. At the end of the semester you will use your updates as data to write a reflective paper. In your initial post, your midterm update, and your final reflective paper, explain how your project helps the environment.

For the first ecampus post you will describe, in 400-500 words, the commitment you have chosen, explain how you anticipate it will improve the environment, discuss what changes you need to make in daily or weekly routines in order to succeed, and think ahead to possible challenges in maintaining your commitment. NO FLUFF! Provide a one-sentence introduction, at most two sentences of conclusion, and make every word count.

After you have submitted your ecampus post, read what your classmates have posted. React to three different posts from classmates: have you learned something from their posts? Do you have advice for them? Are you intrigued by their choice of commitment? Don’t just say “hi” or “that’s a good project” -- for credit for a response, you need to add to the conversation.

Grading
Your eCampus post will be graded on thorough attention to the instructions, careful explanation of your project, thoughtful analysis of potential pitfalls, and good use of detail to support your ideas, as well as on organization, conciseness, and mechanical accuracy.

 Some possible projects:

● Reduce your meat consumption. Limit the amount you eat at every meal, or pick a meal or a day every week to eat vegan or vegetarian
● Write a letter to an elected official twice a month demanding environmentally responsible policies
● Limit food waste: buy what you will eat, and eat what you buy
● If you live at home, turn down the thermostat in the winter or up in the summer
● Buy clothes only from thrift shops for the semester—or, don’t buy any clothing atall
● Purchase a reusable water bottle and coffee cup and skip disposables
● If you live within walking distance of campus or work, pick a day a week to walk orbike instead of driving
● Avoid food packaging, for instance from take-out food, and by choosing lowestpackaging options at the supermarket
● Reduce electric consumption by turning off lights, switching to LED bulbs,unplugging unused appliances, and similar activities. Bonus: Get a solar or hand-crank generator to power your smartphone, or organize a competition between MU dormitories to see which one can reduce electrical consumption the most.
● Reduce your waste stream. Reuse, recycle, repurpose, rethink how much garbage you’re contributing to the local landfills every day and how you can cut back.

If you choose a different project, please consult with one of the instructors for the course.

Humans and the Environment: Syllabus

Dr. Catherine Duckett, Associate Dean, School of Science

Dr. Heide Estes, Professor, Department of English

Monmouth University

This course integrates perspectives from literature and biology in investigating contemporary climate issues. Students are challenged to understand the impacts of rising atmospheric and oceanic carbon concentrations in long-term ecological perspectives, to learn about the recent history of climate science debates, and to understand how literature can help to understand the development of current attitudes about environmental issues. Course assignments include a personal environmental project and letters to public officials or news media to encourage students to engage with civic engagement and the ethics of climate decisions.

Readings and Web Sites

Gaines, Susan M. Carbon Dreams. Creative Arts Press, 2001.

Hawken, Paul. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global

Warming. Penguin Books, 2017.

Robert Frost, "A Brook in the City" (1923)

Earth System Science Partnership, Global Carbon Atlas. Global Carbon Project, 2001-2018.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, EarthViewer app. HHMI Biointeractive, 2012-2017.

Schmittner, Andreas. Introduction to Climate Change. Open Oregon State, no date.

Tallamy, Doug. Bringing Nature Home, 2007. “Why Insects Can’t Eat Alien Plants” and “Blending in

with the Neighbors.”

United Nations report No 2013/3: "Demographic Components of Future Population Growth," K. Andreev, V. Kontorova, J. Bongaarts.

“The Day the Mesozoic Died: The Asteroid that Killed the Dinosaurs.” Howard Hughes Medical

Institute. 

“How do greenhouse gases actually work?” @minuteearth, YouTube

“The Wolves of Yellowstone” BBC Natural World

“Some Animals Are More Equal than Others: Keystone Species and Trophic Cascades” HHMI

Interactive.

Assignments 

Environmental Commitment Project 

Ecological Restoration Project 

Carbon Atlas Project 

Final Project: What Should We Do?

Flying as an Environmentalist

The amount I’m flying this year is getting me down, because it’s hands-down the most carbon-intensive thing I do, and it negates all the carbon reductions I achieve by eating vegan, biking to work, and trying to reject consumer habits.

I’m flying this year to four conferences to give papers on ecocriticism — the study of how literature and other cultural artifacts like art, movies, and historical documents describe or depict how humans interact with the environment. My scholarly work deals with how the literature of early medieval England represents humans and the environments they occupy and imagine — from wilderness and forests through farms and their homes.

My engagement with medieval ecocriticisms is explicitly activist. I believe that thinking about the ways that humans of the past engaged with their environments can help us understand our present. I also believe that we’re in a time of climate crisis, and ecocritical humanities has to recognize that, and our scholarly endeavors have to advance understanding of the need to act, NOW. So that means I also need to act, myself — and all the flying is a real problem.

The last time I flew, I googled “carbon offsets” for flights, and rapidly went down a rabbit hole of conflicting information. One article claimed individuals don’t need to buy carbon offsets, because airlines are taking care of it. For example, they claimed Delta was providing carbon offsets for all travelers through certain airports, including the one I flew through. Turned out they were only doing that for flights taken on Earth Day.

I decided to create my own carbon sink by planting a tree for every flight I take this year. Here’s number one:

It’s a tiny, baby swamp white oak, maybe a foot tall. I planted it in a gully by Long Branch’s elementary school, with the help of a colleague and friend who has a contact there. In the photo, I’m building a cage made out of hardware cloth that will help protect the little tree from predators, mostly deer, and from accidentally being mowed. I’ll need to check on it periodically, and if we have a dry spell in the next four years I’ll have to water it.

My flights to Detroit, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Charlottesville will add up to carbon emissions of about 3.4 tons.

A tree can sequester one ton of carbon in 40 years.

I plan to plant four trees this summer to offset the four flights I’m taking. And the labor of doing that is making me think harder about conference planning for next year, because I plan to continue planting trees to offset my own flights. But we’re in climate crisis now — we don’t have 40 years for the trees to grow.

Six Weeks without Single-Use Plastic?

Lent isn’t my holiday, but I hope those of you who observe it won’t mind if I borrow it to re-commit myself to a couple of environment-friendly habits that have been hard for me to get behind.

It’s true, global warming isn’t going to go away because of the individual actions of a few tree-huggers. (I will admit to being a tree-hugger.) We need corporate and government action. 

But we also need personal change. We need to find ways to say “no” to the endless cycles of consumption encouraged by capitalism and the marketing that supports it.

Lent begins tomorrow, March 6, and runs through April 18. Six weeks is a good time span to establish new habits. My goals: Buy nothing new, and give up single use plastics.

I don’t anticipate not buying new things is going to be difficult, not for six weeks. Once Lent is over, I’ll see how much longer I can keep it up.

Giving up single-use plastics is going to be a much bigger challenge. I’ve developed the habit of carrying a mug with me. I start my day with coffee and when that’s gone I switch over to water. So I don’t use water bottles or coffee cups.

But I’ve come to rely on take-out meals to get me through busy weeks, and it’s going to be hard to go six weeks without a take-out meal. It’s going to be hard to remember next time I’m at a reception not to grab a plastic plate and fork to have some cut up fruit or vegetables and hummus.

I might make it through six weeks without any single-use plastic items, but I’m certainly not going to be able to make it through six weeks without any plastic at all, because of the ubiquity of plastic packaging that comes with groceries. Most of those containers are bigger than single servings, so it’s not technically single-use, but it’s close.

I just went to the grocery store. I bought a couple of bars of soap in cardboard boxes, but inside the boxes — plastic wrap. Yogurt, in a plastic container, dishwasher detergent pods in a plastic bag. Garlic and onions, each in a plastic mesh bag. Almonds and walnuts, each in a plastic bag. Biodegradable plastic garbage bags — in a plastic bag. Calcium tablets in a little plastic jar, and two toothbrushes, both made of plastic and packaged in more plastic.

So at the same time that I’m trying to quit single-use plastic, I’m also going to try to limit the plastic packaging that comes with my food.

Wish me luck. It’s going to be hard.

Living in Interesting Times: Now What?

I was born in Germany, nineteen years after the end of World War II. Growing up in the US, I often wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, to watch Hitler gain power, to see Jewish neighbors taken away by force.

The world I live in today feels eerily like what I imagined then, except it's 2018 in the United States. And I feel completely helpless.

The government grants "thoughts and prayers" to domestic terrorists white men who routinely shoot people at malls, movie theatres, dance clubs, schools but refuses to take any action that would limit their impact. The government incarcerates people of color, deports people born in other places. The president was elected with a minority of the vote under a system that, whether it was designed to do so or not, it must now be acknowledged that it deliberately disenfranchises people of color, immigrants, urban residents, and the poor. Washington's current crop of "elected" officials seems to be at war against women, poor people, trans and gay people, people of color, and the earth itself -- anyone, in short, other than heteronormative white men with economic security.

But as the president fires increasing numbers of public servants, the real goal seems to be to destroy democracy.

This is "my" government. If I don't actively resist, I believe that I am complicit.

Yet I have little power. I am not a scholar of political science and I don't feel sure I understand what Trump and his allies (or his puppetmasters?) are up to. In my classes, while I don't pontificate on the news, I do raise issues of power and justice as they relate to language, environmental issues, and medieval literature, and point out how those cultural formations influence the present.

And so I feel paralyzed to act on any scale that feels meaningful.

Also, I am busy, with work and family responsibilities, and I am tired.

My sense of disquiet about current events keeps growing, threatening to become real panic, yet meaningful resistance seems out of reach. Acts like chaining myself to the fence at the White House grounds or hunger striking don't seem like they'd have much more impact than blogging, bloviating on Facebook, or joining another march.

Now what?

Teaching After Trump: What Is A Book?

When I teach courses on medieval literature and the environment, I know that there are issues that are going to intersect with contemporary politics that I have to navigate with caution. But yesterday, when it dawned on me in the middle of a class meeting that "What Is A Book?" is political, I was pretty well blind-sided.

The course looks at the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital, and tries to throw codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities in the air together to see what kinds of configurations stuff drops into. I've taught the course only once before, four years ago, so I'm still in a very fluid period of making stuff up as I go along.

Yesterday we were looking at the Appendix to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. My students all know that technology is terrible because it makes us distracted, but Davidson engages with the prophets of doom and makes a good case that there are also things to value, and rather than rejecting it, we should engage with technology and figure out what it can do.

The Appendix turns out to be a good introduction to the book, and the course, because it lists "Twenty-First Century Literacies" like attention, collaboration, global consciousness, and ethics. It raises good topics for discussion and gets the students and me pretty quickly beyond the problems of how social media and mobile devices are distracting us into other issues involving the ethics and affordances of technology.

The night before class, I'd spent half an hour or so on Twitter following the new president's gag order on US scientific agencies and national parks, the scrubbing of anything that could be interpreted as related to climate science from government websites, the silencing of agencies like the USDA and the CDC. (Salmonella, anyone? Zika?)

Davidson lists sustainability and preservation near the end of the appendix. She uses "sustainability" to refer to environmental issues like the amounts of electricity needed to power computers and servers, but digital humanists use the same word to refer to the creation of digital texts and databases in forms that will outlast current hardware and software configurations and still be readable, decades or hopefully even centuries into the future.

The related issue of "preservation" has to do with keeping copies of things -- archiving materials created digitally, as well as figuring out how to keep copies of things that began their life as material objects. If something originally in book form is preserved in pdf, is that the same as the original? What if there are different copies owned by two different people who made notes in the margins? How important are those notes?

Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is the manuscript that contains the unique copy of Beowulf. It was put together, probably in the seventeenth century, out of two different collections written several hundred years before, but a couple hundred years apart from each other. It contains the Nowell Codex, a late tenth- or early eleventh-century copy manuscript of two poems, including Beowulf, and three prose texts. Is that a book? Or is a medieval collection of materials different than what we think of today as "a book"? Are photographs of the Beowulf manuscript the same as the actual manuscript? What if we could print a 3-dimensional copy, retaining the texture of every page?

People who deal with other media ask related questions. Is a CD version of a song the same as its 45 rpm vinyl original? Is a DVD copy of "Singin' in the Rain" the same as a print of the film on several reels of 35mm film?

Preservation also deals with avoiding loss of data, which was a big problem in the early days of computing but is less acute now, when storage is cheap and it's easy to store redundantly. The issue of data that lasts forever, like social media posts that haunt people hunting for a job, looms larger.

So there I was in class, talking about the relatively long life of manuscripts in comparison to things like punch cards and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and suddenly I apprehended the enormity of the new administration's deliberate suppression and even destruction of information.

I don't know if this material is being mirrored or archived in some other country that's now freeer than the United States or if, horrifyingly, decades of data that the new regime considers to be "alternative facts" or even "a hoax" will simply be destroyed. I don't know what the consequences might be of stopping research in the sciences and humanities dead, and how quickly it might recover if (when?) we get ourselves back on a course of sanity, four years or more from now.

But there I was talking about issues that, six months ago, seemed to have nothing to do with politics in the United States. Yet even though they have nothing to do with hot-button issues like climate science or women's health care, issues of data preservation and sustainability are completely politicized.

It caught me completely by surprise. I hadn't prepared to teach a class that was politically charged, and I found myself floundering. I said that whatever anyone's politics, our classroom had to remain a space for civil discourse. I said that I grade on how persuasively students organize and present their research, not on what their opinions are, and I hoped that students would feel free to disagree, even with me.

I need to do better, though. I need to make it clear that scrubbing websites is comparable to burning books and neither has a place in democracy.

I'm thankful for tenure. I'm thankful that I teach in a university, and a state, that isn't moving to silence its faculty. And I'm deeply sobered and dismayed by the implications. Teaching with integrity used to mean not smoking or sleeping with the students. It's become far more difficult to navigate the environment of alternative realities, suppression of scientific fact, and abrogation of human rights.

I now feel a grave responsibility to step up and state clearly that these things are not right. But I have to do so in a way that maintains respect for students with different views and allows for an open classroom atmosphere, that keeps the classroom a place of inquiry and the development of critical thinking, not a lecture on the ills of the people currently in power.

Teaching just got a whole lot harder.

Over at Medieval Ecocriticisms, I've just posted my notes for remarks given in a round-table session on "the Twitterati" at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds last night. Here's the link, if you'd like to go have a look.

Thanks to Carla Thomas for organizing a great session, to my co-presenters Dorothy Kim, Jonathan Hsy, Kristen Mapes, and Angie Bennett Segler, and to a fabulous and engaged audience.