Junior final exam plan

You are to write a 1200-1500 word essay (formal 3rd person) or manifesto (informal 1st person) that narrows a particular theme in the class to one specific question and then synthesizes four class texts plus one outside text into a coherent position. 
Additional expectations include proper citations and works cited page. This is due ON PAPER in my office by the end of the English exam period. Here is the link for the course survey. I appreciate your anonymous responses to the class. Thanks. 

Project evaluation criteria below-

• Jenny Price's literary manifesto"Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A."and part 2               
• McKibben's "Global Warming's Terrible New Math" describes our current climate change plight in clear, direct, stark CO2 terms.
• An article in the NYT magazine about legal rights for animals based on Leopold's land ethic. 

• Chris Hayes' article on the New Abolitionism which compares fossil fuel holdings to southern plantation owners holding of slaves. A provocative economic/moral argument.
• Ted Kaczinsky, also known as the unibomber, wrote this environmental manifesto from his cabin off the grid in Montana.
• Here's a NYT magazine article and the website for The Dark Mountain Project which contains another manifesto about environmental despair and failure.  

 Evaluation Criteria---------------------------------------------------------

• Quality of thinking- 50 points
• Narrows topic to a productive, specific question
• Develops the idea and uses sources thoughtfully
• Shows effective choice of four (4) texts and passages
• Incorporates details/examples from sources sufficiently and effectively
• Goes beyond cliche/superficiality into substantive tensions/questions
• Arrives at a considered, personal, coherent conclusion 

• Quality of writing-50 points
• Effective, clear structure- either formal or creative
• Careful editing (MINIMAL WEAK VERBS)
•  Use of title, thesis & topic sentences- either formal or informal
• Uses specific details from text and personal experience to ground ideas in context.

Senior Exam-

Meet at 12:30 in room 223 (next to Mr. Hughes' office) with your presentation script, annotations, & a computer (for a course evaluation). I'm looking forward to some rousing, creative explorations of the texts and questions from the term. I'm also available Tuesday during class time to answer questions. If you'd like to take the class survey early- the link is HERE.

Google(Earth)

How does Google's Earth Day doodle show the relationship between (wo)man, nature, and technology?

Like housing projects named for features they displaced 'Fox Run' 'Oak Knoll' 'Falcon Ridge' (this article mocks this approach in Denver), Google's cyber nature passes easily for cute celebration of nature, but of course when we watch this, we're very much NOT watching any actual birds or beetles as your Vine videos suggested.

In the animation for Earth Day, Google creates a few small creatures, hummingbird, dung beetle, puffer fish, jelly fish, that turn and float and flutter. The pair of shivering monkeys seem different from the rest, staring out at us from their double oo station, the place all these cartoons are integrated into the name.  They're rendered in anthropomporphized letter O's subordinate to the all encompassing often dancing word Google. How many of you regularly click on the animation?  How many minutes have you passed idly watching this? How many human years have passed similarly? At what cost? 

In The Circle, Eggers opposes the utopia of the Googleplex corporate campus with kayaking on SF bay or later on Mae's boyfriend's off-the-grid hideout. Yet the real place we experience Google is on the screen, increasingly in all our screens as Google grows ubiquitous. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate their work. I hate using email programs that don't let you easily embed links or pictures. Their products are so intuitive they feel....ummm.....natural. On the screen, as we search, Google greets us daily with a cute, clever, animated version of their name created just for that day.  Each day they greet us with a combination of puzzle, cartoon, and lesson.

And the word Google- do you know the original meaning before it became a company and then a verb?  It meant 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially an incomprehensibly large quantity. An apt name, certainly, perhaps because of the incomprehensible encroachment it represents on our time and because of the way technology continues to replace the natural world in our lives, even as it evokes it like those awkwardly named housing developments.

Earth Day

While Earth Day now gets lost in the chaos of all the other awareness days and months, the early environmental movement used it very effectively. In this interview Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand talks about this campaign to make public the now famous first full image of earth published by NASA in 1972. Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson focused on creating the first Earth Day as noted in this history.  

Brand's life fascinates me for his role on Ken Kesey's magic bus, his founding of the Whole Earth Catalogue, his life on a houseboat in Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, and now his latest venture, The Long Now foundation. This organization is trying to help us understand the world across incomprehensible time scales.

This year NASA is celebrating Earth Day with the #GlobalSelfie project. I hadn't heard of it until I did a bit of research for this post, so I don't know if it's really working.  And while crowdsourcing is amazing, I'm less sure about selfies.

As we move toward your final projects and the end of this class, I'm weighing the balance between hope and despair in these conversations. Climate change conversations tend to produce fatalism, and this bleakly hilarious viral video w/ 8 million views tries to make humor out of it. Yet this seems to be a long way from the 60's hope that an image could change how we think about our relationship to the planet. As I write this on a bright spring morning, everything seems momentarily right with the world. I believe these questions are the most important ones we face.

I hope this term has increased your appreciation for them. We're all going to have trouble doing homework today as the pull of the sun and warmth and first signs of spring call us back after the long, cold winter. Who couldn't love these days?  I want to believe we act more out of love than fear, and I hope we can enjoy spring and consider these ideas in our final days and projects.

Calendar

Dear seniors (and friends)- It's finally nice outside and we're all distracted, 
but it ain't over 'til it's over.... Here is a calendar for the last two weeks.

Monday 4/14                       Wednesday 4/16               Friday 4/18
triptych presentations          Final proj assigned           Final groups- short planning time
ITW quiz/discussion           Jigsaw presentations         Jigsaw presentations
**quiz on 'Allegory of the Cave' too!                          ITW blog due (see other post)
                                                                                      hw-Read scenes 1 & 2 

Monday 4/21 (45mins)       Wednesday 4/23              Friday 4/25
reading/performing Arcadia in class------------------------------>
Arcadia quiz                      hw-start final
hw- read to Act 2 sc 6       

(Seniors only)
Monday 4/28                     Wednesday 4/30
review rehearsal day           12:30-2:30 Presentations in Lecture Hall.

Reading Jigsaw

While we read Into the Wild, here are a few short but important readings that pull offer some key ideas about ways of thinking about nature and place.  In groups you will carefully read and discuss one set of readings.  Make sure you understand them and be prepared to lead a discussion addressing difficult ideas, images or words, 2-3 key passages, and then a couple of guiding questions that connect this reading to other readings/ideas from the course. 

You need to turn in a annotations for key passages, an outline of key ideas, a set 5-7 discussion questions including questions linking your texts to others in the course. 

1. Garret Hardin "The Tragedy of the Commons" with 2 key passages to discuss with 10 examples
and this article, too.

2.  Dr. Seuss' The Lorax vs the American Forest Products Council's The Truax, this comic and then perhaps an excursion into chat/blogs like this

3. Richard Louv introduction and excerpts from Last Child in the Woods and this one about NDD and ADHD and follow up article

4. Aldo Leopold "The Land Ethic" and the AL Foundation page

5. Joyce Carol Oates "Against Nature"

6. Sandra Steingraber Living Downstream excerpt with/against video Frontiers of the Future

The coming weeks

You were to have read up to chapter12 in Into the Wild for today, and I'd like you to finish chapter 17 by Friday.  Over the weekend, please read the last 17 pages and complete/post your triptych. By Friday, April 18th write a blog post responding to one of the following questions, or see me if you have another idea you'd like to pursue.

• Search "Chris McCandless" in Youtube and watch a few of the many videos.  Consider how they represent and respond to his life and death. Compare and contrast these and offer your own response.
• Read this New Yorker article by Krakauer that considers new evidence about McCandless' death. Why does this matter? How has the author's perspective changed in the 21 years between the two articles? What is your response?
• Assess McCandless' life and death for yourself. Identify and rank the most compelling explanations Krakauer offers, and then explain what you think the story suggests about your/our relationship to nature.

What is 'real'?

In class today we debated an ancient question- is the world as we experience it 'real'? In a related question that drives Chris McCandless- is the natural world real and different from the human world? Is it better? From Inception to The Matrix and originally in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" we have wondered about the reliability of our senses and the nature of the world outside. This still shot from the claymation version of the allegory shows how Plato views our position, and suggests his view of our 'reality'. 

 Here's an explanation that goes further than we will in class on Monday. As you try out some video triptych scenes this weekend, think about how you face the same questions Alex/Chris does in the story. And please read to page 116 for Monday. We will read and discuss Plato on Monday.

Into the Wild

Please read chapters 1-3 for Tuesday and 4-7 for Thursday. Check your Thoreau essay comments on the papers I've put in your folders this morning.  Please see me during tutorial with any questions.

avoidance, approach & assumption

Here is my video triptych.

This series of videos start w/ pretty direct responses to dramatic elements in the environment- a late March snow and a hike in Canyonlands.The first expresses despair at the snow and cold we had during spring break and personifies nature. In looking at it now, I'm struck by the lack of color compared to the second. Here I feel some of Jack London's naturalism. The second is a response to that despair, a trip to Utah's desert warmth and drama where I again feel what Romantics called 'the sublime'. I don't know how long that awe would last if I lived there. But when I lived on the beach in Morocco, the pounding surf amazed me the entire time. Some elements of the natural world have that power. The first snow of the year often does as well, but the last snow feels quite different.  Finally, the third video challenges the emotions of the first two landing on a less emotional and probably more 'real' truth. My greatest impact on and therefore relationship with nature is my carbon footprint based on the daily commute. Commuting and communing (with nature) are nearly identical words with opposite meanings. Living 24 miles away from work and consuming the fuel, the vehicles and the freeway system puts me pretty squarely in Ishmael's prison industry of 'consuming the world.'  Commuting and prison do seem pretty synonymous.

What has evolved in these videos is a focus on a fragmentary gesture like walking or driving as a representation of my role in nature.  The first version of the first video showed my feet walking in the new snow. I prefer the text of this one, but the opening of the other one connects the three better.  Overall, I'm more pleased with this assignment now having wrestled with it some.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how you handle it. 

Video Triptych

What can you communicate in a few seconds of sound and image?  Early film makers started asking this question with Edison's kiss, Muybridge's horse & Lumiere's train. Vine and Instagram have allowed all of us to answer this question as well. Recently, a UNH prof created the #walkmyworld project asking people to use video and social media to share poetry experiences. We're going to use the same approach to consider natural ones. (Note- there's a great video introduction to using Vine in the Walkmyworld site above).

This assignment pairs something new with something very old- the triptych. In fact, as I write this it's possible some of you (Jared and Mary?) are looking at one of the most famous ones in the Museo del Prado called "The Garden of Earthly Delight". The still image is below, but check out this cgi animated version w/ description & this history. Here the view of nature as heavenly garden starts beautifully on the left side, then goes rather wrong on the right. Here's a great close up of the right panel although oddly 'one minute art' didn't do the others.

Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

An original reason for a tryptich format was practical.When the church service ended, the two sides of the picture could be closed and the image protected.Our reason for a tryptich is also practical- 7 seconds (or 15 if you Instagram) isn't enough to say much. Yet, three short reflections on your relationship(s) with nature allows powerful visuals but requires serious focus.

The goals for the assignment are (surprise) threefold- Represent three different attitudes toward/relationships with nature, connect the three scenes with either a visual element/sequence, a narrative approach, or perhaps audio elements, create vivid, dynamic visuals.  Then write a brief explanation of your tryptich. If you don't have access to Vine or Instagram, you can record 7 second videos with any camera and upload them directly to your blog.  

·         You can represent  a sense of place, attitude or relationship with nature in image, gesture or word.  Consider ways the three might interrelate, create dialogue, or even contradict each other. How might you connect the three visually with perspective, lighting, shape, gesture, or framing? Finally, creative approaches are harder to name.  You're probably better at this than I am.

 

·        Finally, write a blog post with the three videos and explain your intentions and decisions

extinction & de-extinction

NOTE- Final essays due in DROP FOLDER @ 3:00 on Friday. 

Are we with within nature, or is it in our hands? Most of our opening Venn diagrams placed man within nature, but many conversations since have questioned that assumption. While climate change dwarfs these examples in importance, these two strangely opposing stories reveal specific ways we are taking remarkable control by using science and DNA to recreate the extinct wooly mammoth.  This sounds like sci-fi, but there's real money and science behind it, not that I believe it will or should happen.  Ironically and simultaneously we are using bad science and DNA to delist, or to stop protecting wolves in the lower 48 states. Of course wolves haven't lived in most of the this area for years. As you may know, wolf hunting has actually resumed in Minnesota and Wisconsin this year. Some would view this as a success story, a species learning how to survive in modified habitat and coming back from the brink of extinction.  This article points out that another way of seeing this decision is a narrower definition of habitat than some see as the purpose of the Endangered Species Act.  What both articles also reveal, is that the definition of a 'species' has gotten more instead of less complicated with DNA analysis. 

What are we doing?

We've moved from holding up lighters to cell phones at concerts, but why do this on a moonlit beach?  This eerie, beautiful image from National Geographic shows Somalians in neighboring Djibouti looking for cheaper cell service across the bay. These silhouetted figures in moonlight and phonelight unintentionally link technology and nature in their simple desire to speak to family.  And while Eggers satirized transparency in The Circle, NPR shows a clip on camera called Narrative that posts pictures to the web all day long. The company suggests it will supplement memory, a simple need that I certainly feel, but with a different eerie quality in every moment. 

Often listening to the news on the way home feels like our class discussion continued. For example, "How would we know if we were on the Taker Thunderbolt?" Then this story reminds me that despite the cold US winter, January was still the 374th consecutive month above global average temperature and this one links Peruvian glacier melt to those temperatures. Combined with James Lovelock's newest predictions for economic disruption caused by climate change, I find the analogy compelling.  Our conversations about Ishmael again confirmed that it helps us think about 'how things came to be' and understand that we can tell different stories and make different choices.

I mentioned my friend David Dunbar's DKDK zone in class the other day, and his blog notes,  

One solution might be to try to figure out how to get into that zone of unknown unknowns—the DKDK zone. In other words, don’t avoid the DKDK--actively seek it out. Being there might just provide the necessary confusion or disequilibrium (key precursors of insight and experience) that would force us to create new paradigms.

Ishmael doesn't tell us how to live, but it does suggest how we might understand the way not to live, and then how to accept our ignorance as we look for creative new ways to live. But first, we have to be able to accept our errors, admit we don't know what we're doing, and open ourselves to new solutions.

Weeks 7-9 (to end of Q3)

“Nature is not great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”                    Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an early celebrity of the modern form- as famous for being famous as he was for whatever made him famous.  A couple other quotes include this one that I rather like-"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."  And one more apt for Ishmael, "I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability." (Wikiquote.org)

Still, Wilde's clever phrase suggests that our understanding of nature comes from the stories well tell about it.  For example, I don't intend to deny that Sela's grizzly bear was real, but even the use of that bear to reveal 'grace under pressure' uses the wildest of nature for a very human purpose. And similarly most of our nature stories have diverse human purposes separate from nature's perhaps opaque agenda. And now that most of us live quite distant from the wilderness, the 'arts' or media that create nature for us are even further from the the thing itself.   

For the next two weeks we're going to the way back machine here, considering historical ways nature has been created in literature starting with Greeks and moving to Transcendentalists (with a brief pause for Hemingway). Then we'll start reading Into the Wild, a book about Chris McCandless who took some of these ideas as far as he could, and perhaps farther than he should. 

Note- readings should be completed before each date: I'll be looking for discussion leaders, too.

2/25- Final Ishmael debate & Pastoral poetry lecture.  (Hesiod/Virgil handouts HERE)
**pick this up if you missed class Friday! 
2/27-  Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"

             *Aaron Schuler- guest instructor this week!
3/3- Hemingway's "Big Two Hearted River" 
3/5- Orwell's "The Common Toad" Read/annotate for ways Orwell's visions of nature compare or contrast with Hemingway's. 
 

3/10- Thoreau's Walden "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" & Romanticism lecture.  Do check out the larger Thoreau website and dip into a couple other chapters of the book.  Find one other quote you appreciate to put on the board and share with the class. Look for the writing assignment on the assignment page.  
3/12-  Thoreau essay draft due- peer and teacher review/work period
3/14-  Essay due. Introduce/start 'Into the Wild'

Weeks 5-6

What would Ishmael say to Rukeyser's 'The world is made of stories, not atoms'?

The famous nature historian and University of Madison professor William Cronon's article "A Place for Stories" poses a similar question. He seems to believe they matter, but mostly for how they affect us, or, as Ishmael would say, how we enact them.    He starts with two historical conclusions about the dust bowl. Read these two closing paragraphs on the first page of the essay and come back.  I'll wait...                                        Yep, I'm waiting.  Go click on title link above, please....
 
Ok.  So, Cronon notes that each author observes the history of the dust bowl, but one sees human perseverance and victory over nature as challenger and the other sees human failure to understand nature as a larger disaster.  The same facts can be read differently.  Later, Cronon notes, "In the act of separating story from non story, we wield the most powerful yet dangerous tool of the narrative form." Here he means inclusion- what is told and what is withheld. Sometimes, information isn't withheld as much as it's inaccessible.  In the climate change debate, for example, the data have been difficult to comprehend because of magnitude.  We struggle to understand or accept the problem because it's too large to comprehend.  This new NASA video shows global warming over time in a visual way.  Of course if we accept climate change, it also falls easily into the declensionist narrative, the view that we always destroy paradise because it's somehow who we are- and both denial and shoulder shrugging acceptance yield the same result- passive inaction.

So returning to Rukeyser, is there a story about our relationship to the world that can save both?

Assignments for the next two weeks:

• Finish Ishmael for final discussion on 2/19.  Please go online here to participate in the prediscussion forum.  Please sign into your school google email when you post.   Please you your personal gmail account as the school accounts seem to be blocked.
• 7th period forum       
•  8th period forum 
•  
• Write 2nd blog post on an Ishmael related subject.  Follow the same approach w/ a couple of visual elements, a couple of outside texts that fit your idea, and a thoughtful, edited reflection with closure if not conclusion in a lively, personal voice.  Possible topics- Malthus, noble savage, Peter Farber's ideas, Biblical revisionism, the declensionist narrative of Genesis, Socratic dialogue or reflections on Quinn's argument or the novel itself.  Here's a video 'inspired' by the book, and a web community devoted to it.  You could also compare Quinn's message to another book or movie.   Due 2/21

I'm a tool-

7th hour Googledoc                                8th hour Googledoc

. . here is the paradox of the 20th century: our tools are better than we are, and grow faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: To live on a piece of land without spoiling it.   Aldo Leopold

It's Sunday afternoon and way too cold again. I'm reading your essays, feeling a bit stir crazy, and checking my devices way too often. The media fasts were provocative exercises for many of you, although I can't seem to embrace the lesson myself this afternoon. Today's NYT also has a great article here about a week long technology 'diet' (the author wisely resists the extremism of a fast).  The picture below shows one man's 1925 solution to over stimulus.  Why do I imagine the eyes in this helmet outfitted with Googleglass lenses? And why does it resemble my blogger profile picture? 

In Leopold's passage from the famous book Sand County Almanac he connects Thoreau to Ishmael. We will dig into Ishmael's arguments on Tuesday.  

A tool to avoid becoming a tool of your tools.  Or maybe not.... http://imgur.com/gallery/J5uqU