Nature – Sustaining Ecologies

RQ: hooks, Preface and “Kentucky Is My Fate”

July 15, 2018 admin Leave a comment

Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read bell hooks, Preface and “Kentucky Is My Fate.” The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

Preface

Let’s start thinking about hook’s opening question:

“Can we embrace an ethos of sustainability that is not solely about the appropriate care of the world’s resources, but is also about the creation of meaning—the making of lives that we feel are worth living?” (1)

How does the “Shadowy history of slavery” find expression in the world of real estate (3)?

How/why will hooks engage with Wendell Barry’s work?

How will hooks look to the past and her past, but without idealizing the history/her past. In other words, how does she plan to avoid the problem of nostalgia when writing about place and family?

Chapter 2, “Kentucky Is My Fate”

How/why does the opening line of the chapter echo Thoreau? What does hooks do differently?

Why open a story about living in a place, and to a lesser extent the past, with the vision of her own death? How does the image of “scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash”(6), figure the future and also avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia?

What lines divide hooks’ childhood? How does the house she lived in with her family in the Kentucky hills illustrate the spatial and temporal differences of her childhood?

How is Nature (or the Nature hooks experienced as a child) the “foundation of our counter hegemonic black subculture” (8)?

What accounts for her experience where “white and black folks often lived in a racially integrated environment, with boundaries determined more by chosen territory than race” (7)?

How was racial difference enforced when she once hooks moved from the country to the city?

Why did hooks leave Kentucky and what was her experience of place when she was an undergraduate at Stanford?

How/why were hooks and her community separated from nature? Why/how did this separation produce fear of nature in her?

What are the two “competing cultures in Kentucky” (10)?

How does hooks define the term, “A Culture of Belonging” (13)?

How did hooks’ “experience of exile” while in CA for college, “transform [her] perception of the world of home” (13)? What takes her so long to go home to Kentucky?

Reading Questions

27 June. The Ecological Thought Post Nature

June 27, 2018 admin Leave a comment

Featured Image: NOLA Water Treatment Facility Katrina Repairs

Housekeeping

1. Good work at the workshop yesterday. If you navigate to the Poster Assignment Page, please find some How-to materials in the right hand column.
2. Multimedia Studio printing turn around time?
3. I forgot to ask you to put your name on the Google form I sent out for Poster Presentation Preferences. You can have three extra credit points if you present on Monday.

Freewrite

Freewrite: Write a response to the following question for 7-10 minutes without stopping, and be prepared to share your answer with the class:

In a few sentences, describe the local or national development issue/project have you chosen to illustrate the concept of sustainability in your poster. Then, in a few more sentences, explain what exactly the issue/project you chose aims to sustain, i.e. preserve, protect, maintain.

Morton Discussion

Organize yourselves into groups according to the first few letters of your last name, and answer the question below that corresponds with your group number:

Group Number	Group Names
Group 1	A-E
Group 2	F-H
Group 3	M-N
Group 4	P
Group 5	S-W

Take 10-15 minutes to discuss your answer in your group & be prepared to cite evidence when you respond to your question.

Group One: List some of the ways that Morton defines the ecological thought. Are you ever satisfied with his definition? Is he?
Group Two: List some of the rhetorical or stylistic choices Morton makes in this chapter. How does his rhetorical style compare with Caradonna’s? Is one author more successful than the other, why/why not?
Group Three: What does the term “Nature” describe according to Morton? Why do we have to let go of “Nature” to have ecology? Do you agree, why/why not?
Group Four: What happens to the concept of personhood or the human when it expands under the ecological thought? For instance, what do you think Morton means when he says that “The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person” (8)?Do you agree, why/why not?
Group Five: What sorts of artwork best demonstrate the ecological thought? To respond to this question, examine at least one movie, book, etc. that he talks about as an example of the ecological thought. Can you think of your own example(s)? Do you agree with his assessment, why/why not?

Break!!

Discussion of “Nature, Post-Nature”

Get out the Clark essay and be prepared to discuss the following:

1.What does Clark mean when he says that the language we have inherited to describe the current environmental crisis is “fragile” (75)? How do the words “nature” and “natural” get “pulled in opposite directions at once” (75)?
2.What is the Anthropocene? How does the Anthropocene mess with distinctions such nature and culture or human and nature?
3. What “scenarios” does Clark propose would “avoid the disasters of the Anthropocene” (84) if implemented? What keeps his proposals from being implemented?
4. How does Clark’s definition of nature compare to Morton’s defintion? How does Clark’s definition compare to Caradonna’s?

Finally…How might you incorporate Morton or Clark’s ideas into your poster?

Class Plans

RQ: Morton, “Critical Thinking,” 1-14

June 14, 2018 admin Leave a comment

Featured Images: GreenMountainWindFarm Fluvanna

Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Timothy Morton’s “1-14. The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

1. What’s ecology according to Morton?
2. What does Morton mean by the “Ecological Thought”? What are some ways he defines the term? Are you ever satisfied with definition?
3. Describe the organizational strategy of this chapter? How does it differ from the way Nixon and Clark set up their chapters?
4. How/why does what Morton calls the ecological though disrupt time? What does he mean when he says things such as, “In some strong sense, the ecological thought rigorously comes afterward–it is always to come, somewhere in the future. In its fullest scope, it will have been thought at some undefined point” (3)?
5. Why do we have to let go of “Nature” to have ecology?
6. What does the term “Nature” describe according to Morton? Why is “Nature” a problem in his estimation?
7. What happens to the concept of personhood (or even species) when it expands under the ecological though? OR, what does Morton mean when he says that “The ecological though fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person” (8)?
8. Why do “all artworks…have an irreducibly ecological form” (11)?
9. What sort of interaction between the sciences and the humanities does Morton propose and why?
10. Why doesn’t Morton talk abut “theory” more explicitly? Or, what choices do think he has made in this chapter to be more accessible to non-specialists?

Reading Questions