short film on beach-combing & fun end-of-the-semester video re dance/walking...

http://aeon.co/film/flotsam-and-jetsam-a-short-film-about-beachcombers/

http://www.superstarmagazine.com/this-guy-decided-to-dance-with-someone-on-the-street-what-happened-next-will-make-your-day/

Frack Free Denton Mailing List

If anyone wants in on the anti-fracking mailing list (which provides links to news articles and research), here's the sign-up webpage:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nEm1OFMw-4FQpij4NDfVDMQSyB5_bNieaU-yARmM3gE/viewform

articles for Thursday's discussion

http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism#

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?hp&_r=0

close to home: court case on the environmental effects of fracking

LA Times reporting on recent court case in Dallas in which the jury awarded the family close to $3 million in damages from the air and water contamination caused by fracking. The family lives in Decatur, 30 miles from Denton. http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-79999980/

HERE'S THE ARTICLE I was talking about in class today regarding lasers being used to create rain and lighting...enjoy, I guess???  I'm not sure I like the idea of mankind being able to create storms.  I will have to give this one more thought.   :-)


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140418141242.htm

The sciences based version of today's discussion?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics

Consciousness: a State of Matter?

Not directly related to anything, but Emerson's thoughts on "mind" reminded me of this nifty article on a neuroscience breakthrough that came out recently:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/physicists-say-consciousness-might-be-a-state-of-matter/

another article on the economics of climate change

There has been a veritable explosion of articles on this topic in the past couple weeks, possibly because of the release of the IPCC report. Here's another, this time from The Atlantic:
 http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-economic-case-for-acting-on-climate-change/360995/

Meehan and Metonymy

I came to this article ready to reject it out of hand as I usually find Emerson’s conception of nature as too anthrocentric: it is a blank canvas on which mankind can express itself and come to understand itself better through that expression. However, Meehan seeks to complicate this reading of Emerson and gives us a fuller picture of how the writer understood the interwoven relationship between humanity and the natural world. The article correctly sums up the widespread notion in criticism that Emerson was overly transcendental and metaphorical when compared to an observational and empirical Thoreau. Using metonymy, which Meehan defines as an association between two objects through “physical or temporal contiguity”, Emerson and Thoreau are both able to bridge the gap between the imaginary and the concrete, the lofty and the grounded.

In his discussion, Meehan raises some interesting points that I found especially relevant to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack and Nature even though they were not his primary texts. The larger trend of ecocritics to separate the literal and the literary in texts such as these creates a sort of binary where concrete representations of nature are privileged over the more expressive and imaginative depictions. Is it wise to separate the abstract from the concrete? Emerson and Thoreau seek to marry the two concepts together by using carefully constructed rhetoric to shape our perception of a material nature. Metonymy becomes a means of understanding that which we cannot conceive of empirically: the interconnected web of the natural world. Empirical knowledge can only take us so far before we come up short and must rely on literary expression. Yes, we can track the dispersion of seeds and catalogue the numerous species of plants and animals but nature will continue to hold a mystery just out of reach. When we find ourselves faced with the incomprehensible, metonymy and other forms of literary expression can offer us a way to articulate the inexpressible in readable ways we can understand. In Meehan’s reading, Emerson’s “poet” becomes a kind of middleman to form a “chain of relation among nature, writer, and reader” (Meehan 305). In this way, the poet is a filter or “organic agent” willing to forge a metonymic relationship between the reader and the natural world.

To bring Thoreau and Emerson together, is Thoreau going out on the river to pluck the ripe symbols waiting to be transcribed for his readers? Is he an “organic agent”? I think both Thoreau and Emerson understand the power that comes with mediation and use it to communicate their own messages. In A Week, Thoreau offers empirical observations of the fish living within the current of the Concord River together with historical insight into mankind’s relationship to the fish and the river itself. Expounding on his cataloguing of fish and plant life, Thoreau builds from descriptions of colors and behaviors to a full examination of the ecological impact man has stamped into the river with dams and factories. The structure of the book itself shows form blending into a higher function as Thoreau’s narrative flows between journalistic observations of the Concord and high-minded analogous sermonizing. If Thoreau’s style meanders and flows like a river, Emerson’s Nature delves right into an exploration of metonymy, most notably in the “Language” section. When describing the use of naturalistic terms inherent in our speech on page 18, Emerson combines the spiritual with the physical: “An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock… A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite”. Though he does not use the word metonymy, he describes these phrases as things that “can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.” Here we see Emerson relying on metonymy to express things he would be unable to otherwise.

IPCC report on limiting climate change

I forgot to post this last week. It was released on  April 13, 2014. It is the "what can we do to stop this" part of the report (Part III):
http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/04/13/ipcc-options-for-limiting-climate-change-still-available-if-action-on-grand-scale-starts-now/

fighting CO2 emissions as "the new abolition"

Interesting and disturbing article in The Nation that compares the economics of slavery to that of oil. Worth the read: http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism#

“Time is but a stream I go a fishing in” – Thoreau’s Time on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Set within the span of a week, Thoreau appears to give us a pretty straightforward timeline for this trip right in the title. Yet even though the number of days and nights out on the rivers are set, the time does not quite seem measurable once Thoreau has entered the current. Throughout this sort of travelogue, I think we can start to see Thoreau frame the natural history of the river and his exhaustive cataloguing of every flower and fish he comes across with the history of man. More specifically, with the history of American man. Within the framework of the expedition, Thoreau plays with the form of the travel journal as he presents us with a narration that jumps in and out of the present. Written a few years after the actual trip while the author was living at Walden (by the way the quote in the title is from Walden), this is Thoreau’s memory of time spent with his brother that is imbued with a gravity that his brother’s untimely death gave to the journey. He begins his journey with references to the American Revolution which is of course the beginning of the nation and he gives us the Indian name of the Concord. As he progresses further and gives us accounts of the skills white men acquired from Indians as well as episodes of men settling alongside and building locks and dams on the river, we see the progress of civilization into the wildness of America. Thoreau was a voracious reader of all sorts of texts including natural history and even Hindu religious texts. Much like Tennyson, he had read Lyell’s Principles of Geology and was heavily influenced by it to the extent that much of his journaling and late essays were natural histories themselves. In this work, see Thoreau putting the succession of nature alongside the succession of humanity with American civilization.

Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Thoreau's work provides an interesting offering to the works that we have read thus far in this course. He is evoking many of the themes that we have noted in previous romantic works; however, his non-European perspective and setting provides for a radically different manifestation of these tropes.  Thoreau evokes an empirical tone when talking about the Nature that is around him. He takes great pains to take note of the named places, the specific length and depth of the rivers, the extent of their rise and fall over the seasons, and the local histories as collected through the townspeople and newspapers. This detailed focus, similar to what was seen in the travel narratives that were popularized over a century before, is oddly conflated with pastoral/idyllic tropes that celebrate the classic notions of a natural ideal. Furthermore, these figurations seem to be evoked by Thoreau strictly as a meditative means; the rivers are a channel through which Thoreau can expand upond a larger human/natural context that is largely concerned with matters of the soul. Essentially, to me, Thoreau's work resembles many canonical romantic works through the conventional forms he evokes; however, the content is clearly concerned with man's spiritual navigation and discovery. Nature seems to offer little more than an entry point for Thoreau's mourning of his brother. Because of this named and numbered distraction, Thoreau's figuration of nature seems disconnected from the first generation Romantics' concerns. Nature reads as a theoretical stand-in for the philosophical constructions of a soul's journey after death.

Emerson

I have more to say about Emerson than Thoreau, for I see Emerson's legacy played out in so many philosophical pathways of understanding. Firstly, I was aware of Emerson's influence on Nietzsche, but I did not know it was this close. Furthermore, I had not considered Foucault to be influenced as well. However, Foucault turns towards the material while Emerson looks through the material and towards the spirit, the only way, according to Emerson, by which we can really understand the world. Foucault's order of things and Emerson's order of things are similar, for they both look to establish an end (an understanding of) to the final cause--the final cause, in the Aristotelian sense, is the intention made towards some objective end--the product, which, for Emerson, can only be understood through phenomena, the thing as it is perceived, in the Kantian sense. Nietzsche and Emerson are similar in that they both believe that the understanding of spirit (Nietzsche's "god") can only happen indirectly (not to mention the proto-fascist musings on will and power and how some people are more capable than others) through parable or poetry. Foucault, the man who provided us with the intellectual tools for codifying the boundaries of discourse, looks to the place where the word touches the body, not where the word, the idea, glimpses the spirit. Furthermore, Foucault's episteme runs contrary to Nietzsche's anti-system, anti-nihilist philosophy, not even to mention Emerson's optimism. Emerson and Nietzsche are very romantic in their view, seeing great potentiality and value for human perception, whereas Foucault shackles us with the noumena (not in the empirical sense). I would like to say that I am a Nietzschean or an Emersonian, but alas I am a Foucauldian. How sad. I would definitely like to say that I am a Thoreauian, but that is not my world. I can't imagine living in a world where nature is anything other than an ornament.    

The Grenade, a Response to Rising Sea Levels

This is an advertisement, but I'm not sure what for. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting view on fatalism in the face of climate change. These very fears are being commodified to sell products. I feel like I should be surprised and disgusted, and for some reason, I'm not.

On climate change denial, but includes discussion on the scale of environmentally ethical choices

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22zwkq/science_ama_series_im_prof_stephan_lewandowsky_i/

Interesting read of an activist gone rogue

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?hp&_r=0

climate change talk on Friday

As if there wasn't enough to do on Friday, here's another talk of interest:

   The speaker for [the philosophy] departmental colloquium on Friday of this week is our own Alexandria Poole.  Her subject centers upon an issue of interest to all of us: climate change, its deniers and those who suffer the consequences.  Please plan to join us for what will be an engaging talk by a valued colleague.  The colloquium meets in EESAT room 115 Friday April 18, 3:30-5:00pm.  The full topic and abstract follows.

Best wishes,

George James

Topic

Acknowledging Climate Change Denial and Climate Refugees:

 Plural Epistemologies in the Climate Change Debate

Abstract

The existence, impacts and risks of climate change remains controversial in the political arena of the United States, despite the nation being the second significant contributor of global emissions and highest contributor per capita in the world. In sharp contrast, the number of climate refugees continues to grow as these impacts are felt in vulnerable areas, such as coastal regions and island nations—even though these communities contribute very little to the causes of climate change.  These increasing pressures make evident the urgency to bridge and negotiate between the distinct, multiple, and often conflicting epistemological views regarding climate change and its risks to humans, the environment, and biodiversity. This paper aims to build epistemological bridges within the climate change debate by exploring the tension between those who do not think that climate change is a serious threat or have “climate change denial” and those communities who cannot escape the impacts of the rapidly changing environment of the “anthropocene.”

Yet, before we can even begin to navigate the complex issues involved with accountability and management of the drivers of climate change, we must first ensure that our framework enables the articulation of all perspectives that are participating in this discussion, so that we all are speaking at the same table. The Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative (IPCCA) has developed a methodological toolkit that is designed to both articulate and monitor concerns for these indigenous groups, but to do so in such a way that translates to scientific and academic research communities as well. The IPCCA toolkit identifies epistemological bridges to communicate the impacts of climate change and loss for indigenous communities, including: Self-determination, Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Endogenous Development, Adaptation, Mitigation andBuenVivir. This paper reviews these principles within the context of urban and buffered communities, who are mediated from the direct impacts of climate change, in an attempt to identify “epistemological bridges” between diverse perspectives within the climate change debate. Such bridges may aid individuals who otherwise deny or ignore climate change to become aware of their role in bringing about this imposing reality.

Eco-Lit News Flash

Just read the Pulitzer Prize award list and the winner for General Nonfiction is Tom's River by Dan Fagin. It's a book about the tragic impact that a polluted river had on a New Jersey town. Slow violence left over from an industrial chemical plant. Hope it gets people talking

Tennyson's Geology

Tennyson’s In Memoriam was written in a time of disruption for not only the poet but for the intelligentsia of the Victorian era. The mid 19^th century was a time of rapid scientific development and even though In Memoriam would predate Darwin’s Origin of Species, the scientific discourse of the day was already challenging the notion of a world existing solely for the dominion of man. As mentioned in the introduction to this text, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had a tremendous impact on Tennyson. Lyell brought the idea of geological evolution to the forefront of popular science and forced many Victorians to reevaluate their conceptions of an Earth created by divine providence in contrast to a planet ruled by chaotic upheavals in the natural world.

It is between these two competing ideas of how Nature operates that Tennyson creates a space for human habitation and evolutionary advancement. With images of divinity focused on the sky and images of death focused beneath the surfaces of the planet, the geologically minded poet creates a middle ground between the two opposing ideologies for the “little lives of men” (section II, line 8) to run their course. In the Prologue, Tennyson invokes the son of God as represented by the sun and the moon and trusts that our dead will not be left to lay beneath the dust forever. In the second section, a tree runs its roots into the ground to nurture itself on the remains of those interred in the church graveyard. In the first, he mentions dancing with death in order to “beat the ground” (12). The idea that Tennyson believes that contemporary man has evolved from the ashes of those before him is given a physical manifestation. As we bury our dead into the ever-changing geological landscape, we bring ourselves closer to a higher form of being and closer to God.

Evolution & Water in "In Memoriam"

In Memoriam, Tennyson's lengthy elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, takes up various topics that were important and pressing to Victorian society (hardly surprising, since the poem took seventeen years to complete). One of the most notable recurring subjects is that of the then-nascent theory of evolution, which Tennyson references in several sections of the poem.

The poem’s initial attitude toward nature (“red in tooth and claw”) is often one of fear and anger, as we may observe in section LVI: “From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.’” Here, according to our footnote, “scarped” refers to an escarpment, or a cut-away section of earth, in which several layers of fossil and decomposed organic matter may be observed. “She” is nature, personified as a careless and cruel goddess; nature has even conquered the “Dragons of the prime,” or the dinosaurs. Throughout the first several sections of the poem, nature always seems to mimic Tennyson’s emotional state—when he is particularly distraught, a storm comes; when he is contemplative and melancholy, natural forces reflect the sentiment.

As Tennyson’s grief becomes more manageable, so does nature. Section LXXXIII welcomes the second spring after Hallam’s death and asks whether trouble “can live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons,” urging the new year to “bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire . . .” In section CXIX, Tennyson revisits Hallam’s old address (for the first time after a painful visit shortly after his death) and claims to “smell the meadow in the street . . .” Tennyson even finds Venus (or "Hesper-Phosphor") to be a site of comfort in section CXXI: “Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name / For what is one, the first, the last / Thou, like my present and my past, / Thy place is changed; thou art the same.” Tennyson’s having found comfort—and having identified a comforting quality of changelessness in a natural body—is a victory for the poem; it is one of the first sections in which Tennyson directly mingles scientific fact with hopeful rhetoric. Finally, the poem’s epilogue (written for the occasion of Tennyson’s sister’s marriage) is at significant peace. Tennyson foresees the birth of a niece or nephew, describing the “lower phase” of gestation in which the embryo “resembles lower forms of life”—a far cry from the outright fear of evolution that characterizes the earlier sections of the poem.

Additionally, the stream, river, and ocean are all recurring images throughout the poem. Earlier sections of the poem take rivers for their subjects; section XIX compares the tide’s stilling of the Wye to eyes “fill’d with tears that cannot fall . . .” The Lethe, which is a river in Hades, is mentioned several times. At one point, Tennyson expresses that he would rather have Hallam buried in the churchyard than at sea. In section CII, Tennyson describes a dream in which a dove brings “a summons from the sea.” Tennyson obeys the summons and goes to a ship, where he finds Hallam, and the men and their companions “steer . . . [the ship] toward a crimson cloud / That landlike sle[eps] along the deep.” We haven’t spoken much of bodies of water thus far in class, nor have they figured this heavily in many of the other works we have read. What kinds of work does water do for the poem? What can be said of the different ways in which bodies of water are represented throughout the various sections?

If you need a little levity after reading about colonialism and disease, check this out:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/28968/where-are-they-now-diseases-killed-you-oregon-trail

Book on the life of a P B Shelley poem

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1434-masks-of-anarchy

excerpts from Malthus' On the Principle of Population (1798)

from chapter 1:

The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy; the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing; the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world; the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects, which dazzle, and astonish the understanding; and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon the French Revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind.

It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement; or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal....

I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them. These difficulties it is my present purpose to state; declaring, at the same time, that so far from exulting in them, as a cause of triumph over the friends of innovation, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely removed….

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.

These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature; and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe; and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations….

Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.

This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind….

This natural inequality of the two powers of population, and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which, should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.

for a discussion of the conclusions Malthus draws from this argument, see the entry on the Victorian Web.