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            For my final project, I want to reflect on a big part of the way I think a lot of us think about the environment (occasionally without admitting it to ourselves). To do this, I have to examine something that we haven't touched on so much in class: fear. One thing I kept coming back to this semester but never really found the time to talk about was the fact that I was having a hard time fully embracing the attitude of "love your environment, go outside and frolic in it" and the occasional "...or you're a bad person" that some of our readings seemed to imply. This is mostly because my journey to familiarize myself with the outside world contained a great deal of fear that I had to overcome, and I don't believe that I could be one of the only ones that experienced this.

(With my extension for my final work, my teach-in participation was at this point a while ago. However I think I still remember it well enough!)

My contribution to the teach-in was to discuss the subject that drove me to take this class in the first place. My journey in connecting with my environment was greatly helped along by working with a marine animal hospital and this peaked my interest in this class as an elective, so I thought I would share something about these experiences with the class as part of the teach-in.

The point of my demonstration was to peak people's interest in further exploring the world around them, but from some of the reactions to my question about which animals they could identify, I feel like I instead made some people feel like they hadn't done enough exploring of their own environment. This was accidental but I feel like it was also a good thing. I liked the fact that people felt like the absence of their ability to identify common animals meant that, generally, they had more exploring to do in order to fully understand the world around them, and I liked that I ended this class in a way that opened further reflection instead of clsed our earlier reflections.

I do recommend the movie (and the book) Life of Pi. Survival/vegetarianism/cannibalism/predator/prey/human animal relations, plus literary devices, allegory, levels of reality, what is real/true-- scary moments but great fun. I went with my niece and nephew (both in their 20s) and thought of all you eco-imaginers...

I want to get
older with you
read in
bed with you
every night
like tonight
we've got
time but
that bright star
looking through
our dark window
the reflection
more beautiful
than this what
happens when
the water's too
tired to clean
our human shores
the air too
thick to see
stars caught in
fall trees'
capillaries
choking
well I'll be
listening
to your
tender breath 
I'll be more
steadfast than
that nightlight 
sleep sound to
your soft fall
and swell
dreaming of 
waking with
you of
waking
with you. 

We're old
enough to know
we're young,
this winter's snow
shining far as
we can see
which isn't far
but sure is
beautiful.
Nothing is
as pure as this 
and it isn't.
However we walk
soft this solstice 
through our mother's
bare forests
whiter than our
mind before dreams.  
The sky darkens
early and our
parents sleep.
I hold your
hand and
we go bravely
into that
sweetness. 

I started at a pretty bad place. I did not even realize how little time I spend with nature and think ecologically until I attended Ecological Imaginings course. In choosing an on campus site, I was the only person in class to adopt an indoor site and intended to observe nature from afar through the window, which I later learned in Terry Tempest Williams book, is an unnatural thing to do. Since I had little memory of nature and was not used to ecological thinking, I even compared the natural scenery of the night sky with the scenes from man-made films. Worse still, as an international student whose first language is not English, I was overwhelmed by the readings and had a difficult time fully expressing myself in my essays. On top of these, I was also dealing with culture differences (that my essay is always not explicit enough), my procrastination and my homesickness.

I could talk little about the first few readings, not because I did not read them carefully because they are talking about those new ideas that were higher than my normal thinking horizon, for example Bohm confused me by comparing the usual method writing with quantum, because I think writing and physics are incomparable at that time. I could only turn in a somewhat beginning of a paper for my first paper, simply because I did not have the confidence to write a paper at that time. Nor have I been used to setting time to sitting alone on  grass thinking how dependable human are of plants and other ideas or refelctions.

I had a very happy time preparing the Teach-in with Barbara and Shengjia. I borrowed some book from Swat library so that we could find some good supporting materials about the Sky Burial Process. I focused on the cultural background of Sky Burial and found that Sky Burial, for Tibetan people, was not only a way for "gainning better rebirth", but also an important ceremony for worship nature.

I was impressed by the wisdom and reasoning behind Sky Burial. People made a non-profit "fair trade" with natural world to well balance their survival and belief, and I think their effort, however controversial in legal perspective, should really be appreciated and respected.

Also, I learnt many things from my Teach-in partners, Barbara and Shengjia. Barbara was really good at showing and describing the Sky Burial process, and Shengjia perfectly joinned parts of components together--from sites on school to "journey to Tibet".

I think Teach-in is a very good activity at the end of semester. Because of the Teach-in, I had the chance to work with my friend and provide my classmates more information on an interesting topic related with what we have learnt this semester.

            My group’s final project was a workshop that touched on different types of oppression and ways in which different groups are silenced on campus. We explore voice and Jody’s by educating people on the different ways in which privilege appears on campus. We used the discussion-based way of teaching/learning in our workshop. We explore the notion of vision and Barbs class by making the participants think about their niches on campus and where it is that they feel comfortable and where they do not. We used silence in our workshop by having silent discussions and giving people time to reflect on what they have seen on the posters before commenting. We also had a Delpit way of “teaching”. Throughout most of the workshop (i.e. cross the line activity) our point would get across depending on how the participants interpreted the activity. Throughout that activity, we included questions that touched on religion, gender and sexuality and race with the hopes that the participants would make the connections themselves.

Hira Ismail

Final Web Paper # 4