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            People of the world! We have problems, and these problems are as big as the earth itself. People of the world, we must solve these problems or perish. This is the discourse of every environmental theorist, writer, or scientist. We have come to a cross roads in our existence here on earth, one where we choose to live and save other species in the process, or one where we exterminate those around us, then die ourselves. Certainly bleak prospects. Either way, we shall be required to give something up, to change fundamentally, to stage a revolution, and accept that we are part of a larger ecological system.

Abandoning Despair

Picture this: A city where some houses stand in water that has risen to the windows of their second floor. Other houses do not stand at all but now only consist of a basement filled with the former first floor and a roof to cover it up. Cars are flipped onto their sides and crushed like cardboard boxes. There are fallen trees, scattered planks of wood, broken glass, and upturned furniture lining some streets, and slow moving rivers where other street used to be. There are no people. Everyone has left.

For Bryn Mawr women who want to have an impact on shaping what BMC is like, ecological thinking is a relevant field to explore. Ecology is literally “the study of home”. Do we really know much about our home? What elements did we miss out in our home? How could we make sustainable decisions for our home? These are all about ecological thinking, which essentially brings a difference when we approach to a problem.

Our Emily Balch Seminar, Ecological Imaginings, is an ongoing experiment about the development of ecological literacy. Here I am eager to share with other Bryn Mawr women about what our tight group has experienced so far and invite more people to think ecologically and give a hand to spread this awareness. Ecological literacy is not confined to academic discussion, but can be applied to bring about significant changes on the campus. How we shape Bryn Mawr College is up to each one of us.

Ecological literacy is the ability to understand the world from a holistic perspective. Consider the fluidity of the world when you see, feel and think. Recognizing the interaction process of each component of an action is essential to holism. I want to share some class experience, in hopes that it will be helpful for my fellow Bryn Mawr women to implement this ideology.

                I have never considered myself to be a personable narrator, and before this semester, have never been encouraged to be one. My reluctance to write in the first person narrative stems from my own experience as a reader who has been berated and patronized by authors who are unable, or unwilling, to place themselves at my level of comprehension, and had been reinforced by my high school teachers who insisted that I write in the traditional third person narrative—my mother being one of them, might I add. As a result, I’ve developed into a writer who is hard pressed to find literary merit to a thesis based solely in opinion, let alone my own. However, throughout the semester of “Ecological Imaginings”, I have realized that there was a need for my writing to evolve, and I therefore made an effort to rediscover my personal voice in my writing. After analyzing the works of authors such as Terry Tempest Williams and those of my classmates, I’ve begun to be able to piece together the formula imperative to the successful implementation of the first person narrative, which I believe is imperative in the development of a writer who is able to write at the collegiate level. Although most college essays will generally be written in the third person narrative, teaching students to locate their own voice at the high school level sets a foundation of understanding that will translate to college.

 From a distance, I could only see one color green when I approached this field. It wasn’t until I got up close when I realized there were flowers in the field and it took a while for me to count over a dozen different species of plants hidden in plane sight in a field I had walked by many times but only now stopped to lay in. During a course I took this semester called “ecological imaginings”, we read a number of texts discussing ecological and environmental issues. An idea that was brought up during our discussions and that I connected with and feel is important to share is the idea of intimacy with the land being the key to the health of our environment. Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger, Timothy Morton’s “Ecology without Nature”, and Thomas Berry’s “The Dream of the Earth” are texts we read during the course that touched on this concept each in their own unique way. Morton illustrates how we can be cognitively intimate with nature, Berry suggests ways in which we could be more intellectually intimate with the earth, and Williams shows us how becoming physically intimate with the land will fix our relationship with the environment.

First semester is just about over, the cold weather has crawled in. The rain droplets posing at the tips of the branches ready to fall at any second when they shatter the silence. Calling, "attention! Attention! Look at me!" But no one is really watching them. They sit there in utter despair until they either dry up or fall to the ground. When that one drop does fall to the ground, it is taken in, abosorbed by the luscious, green blades of grass. As they are soaked into the ground, cared for and sheltered they are spread out to quench the thirst of the starved organisms inside the earth. Feeding the flowers and edible vegetables. They breathe out the oxygen we need and we breathe out the carbon dioxide they need. Who needs who more?

My dear freshman friends, final week is coming and stress seems to be unavoidable. Just like you, I have been buried in work, papers and exams. However, perhaps such busy schedules also signal the time for us to take a break in order to achieve full power for the fight.  I am recommending one way to do so is to attend to nature. We all are lucky to be living in this wonderful green campus, so why don’t we just go out and experience a bit of ecological happiness? It is a precious state of the mind that needs to be maintained by protecting the environment.

            While reading Eva’s Man, I grew more and more frustrated when her writing became more complex. I became frustrated because I lost access to a transparent storyline; as I got more confused, I got to a point where I realized that I did not have to understand what was going on. I had an epiphany that Eva’s Man seemed to be the quintessence of Doris Sommer’s piece Advertencia/Warning. Doris Sommer claims that readers “feel entitled to know everything as they approach a text … with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner” in this case I became the reader who was trying to know and understand everything that was going on. She then proceeds to write, “the slap of refused intimacy from uncooperative books can slow readers down, detain them at the boundary between contact and conquest”. At first I found myself slowing down and re-reading the passage, until I realized that no matter how many times I read it, the text was meant to make me confused and to get the sense of confusion and craziness.

As I and my fellow first-year students at Bryn Mawr College approach the end of a semester of reading, thinking, talking and writing about “Ecological Imaginings,” I find myself reflecting on something that applies not only to our topic, and not only to our class, but to the broader community, of our own institution and of higher education in general. Despite the broad range of our readings and discussions about ecology, one word which has rarely been mentioned is spirit, or spirituality. Once one notices this lack, it becomes glaring, conspicuous in its absence, since in many instances it proposes the resolution to our dilemmas, the center which would hold together our ethics and our analysis.

Over the last half century or so, the impact of our civilization on our planet has become more and more a cause for concern. Despite the many voices warning of the consequences of over-population, pollution, deforestation, ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, loss of species diversity, depletion of resources, environmentally caused health problems, climate change, and general looming disaster, it has been difficult for us as a species, either globally or nationally, to change our direction. The assumptions underlying our way of life are deeply entrenched, even as ever more people suffer as a result of these assumptions, and despite the growing awareness that we need to change.