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Today, as I’m travelling back to campus, I’m not writing from my sight-sit, but on a train. This has awarded me the opportunity to travel “ecologically”, as I’m being careful to observe the interactions of other passengers. I’m realizing that a train is, in fact, one of the most interesting places to study people; individuals are forced to situate themselves within close proximity and besides having the same destination in mind, I’m hard-pressed to find many commonalities between these people. There are clearly very different socioeconomic classes, and if we weren’t all going the same place on a monotonous eight hour trip, I doubt that many of us would have ever had a reason—or opportunity—to interact with one another. I just had a conversation with a boy who attends Loyola University, and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut. His disposition didn’t seem particularly friendly at first, but when I started talking to him, he was very engaged in our conversation (which was about midterms). Somehow, we ended up having a conversation about skiing, and he told me that he goes up to Okemo and Killington to snowboard—which is about ten minutes away from where I live in Vermont. If I hadn’t been on this train, I would have never met Michael, even though he visits my favorite mountain several times a year.

          This is a history lesson about the future. The climate is changing at the most rapid rate in history. The years are hotter, sea levels are rising, arctic ice is melting, hurricane frequencies are increasing, infectious diseases are spreading north from the tropics, and crops are dying; this all conveniently coincides with technological and production increases, human expansion, deforestation, overfishing, and general living beyond our means and the means of the earth.

            This problem is the white people’s problem. Had the past unfolded in some alternate way perhaps this would not be the case; but here we are in the midst of that vague term “post-colonialism” where the white man has expunged his declaration of control, and yet the remnants of colonialism can still be clearly found from the poverty in many parts of Africa to the displaced Native American tribes of North America.

            Now, it seems, the people who used to care so deeply for the land are too busy staying alive, doing what they can to make ends meet to share the connection that they once had with the land, with life itself. They lost this because of the white people.

It has been a week since my botanical tour with Barbara, Claire and two others from 313. For me it was a good chance to revise what I have learned from our geological tour and also get to explore the campus from another viewpoint. From a geological point of view, we tend to examine the way people make use of nature to fulfill our needs. We use different types of rocks for different purposes; we look at how natural setting affects human construction… As we look from a botanical point of view, we also study about how elements of nature interact or relate to each other. What impressed me the most was the competition among plants. As I think of competition, I used to think of omnivores and the food chain. I rarely took notice of the competition for survival among plants. During our botanical tour, I learned that plants that live in the same area actually mimic each other’s appearance in order compete. Without tearing the leaves and smell the difference I would never think that two trees that look exactly the same could belong to totally different species. Competition also exists in the form of parasite: ivy climbs on a tree, depending on its nutrition to thrive and grow. The beautiful ivies turn out to be harmful to the growth of another plant.

The much weather-delayed botanical exploration that froggies315, Srucara, and I led was part of our third web-event, the other parts being the class notes and a reflection. Here is that reflection, inspired by the class exploration, but also by recent readings, memories, musings, and opinions.

In the final projects you are co-creating for our 360 on Women in Walled Communities, we are expecting multi-pronged, cross-disciplinary endeavors that involve both collaborative and individual components, including
    • a public demonstration, 1-3 pm, Mon, Dec. 17, of a tangible project that you have created together,
    • which builds on the particular skills, knowledge and experience of all students in the group, and
    • draws in some way on the Education, English and Criminal Justice knowledge you have acquired over the course of the semester.

In the final e-portfolio of your work, due on Serendip by 12:30, Fri, Dec. 21, we will expect critical reflection about the ways in which your final product brought together the different angles of vision (individual and disciplinary) listed above:

    • how did each of the three courses/disciplines inform your final project?
    • how did completing the project push your thinking in each of these disciplines?

As I missed class Tuesday, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about Terry Tempest Williams book, an Unspoken Hunger (which I had signed by the author by the way!). Instead of boring you with black and white print, I thought I'd offer a more colorful deliniation of what I derived from the text. One of my close friends, Stephanie, is a talented photographer. In my opinion, what makes her photos more captivating than her fellow peers is the fact that she doesn't take photos professionally; on any given day, she'll walk onto Morgan Hill and take photos of the landscape, just because it, for one reaosn or another, moves her emotionally that day. She allows a transparent perspective of nature, her goal being to elicit emotion from the eye of the beholder. My admiration of Stephanie is much like that of William's of Georgia O'Keefe. Williams wrote that O'Keefe had the power to "transform desert landscapes into emotional ones, using color and form to startle the senses. Scale belonged to the landscape of the imagination. When asked by friends if these places really existed, O'Keefe responded with her usual cando 'I simply paint what I see'". (p. 20) Like O'Keefe, Stephanie "paints what she sees", and what she "paints" is what she feels--she just does it with a camera instead of a brush. These are some of her photos: 

Feeling the burden of finding a place, close by, for our final collective ramble, I forsook the Friendship Bench once again, in order to explore Ashbridge Park. I think this is our place!
Re-storation.
Re-stori-ation.
Re-story-ing.

Reading Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man, it was clear to me that Eva was oppressed, silenced. I saw her as a victim, and felt really bad for her and sad to think how many other women have had similar experiences. Through our class discussion, however, I began to consider that maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. It was couldntthinkofanoriginalname who first brought this to our collective attention in her post, Reflections on Eva’s Man: “all characters… are apart of a cycle of abuse…there is a larger conversation to be had about this book. One that touches upon male's oppression… and internalized sexism…” It was so easy for me at first to write off the men in Eva’s Man as oppressors, representations of the patriarchy at work. I then realized that everyone in this book, just like everyone in the world, is a victim of the patriarchy, and as such is silenced. Throughout the book, Eva chooses silence, as do some many other characters, and I began to wonder how much agency they actually had, if those silences were only chosen due to the way in which society represses and restricts. Thinking about Adrienne Rich’s analysis of silence as lying what role did Eva’s silences play in her abuse and mistreatment and is this something that she or anyone else ever has control over?

During my conference with Anne we talked about me doing something "creative" for my papers in the class, rather than a typical academic essay.  So, for my web event, I decided to write a haiku.

I was very drawn to the transitions throughout the book, so I decided to take the authors own words - the first set of words from the first three chapters - and put them together to form a haiku.  It is both written out below and in the attached file.

The police came and1