Place: Politics, Environmental Issues, and Composition

Texts

Reynolds, Nedra “Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace.” CCC 50.1 (1998): 12–35. Print.

Reynolds uses “concepts from postmodern geography to explore how spaces and places are socially produced through discourse and how these constructed spaces can then deny their connections to material reality or mask material conditions” (13).

Roorda, Randall. “Great Divides: Rhetorics of Literacy and Orality.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 97–116. Print.

Traces the history of the divide between literacy and orality in literacy studies critiquing both the divide and constructivist opposition to the divide.

Brown, Stephen G. “The Wilderness Strikes Back: Decolonizing the Imperial Sign in the Borderlands.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 117–130. Print.

Approaches place from a post-colonial perspective using “the Alaskan environment as a master trope not only for indigenous identity, but for native resistance as well” (117).

Long, Mark C. “Education and Environmental Literacy: Reflections on Teaching Ecocomposition in Keen State College’s Environmental House.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 131–146. Print.

Discusses how a student centered approach to teaching place fosters the critical thinking skills needed for both environmental literacy and education.

Plevin, Arlene. “The Liberatory Positioning of Place in Ecocomposition: Reconsidering Paulo Freire.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 147–162. Print.

Argues for teaching place as a means of accomplishing Freire’s objective of helping students to recognize “discourse hegemonies” (149).

Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition: Pedagogies, Perspectives, and Intersections.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 163–178. Print.

Argues for ecocomposition as a means to discuss social issues while maintaining a focus on teaching writing.

Colleen Connolly, “Ecology and Composition Studies: A Feminist Perspective on Living Relationships.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 179–192. Print.

Offers “an ecofeminist pedagogy that aims to examine and thin about the discursive and cultural practices that define the relations among individuals, society, and nature” (181).

Christopher J. Keller, “The Ecology of Writerly Voice: Authorship, Ethos, and Persona.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 193–208. Print.

Offers an ecological perspective of voice based on the experience of a class assignment to write either a nature retreat essay or a position paper on an environmental issue. He grounds voice/self (identity) in the politics of space.

While these articles are quite different, one factor that ties them together—besides mostly being in the same book—is that they all, in one way or another, present an idea of what ecocomposition is that revolves around a sense of place. This is also true of our readings from last week. All of the ecocomposition articles that we have read so far, however, indicate some diversity about the proper focus of an ecocomposition class when it comes to the place of politics, environmental issues, and composition.

For the purpose of this presentation, I am operationally defining politics as "competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership" (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary), environmental issues as introducing texts, discussions, assignments that center on issues of ecological crisis, and composition as the teaching of writing with a focus on helping students learn to write more successfully. While politics is always operating in any social situation, and especially a classroom, and while some may argue that any class that includes a certain amount of writing and reading might qualify as a composition class, these articles reveal very different ideas about how central these and reading and writing about environmental issues are for how these individual authors understand ecocomposition.

The following chart places each ecocompositiong theorist we have read so far in the columns of politics, environmental issues, and composition according to how much their articles seems to focus on each one. While Dobrin discusses each of these three aspects as part of ecocomposition, every other author focuses their attention on one or two, indicating that the other category or categories are less if not "ir" relevant.

This is, of course, an entirely subjective chart meant to elicit discussion and disagreement. Some

questionable placements, however, will be explained shortly.

Some of these placements are based in actual statements by the authors: Owens and Long in respect to politics and Owens, Drew, and Keller in respect to environmental issues.

Owens

“Not only am I conscientious about making my students feel that they have been misled into taking a course in ecological economics more than composition, but I also have little interest in lecturing about anything, sustainability included” (30)

Long

"calls for transformation risk limiting the potential of environmental literacy by demanding that students assume and act upon a set of values that may not be their own” (142)

Owens (environmental issues)

IBID

Drew

“I had no desire to stake out a position regarding whether or not compositionists ought to work to conserve and protect natural environments by teaching students to produce and analyze texts about nature and environmentalism” (57)

Keller

“At first glance, ecocomposition may look like an attempt by composition teachers and scholars to incorporate studies of the natural world into the writing classroom…I agree completely with Drew that we must divest ourselves of the notion that ecocomposition necessarily deals with nature” (193–4)

Other choices were made based on apparent neglect of one or more of these aspects in the articles. Neglect was a primary factor for most decisions not to place an author under composition. By the time I finished reading several of these articles, Brown's and Plevin's most notably, I wondered whether they bothered to teach writing at all beyond the fact that students in their classes would do a lot of reading and writing. Roorda's article has no real pedagogical focus at all, and from last weeks readings Killingsworth and Krajicek's contribution seems to be about a literature rather than a composition class. These and other factors give fairly strong indications about what these authors consider essential for ecocomposition.

From last weeks articles, neither Cooper nor Bawarshi give us indications that they see either political awareness or environmental issues as essential to ecocomposition, though they both address place and ecology in respect to teaching writing. Plevin and Connolly, while they do mention environmental issues and writing instruction, seem to give much less importance to them per se than to ecocomposition as a means to carryout a political agenda in the classroom. Gaard, while similarly focused on political possibilities, is careful to forward composition in her article and downplay her political agenda for the sake of "[allowing] for a much greater range of perspectives, both philosophical and religious, to flourish among the students" (172). She similarly points out that her teaching "allowed [her] to 'teach' environmental ethics as an adjunct to teaching writing" (170). In Gaard's article, it seemed that while politics were certainly addressed, and students read about environmental issues, both of these were less important than composition. Environmental issues, in fact, seemed to be a topic that could easily have been replaced with another politically charged issue without dramatically changing the pedagogy of the class, which is why I chose not to list Gaard under environmental issues; I don't get the sense that it is essential.

As for the issue of composition, authors, Killingsworth & Krajicek, Weisser, Roorda, Brown, Plevin, Connolly, indicated that composition might be less than truly relevant to their conceptions of ecocomposition simply through neglect. Their articles give little indication that they think explicit writing instruction is a necessary part of ecocomposition.

In her article, Nedra Reynolds argues that power often hides in the realm of space or place through "time-space compression," the conception that as modern technology has allowed us to travel faster (physically or online) space matters less or seems to grow smaller, giving us the impression that because it takes less time to travel around the world we must have more time (19–21). My question concerning ecocomposition (as an imagined space within rhetoric and composition) is whether time-space compression is not operating to suggest that teachers can and must construct ecocomp classes that give full treatment to politics (race, gender, sexuality, place), environmental issues, and composition all within the scope of a single class. Most of the authors in this collection seem to choose from these those they feel are essential, but can a class be called an ecocomposition class if it lacks one or two of these factors? Reynolds also introduces us to the concept of "transparent space," the danger that time-space compression might result in "believing that space does not matter" (18–19). Transparent space is the disappearance of real physical space and the things that inhabit it because it is taken for granted or assumed. Does ecocomposition participate in transparent space in this manner? Do conceptions of ecocomposition as presented in these articles ignore the realities of local spaces? What conceptions of ecocomposition are applicable to what places, classrooms, students, and so forth?

If anything is clear about ecocomposition, it is that it yet lacks clarity and form. It appears that its place in composition may require much more discussion about what is or isn't essential for composition.

ECOCOMPOSITION (Part 1)

If ecocriticism is a literary criticism that focuses on textual interpretation, ecocomposition is the flip side of the same coin, concentrating on textual production and the environments that affect and are affected by the production of discourse. “[E]composition is about relationships; it is about the constitutive existence of writing and environment; it is about physical environment and constructed environment; it is about the production of written discourse and the relationship of that discourse to the places it encounters” (Weisser and Dobrin 2).  This study is important because, as R.C. Lewontin et. al. argue, "All organisms—but especially human being[s]—are not simply the results but are also the causes of their own environments” (qtd. in Weisser and Dobrin 17).

Derek Owens in "Sustainable Composition" suggests that “Teachers who design their courses in response to our threatened local environments are doing something that needs to spill over into the rest of the curriculum. Whether we teach first-year writing courses, design writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives, or run writing centers, compositionists need to acknowledge their fundamental roles in creating sustainable curriculum that moves continually toward environmental stability and community revitalization.” Owens provides practical examples of writing projects he has used to foster environmental thought and awareness.

Another critique born out of ecocomposition concerns the possible alienating nature of some important environmental writing. Killingsworth and Krajicek explain: “while the political alienation of a Muir or a Thoreau has represented a powerfully productive critical force in American culture at large, close identification with the form of environmentalism that depends upon the conceptual triad of ecology, alienation, and literacy, may alienate…a large percentage of any contemporary class of student, and may thereby stand in the way of effective teaching. Moreover, the students who resist this perspective may well have something to teach us about the rhetorical shelf life of the old environmentalism with its woodsiness and wordiness.”  They continue to explore this concept by defining a "Triple Persona" in much eco-writing:

In Julie Drew's "Politics of Place", she argues that temporal concerns have consistently trumped spatial ones in the academy.  She quotes W.J. Soja who states that critical social theory is “still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparable geographical imagination.”  The consequences of such a myopic view are evident to Drew: “The traditional and consequential submergence of the spatial within the temporal for critical social theory, then, effectively helps to veil institutional power within politicized spaces such as classrooms. Such an understanding is important for composition studies because critical social theory—the “search for practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo”—is an indispensible component of radical pedagogical theory and practice.”

Drew's solution is a paradigm shift in the way teachers view themselves, their students, and the productions of composition classrooms.  She wishes the classroom to be viewed as a "contact zone" between people operating in numerous discourses, "travelers" so to speak, co-producing a new discourse. “Students pass through, and only briefly pause within, classrooms; they dwell within and visit various other locations, locations whose politics and discourse conventions both construct and identify them. By reimagining students as travelers we may construct a politics of place that is more likely to include students in the academic work of composition, and less likely to continue to identify and manage students as discursive novices.”

Anis Bawarshi, in "The Ecology of Genre" seeks to establish the hows and whys of genres as rhetorical ecosystems.  Using the example of a doctor's office and stating that certain expectations are constructed and certain modes of acceptable human behavior are the result of social ideas about what is "natural", Bawarshi compellingly argues that  we do what we do, in the Dr's office and elsewhere, as a result of the genre in which we perceive ourselves to be participating.

Finally, Christian Weisser notes that the systems awareness of ecology may be brought to bear on the self, facilitating the development of an eco-identity. That is, people may begin to understand who they are in relation to where they are and have been, thereby familiarizing and stimulating compassion for the places that make us who we are. (Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity)

Commonality of Places

 Cedar Falls:

Cedar Falls in Logan, Ohio is a natural preserve, geological feature, hiking area, and one of many sites of the Hocking Hills State Park. The first time I visited the site was during the early 90's on a camping trip. We stayed on the main trails and observed the feature from below, hiking between the massive rock formations covered with moss and ferns. At the time, I could only imagine what the top of the falls looked like. Also, I did not know at the time what Cedar Falls would come to mean to me in just a few short years. At the time, I appreciated the site for the preservation of nature, the sanctuary from industrial life, and the excitement of its hiking trails. I enjoyed digging in the pool below the falls and searching for mini-lobsters (I refuse to call them crayfish), fish, snails, and rocks and saying, "cool!" or "sweet!" each time I found something new. 

Little did I know then that I would have a more extensive exploration of Cedar Falls in just a few years. When I visited my friend's family's land just up the road from Cedar Falls for a camping trip, we went to the site on our second day there. However, when we approached "Cedar Falls" I did not recognize it. It was a hot day in late April and the little wind that was present played rhythms on the  field of tall grasses and wildflowers as we walked towards an opening within a hedge of overgrowth. This was not the way to Cedar Falls that I remembered. I also noted on our way in that there was a cluster of natural gas pipes erupting from the seemingly untouched grassy landscape. When we hit the opening, I saw a babbling stream and my friends leap-frogging across it on small rocks caught on the bottom. I followed suit and was mesmerized how I had just crossed into a sanctuary; no sign of cars, gas mains, power wires, or even other people. It was just us, the sound of the stream, the sounds of birds chirping, and the evergreens with their fresh scent and pointy needles brushing the wind.

We have to communicate about the needs of each place, the balance and sustainability of each place for our relationship with the world to be healthy. We have to make sacrifices for the future. Our careers, aspirations, and profits will not mean anything without the planet. 

I returned many times that summer, and the following years visited regularly, leading all the way up to the present. The only thing that has changed is that my journey to Cedar Falls is much closer to home now and I see it more often. Within the past few years, a new bridge was constructed over the stream above the falls to allow access to the rim hiking trail over the falls. Now when I go, hikers are much more common, but it is still quiet and most people at the top are there for the same thing; the energy of nature. The gas main out front of the entrance is more apparent now as the grounds are kept regularly to encourage the bridge's access and you get the occasional bunch of kids who are excited by the prospect of being above the falls; they tire quickly though on the rim trail and I usually wait out the dissonance they bring. 


Who am I to complain though? It is a beautiful spot where people should be, where they should learn to appreciate nature and hopefully connect it to the fate of the entire planet, even the places where we stuff away our consciousness of pollution and extravagance at the expense of the interconnected global habitat. Are we kidding ourselves that everything will be all right if we don't address it? We have to communicate about the needs of each place, the balance and sustainability of each place for our relationship with the world to be healthy. We have to make sacrifices for the future. Our careers, aspirations, and profits will not mean anything without the planet. 

I feel a bit of Cedar Falls in every place of the planet, it is my ideal location, slowly changing but still a nature preserve. I feel that each place, no matter its "prestige" is just as important as any other because the spot next to a diesel exhaust pipe is the same as Cedar Falls or even Olympic State Park in Washington. But what is to come for this place? How will it be changed in the future? Will the stream run dry or become toxic from anthropocentric exigencies? As with the latest oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, we see how our dependence on this source of energy not only warms the globe and pollutes the air, but it kills animals and ecosystems through direct contact and polluting water. The place of energy impacts all of our sanctuary places too, like my Cedar Falls. Will the land be developed for more natural gas or even tourism? Will people crowd here after we poison other places and tuck them away from our consciousness? How far can we run away from the problem? How much place is left? How far are our sacred places from the effects of the doldrums in the pacific subtropical gyre and the countless other reminders of our anthropocentric wake? I believe it is not far away at all.

From Lawrence Buell's "Writing for and Endangered World," he discusses problems of place perception. While I love Cedar Falls, if all the places are not taken care of and consequently swept under the rug, Cedar Falls will eventually perish and become victim of our consumer culture. While industrialized nations and the affluent hide away the injustice of our "progress" in poor neighborhoods, third world countries, and rural lands while distracting ourselves with places we vacation to or hold as our ode to nature, we fail to see the path we are setting that runs right off a cliff. Buell states,

Nothing is easier than to slip into a kind of self-righteous hectoring didacticism when arguing for the importance of place: to make mantra out of that totem word, like the mantra of "family values" perhaps, as if returning home and committing one's whole life there, or to an adopted place like Richardson, Alaska, would somehow solve all the evils of the world . . . Place attachment can itself become pathological: can abet possessiveness, ethnocentrism, xenophobia. (Buell 76)

With Buell's thoughts in mind, certainly I must be cautious about my sanctuaries like Cedar Falls; they should not make me complacent when injustice is rife elsewhere in places on earth. Buell states, "a certain capacity for self-deterritorialization seems needful for resiliency and even survival. Buell is concerned with place-connectedness as a right to possess places and as "Wallace Stegner cautions, 'we may love a place and still be dangerous to it'" (qtd. in Buell 77). However, he is also concerned with my argument that we have to think of more than home, our sacred nature preserves, and that which is not seen or seen from afar via media. Those "spaces" need to become our sacred places too as their fates are all intertwined. Buell emphasizes that if 

one thinks of place sense as containing within it many different patches besides just home, including what comes to us via the world of images [e.g., BP oil catastrophe in Gulf of Mexico April 2010] as well as through live transactions, plus the changes in us relative to place and the awareness of landscape as timescape, then we are on the way to arriving at a conception more fit for local, regional, and global citizenship. At the turn of the twenty-first century, "place" becomes truly meaningful only when "place" and "planet" are understood as interdependent. (77)

When it comes to natural environments, I think there is a lot more that humans exploit as opposed to what humans pre/serve. I feel morally obligated to lessen my impact on environments by reducing carbon emissions, landfill contributions, and speaking my opinion about the importance of a national investment into solar energy (which we pitifully pay lip service to while Germany and Japan are leading the way with the technology). To me, the US policy on solar energy is not nearly as vigorous as it needs to be; perhaps lobbyists for oil and coal have something to do with our apprehension. We talk a lot about renewable energy, but how much are we really doing with it? 

Yes, there is no doubt that we do much to act as stewards of our environments, but I think we justify a lot of waste and overlook our impact based on the progression of civilization and our more immediate personal concerns. The videos below demonstrate a device that reduces carbon emissions on a public bus in New York City; this is a good thing and I like the effort. However, what about the impact resulting from the harvesting and transportation of that fuel? Just because it reduces emissions in one way is it making a difference for the place of earth? Without such a place, all our sacred places will perish. When do such "green" technologies become a more olive drab when we consider this (is anyone thinking of the issues with ethanol?)? 

Humans are arguably the most intelligent species on the planet, therefore humans have the greatest responsibility to pre/serve the copious life that shares our environment. We can do more than filtering emissions.

The environments I love most are those which I frequent, whether they are in a metropolis or out in the sticks. The environments I have never experienced, well, I am grateful for them too. An injustice in one environment is an injustice the world around. All I am saying is that every location, every environment is worthy of our stewardship. Even the doldrums in the Pacific Subtropical Gyre which few of us ever visit.

 Notice the yellow spots in the ocean. They represent concentrations of plastic debris that are traced hundreds of meters deep. Represented are two of five high pressure zones in the world.

More on Ocean Pollution 

(BLOG)

(ARTICLE)

Humans are arguably the most intelligent species on the planet, therefore humans have the greatest responsibility to pre/serve the copious life that shares our environment.

Such toxic discourse is essential for us to consider and is growing with importance in light of news about eco-ravaging by our human tendencies (BP's recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Mountaintop removal strip mining and its associated water pollution, plastic pollution in the doldrums, etc.). According to Lawrence Buell in Writing for an Endangered World (2001), toxic discourse is "expressed anxiety from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification of human agency" (31). Such toxic discourse is increasing as the change to climate and ecosystems becomes more evident. As Susan Casey states in "Our Oceans Are Turning into Plastic . . . Are We?" that we've "bitch slapped the planet," she sounds less and less hysterical with each passing environmental catastrophe, with each person learning more about the true costs of our extravagance on this planet. Buell says that "although toxic concern dates from late antiquity, in recent years it has greatly intensified and spread. Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez" (32). In about ten years time we've had plenty more markers of why toxicity should concern us as mentioned above, and what are we doing about it but turning inward and hoping for the best. Citing Ulrich Beck's "risk society" and "solidarity from anxiety," Buell explains that our culture has been unable, "even with science's assistance, to calculate the consequences of possibly harmful exposure to environmental hazards in one's everyday life" (32). While the progress of environmental consciousness is growing through mainstream environmental groups of affluent classes, as well as the environmental justice movement "increasingly led by non-elites" concern is coming from more perspectives, but economic strife is interfering with the struggle to think about the problems of our habitat immensely (Buell 32). Perhaps more strides by individuals and campaigns to prove their conservation efforts make a difference will help jar loose the "solidarity from anxiety" or instincts we repress to pre/serve the planet.

In a culture obsessed with accumulation of things and focusing inward, we need to take our sights off of the place of self and places of sanctuary, and realize that what is outside us, is us as well. We need to realize that our culture is misleading us in many ways. Wendell Berry states in "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," 

When they want you to buy something 

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, everyday do something 

that won't compute . . . 

 . . . Love the World. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

I think Berry helps echo what I have said about extravagance; do something that won't compute in a consumer culture obsessed with the vainest of exigencies on a planet in need of healing. In a sense Berry is asking that we think about challenging that culture and act as stewards, rather than self-assured parasites who cannot reflect on the impact of their actions.

The Place of Cities

City environments are the origins of the bulk of our pollution and environmental impact. City pollution (such as plastic debris) finds its way through sewers, streams, lakes, and rivers and into oceans, it works its way into the air, into the ground, and even into our bodies. As with the bus videos above, if those buses were running on electric generated by photovoltaic arrays . . . 

 . . . as opposed to diesel fuel with a special emission filter, there would be a lot less consumption of carbon emitting fuel overall. What impact does the demand for the fuel overall have? Is that filter just a cursory nod to "clean" air? Just because the air is clean by the bus doesn't mean it is the best solution to a very global problem.

I don't want to find out what will happen if we continue to emit carbon and other pollutants at the rate we are now. More progressive changes in how we use and create energy is paramount. Switching to renewable energy must be a top priority if we want to preserve any place we hold dear to our hearts.

The Place of Earth

Essentially, my perception of place is that every location is worth preserving, worth pursuing a harmony between anthropocentric and ecocentric ideals, especially in environments predominately modern and civilized. However, there is a distinction here; in the spirit of national preserves of land or national parks, we must continue to value the autonomy of wilderness in a way that minimizes anthropocentric exigencies. This we have done well with, but the future is uncertain as our embrace of fossil fuels encourage rhetoric to emerge that supports opening the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. In this case, anthropocentric exigencies must be quelled. 

  
*How do these images reflect the conflict between Anthropocentric and ecocentric philosophies? Which image best represents Hemmingway's pastoral? Thoreau's?

How do we find harmony in our cities and towns, our dwellings, with eco-centric concerns that respect biodiversity and preservation of species? What is problematic about harmony when so much political influence is behind what we value and define as "harmony." What is the best way to act responsibly towards nature? Collective discussions, reaching across political divides, and realizing our fates and values are actually quite similar are keys to reconciling our needs as humans, but more importantly our needs as global citizens.

       How do natural surroundings shape our outlook, our purpose in life? How do we ascribe value to that?

Without the place of planet, our places of refuge and sanctuary will perish. Manifest that love of refuge and extend it to the world around. Consider what impact our demand for energy has on the world as place; consider energy possibilities outside of fossil fuel and herald the most sustainable and efficient.

Thank you for reading and nurturing the world. Your effort is essential to the success of the sustainability and environmental justice movements.

Best,

Russell Crooks