Producing Nature

Please read Laura Elrick's essay "Poetry, Ecology, and the Reappropriation of Lived Space." It says almost everything I've wanted to say to the class about the relationship between environmental writing and the environment, transforming the former from a sphere of description into a sphere of artistic and social production.

Cortland Street Dérive

Clybourn Metra Platform, 10:30 AM, Saturday, October 24, 2009.

Goldenrod on the platform's edge.

Possibly defunct rail car by Metra line.


Public Storage. Wrigley.


Looking east.


Trackside.

Mysterious machine--a salt grinder?

Grinds salt or something like it.

Emma Jack Emma.

Water damage.


Hands.

Blue mark.

Between the street and the Edens.

Star Car Wash. Candy.

All soft car wash.


You must lower power antenna.


1438 W. Cortland.

Ivy near bridge.

Cortland Street Bridge.

Life buoy by bridge.

View of Chicago River from Cortland Street Bridge.

Drawbridge house.

Cable Crossing, Do Not Anchor.

Pastoral.


Machine on tracks at A. Finkl & Sons, a steel plant.

Blue pipes outside A. Finkl & Sons.


A/C graffiti.

Drill bit outside A. Finkl & Sons.


Solly's Fast Food. (It's a Chipotle now.)

The sunflower that grew from concrete.

Windows on Armitage.

Red doors.

Thru traffic prohibited.

A dentist's office.

Gingerbread on Armitage.

Green doors on Armitage.

Pumpkins on Armitage.

Armitage CTA.

News from the Galápagos

Wanted to point your attention toward a fascinating story in today's New York Times: "To Protect Galápagos, Ecuador Limits a Two-Legged Species". Poor Ecuadoreans are being forced to leave the islands where they eke out a living serving the tourism industry, which provides the economic basis for the preservation of the Galápagos. The divide between economics and ecology is always negotiated by politics and power.

Some of you are doing great with your blogs, but a number of you are way behind. I am paying close attention either way.

UPDATE: Here's another fascinating article—a review of a book by Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy, which looks at the ways animals respond emotionally to each other and complicates perhaps some of what we were talking about vis-a-vis authenticity last week.

Notes on a Visit to Middlefork Savanna, Lake County, Illinois

View from the center.

Astonishing parabolic leaps of the grasshoppers at Middlefork. They can't possibly see where they'll be landing and the strong breezes would push them off course half the time anyway. They leap in faith that wherever they land they'll be able to leap again.



On the northern boundary of woods I see what looks like a stand of quaking Aspen--not what I'd expect to find in an Illinois grove. Silvery bark, but I can't get close enough to properly examine the leaves. It makes me nostalgic for the mountain West. The meadow here could almost be one of the high meadows rolling between peaks in Glacier National Park.

Another angle.

It's the open space that feels exotic. I realize this the moment I step into tree cover and feel again the familiar patterns of light and shade that I grew up with in the wooded suburban hills of Morris County, New Jersey.

Evening creak of crickets in the woods west of the north-south path. Fading now into wind, chirps. Acorns thwap and thud into the ground at intervals. A big yellow leaf spotted with brown like a banana peel falls flat from a tree and hits the ground hard--a parachute failing to open.

Temple ruins.

Emerging from the woods into sun-warmed air startles, as when swimming in a pond or lake your legs might paddle through a cold patch of water while your head and torso are warm.

Another leaf blows into a sort of shaft of reed stems, then drops down to the bottom like an elevator car whose cable has been cut.

In a low patch of marsh half-a-dozen cattails thrust up into the variable breeze. They are the shape and color of overcooked corn dogs.

Black-eyed susans, a little worse for wear.

Feeling one wind on the path, seeing another gusting through nut-colored tallgrass a hundred yards off. And now that wind presses your face and clothes, and the tallgrass is still.

The savanna owes its preservation to the wealth of J. Ogden Armour, who kept a toy farm (Mellody Farm) here. That wealth in turn comes from the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. Wikipedia tells us that among other achievements, Armour used unemployed African-Americans to break a meatpackers' strike in 1904—one of many ugly incidents in American history in which race has been used as a wedge to divide the labor movement.

Armour appears in disguise as one of the capitalists in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle—maybe Freddy the sweet and hapless drunk if we can judge by this quotation of Armour's: "I don't suppose I shall ever be happy. Perhaps no one ever is. But the thing that would make me happiest just now would be to know that I could get roaring drunk and wander about the Loop for two days without anyone paying any attention to me."

Scratchy rustling reeds like the scrabbling of tiny feet.

A few spatters of rain have given way to warm patchy sun. Following the southern trail alongside the drainage ditch, spying a tiny gray bird--a sparrow?--as it flits among the reeds and petal-less sunflower stalks. Tried to trace it to it's landing spot but what I took for the bird nestling is just a crumpled gray-green leaf.

Autumnal by the southern pond: crunch of a few leaves on the trail, staccato shiver of crickets, the train thrumming by, and a sweet smell in the air: water, decay. Stark burned looking tree branches thrust fingerlikr from the pondshore. Down past the path's end through a break in the trees squats a tarnished blue watertower fat and peaceful as a Buddha. (You have to walk down to where the path bends between ponds
to see the upraised white finger of a Christian steeple off to the southeast.) Chatter of wind in the leaves to my left: strange to see the pondside trees so bare while across the path the east flourishes a grove. Then as I step forward a great white egret--or is it a crane?--unfolds itself from it's perch on the southern shore and wings it unhurriedly in a long arc across the water to the west. From where I stand I can see it's long neck leaning forward from where it's landed on the bank below the train tracks and a string of powerlines.

And from the northern side I can watch what I think is a great blue heron stepping with immense deliicacy on its long stalklike legs along the mostly submerged face of a downed tree trunk, its beak of a head bobbing with exaggerated slowness as it seemingly tiptoes toward some prey. Standing still it resembles an old man or a sulky adolescent with a slight shouldery hunch to it's neck. The gray palette of its plumage reminds me of a battleship or fighter plane, especially when it takes flight, low, the tips of its wings nearly brushing the surface of the water.

Now the path winds into woods and tilts downward--always an unexpected gesture in Illinois. I am reminded of the hillpath near my old house in Ithaca, New York, where the topography is typically rugged.

Purple flowers, no sage.

Another great slow unfurling of white wings to my left. I miss the crane, but through the underbrush on still, scummy water I see a family of mallards preening and shaking tailfeathers between bouts of pronounced stillness. Wind conversing overhead. Gray filling sky.

To my right a short trample of a trail leads to the train tracks, which at this moment seem organic to the scene in their mute heaviness. Only now do I become conscious of the hushed grumble of the highway through the trees in front of me due south: West Kennedy Road, and just past it, the interstate.

Black berries: a buckthorn bush, which I now know to be an invasive European species. Another sign that I'm bordering the familiar world.

An obliging Monarch.

Compleat Works and Pollan Video

After much delay, the sidebar of student blogs at right is now complete, with blogs from all eighteen students. Browse and compare with what your comrades have been up to.

And here, by the way, is a link to a YouTube video of Michael Pollan speaking at Google HQ in California last year, to give you a notion of what to expect from today's Pollan lecture at Ravinia Park: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-t-7lTw6mA

A Word from Michael Pollan

For those of you curious about who Michael Pollan is and what his role is in modern environmental discourse, he has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times that you can read online here: "Big Food vs. Big Insurance."

Sixteen Blogs...

And whaddya get?

You get a pretty remarkable assortment of writings. I've commented on a few (it's easiest for me to comment on the Blogger-hosted blogs--you fancy Typepad and Tumblr people may have to live without comments from me unless you enable some such feature.

That said... some of you are not yet taking the "blog every day" instruction seriously. Rest assured that I do.

Blogroll

Three of you have already created blogs and provided me with URLs. You will now see those blogs listed in the right column, automatically updated with the titles and first words of each of your posts. The rest of you, get cracking!

I've also created a roll of some other environmental blogs, some of which belong to individuals and others to organizations, with varying tones: earnest, despairing, snarky. (I mostly did not include the surprisingly vast array of blogs devoted to "green" shopping, but if you're interested in those they're easy to find). Click around for ideas on things you can do with your own blog this semester.

Thick versus Thin Description

A further thought on the exercise I gave you all today that will constitute your first official blog post on Friday:

The relationship that thin description (recording the evidence of your senses with as little interpretation as possible) has to thick description (observation that provides context and interprets/discovers/creates meaning) is a little like the relationship between a photo and its caption. The photo presents you with a view of something, but you may not be able to fully understand what you're seeing without the context a caption can provide.

Of course, a photo can, and from an artistic perspective should, be interesting enough to attract and fascinate and perhaps inform even without a caption. So from this perspective, even thick descriptions should rely heavily on the tools of thin description (vivid and concrete nouns, energetic action verbs, sensory images, and the rough, smooth, or striated texture of its language), which are then "thickened" just enough to invite the reader more deeply into the place described.

This comparison also reminds us that strictly speaking, it's impossible for any description to be "ultrathin," just as a photo is never simply a recording of reality but a selection and interpretation of it.

Starting Out

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...."

—Walt Whitman, from his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass