My husband and I just came up with the title of this blog: Blossom Jack, the name of a cow he once had and a reference to what I hope these posting will be about. I am here to capture some of the amazing innovations and news around green politics, environmental science, green education and green living-- what's inspiring today and how it's inspiring me and my friends.
So here goes:
Natalie Angier's article "Green, Life-Giving and Forever Young" in the Science Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17angi.html?ex=1177646400&en=8daa8d1eefabbe8f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Her thesis: "Plants are not only alive in their own right, they are also the basis of virtually all life on earth, including ours."
What's cool about Angier's thinking: plant consciousness. She explains how we take plants for granted. She begins, "Show somebody a painting of a verdant, botanically explicit forest with three elk grazing in the middle and ask what the picture is about, and the average viewer will answer, “Three elk grazing.” Add a blue jay to the scene and the response becomes, “Three elk grazing under the watchful eye of a blue jay.”
What you’re unlikely to hear is anything akin to, “It’s a classic temperate mix of maple, birch and beech trees, and here’s a spectacular basswood and, whoa, an American elm that shows no sign of fungal infestation and, oh yeah, three elk and a blue jay.”
And then Angier goes on to explain how plants are heroic, particulary impressive, how wouldn't it be cool to know one because they are autotrophic, which means they create their own food, and sophisticated in many other ways as well.
The article made me think of a class to teach "Arguments for the Environment"-- it would be 4 weeks of argumentative and creative writing, debate, environmental issues and education and 4 weeks of multi-media work. We would make an environmental movie in the style that my colleague and I created over the last few years at my middle school. Angier's essay would fit in 7-12 grade curric. It's cute, stylish, concise and even a tad cheeky.
Which leads me to thinking we need a new language to revolutionize the way we think about nature. Being green has been labeled as hippy-tree-hugging-talk for too long, and now it's already maybe sold out to mainstream advertising (I have mixed feelings about the sell-out. Is it a sell-out?) How to make the living world part of living language in a way that allows it to have style, edge, urgency, that allows it to elude stereotyping and didacticism. And can this language be alive in some way that is not simply apocalyptic, the way global warming has had to enter into our consciousness? Does a pliable language for the environment already exist outside the circles of the classic nature writers? For example, how do you get an urban kid who loves urban culture to relate? Consumption for a lot of us means a way out and up and not a death duel with life on the planet. Virginia Woolf said she desired, "some little language such as lovers use." Maybe it is this idea I'm going for: a little language that makes us fall in love with ourselves again and thus with the world again in a way that is generous and sustaining and super accessible.
I was thinking yesterday that if we think and talk of waste differently, for example, that waste is alive, that maybe we don't even call it waste anymore. (What else could we call it?) Will the new point of view then allow us to see death differently? Will death be less forboding-- something that does not pull us out of the moment, and of ourselves, and away from what is happening our all around us? Might we would then think of time differently too? For instance, if we see waste as alive, as an eternal presence (and not always the one we want, as in the case of carbon or toxins, or plastic car seats and strollers and all the plastic detritus that we feel we have to have as new parents ), it could alter our way of fundamentally seeing the world and what we love about it. I'm maybe being precious here; I can think this way because I don't have to worry about just making it through another day, though getting through another a year without using plastics, or fossil fuels? That would be interesting.
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