Position
Paper
Janine DeBaise
SLS 2002
“Poetry and politics both have to do with description and with power. And so, of course, does science. We might hope to find the three activities—poetry, science, politics—triangulated, with extraordinary electrical exchanges moving from each to each and through our lives.” Adrienne Rich in What is Found There
The dominant culture puts politics, science, and poetry into separate boxes. My role as a teacher is to help my students find the electrical currents that run through science, nature literature, and political activism.
I teach at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. My students are studying to get degrees in science -- forestry, biology, environmental science, chemistry; when I teach a literature class, my students bring science to everything we read. In return, I make these future scientists write poetry.
Science brings a certain rigor to ecocriticism. My students, because they are being trained to be scientists, are trained to notice details, to look for facts, for specifics, for evidence. For them, it is the details that give a writer credibility. My students demand scientific accuracy when they read contemporary nature literature. When I planned to use Rick Bass’ book Ninemile Wolves in literature course, I first checked the book out with a grad students who was an expert on the wolf. If Bass had included any misinformation, my students would have shredded the book.
My fall students are part of a learning community and my writing course is deliberately integrated with their botany course. Both writing class and botany lecture begin the first day of the semester with the same poem: “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo. It’s a poem which talks about community, how families and lives are shaped in gatherings around the kitchen table. She refers to meals as “gifts of earth” and reminds us that “we must eat to live.” Food, that is plants, are after all a basic human connection to the earth. Without food, we die. Botany and nature literature both emphasize this vital bond to the earth and examine the ways in which we break this bond when we don’t consider plants as part of our community.
Every September, the first year students in my composition class go on a field trip for their botany course -- to study the influence of aspect on forest vegetation. They make plots on an east-facing slope and a north-facing slope, making hypotheses about what types of vegetation they will find on each slope. While they take notes for the formal botany lab they will be required to write up, they also take notes for a paper they will write in my classroom, a first person narrative written for a layperson audience. In the class next week, we read aloud the first person narratives -- some funny, some philosophical, some profound -- and we also take a look at the formal labs they are writing for botany. We talk about how different the two pieces of writing are -- and also how similar they are. The specific and accurate details in their field notes that make for a good botany lab are exactly the kind of concrete details that make a piece of nature writing interesting to a layperson.
Early in the fall semester, my students study beans, corn, and squash in a botany lab, calculating the ways in which these three plants benefit when grown together rather than in separate plots. Later in the semester, when we read Linda Hogan’s Dwellings, some of my scientific students are at first a bit skeptical of Hogan’s spiritual approach to the ecological crisis. Then they get to the passage in which she talks about the oral tradition of the three sisters, how beans and corn should be planted together, with squash, the little sister, between them, in order to maintain the richness of farm soil. The fact that this bit of oral tradition has been proven by the scientific method -- and with their own hands in their own lab -- forces them to take Hogan seriously. The book Dwellings stirs all kinds of discussions because suddenly there’s no such things as rational objective science: science is mixed up with spirituality and ethics. My future scientists find themselves answering the question she raises: “What is our rightful place in the world, our responsibility to the other lives on the planet?” (Hogan, 114)
What do scientists have to learn from reading literature? Humility, for a start. Contemporary nature literature certainly exposes some of the limitations of the scientific method. Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, a powerful moving drama, highlights traditional methods of healing, intuitive knowledge, dream knowledge, spiritual knowledge, a whole realm of truth that makes western science look pretty small in comparison. In Dwellings, she discusses biologist Barbara McClintock, who received a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants. McClintock’s approach to science challenged many of the assumptions about how science must be done: her approach was alive, intuitive, respectful. “These last years, it seems that much contemporary scientific exploration has been thrown full tilt into the center of one of those minefields, and is in search of a new vision, and of renewed intuitive processes of discovery that go beyond our previous assumptions about knowledge.” (Hogan, 49) Hogan asserts that a spiritual fragmentation has accompanied our ecological destruction. This passage creates deep and sometimes painful discussions in my classroom of soon-to-be-scientists: does plunging into the rational, male-dominated, linear field of western science mean forsaking the spiritual dimensions of knowledge that Hogan talks about -- or can science change?
Scientists, more and more, are realizing the value of traditional ecological knowledge. The study of ethnobotany, for example, is premised on the idea that traditional ecological knowledge can tell us things that the western scientific method cannot. When one of our grad students studied the sweetgrass population in the northeast, she collected physical data by visiting sites where sweetgrass grows and also interviewed native peoples about the ways in which they used and collected sweetgrass. Traditional ecological knowledge is, of course, stories, stories passed down by native people who have been trained to be observant because an oral tradition is part of their culture. Science needs these stories.
In the 1960s, the Academy of American Poets in New York City held “tree walks” in the city parks. Each walk would be led by a naturalist who would talk about the flora of the park and a poet who read poems appropriate to the setting. Sometimes the crowd would plant new trees. The botany teacher and I do a similar combination with our students every fall during an overnight retreat at a nature center. The retreat includes a night time nature walk, freewriting about the nature walk, a poetry reading held by the students, and a scavenger hunt during which the students look for certain types of plants in the woods. Field work -- actually touching and holding the plants -- is what makes botany come alive for the students just as a poetry reading -- hearing the language spoken aloud, breathed, shared -- makes poetry come alive for the students.
If we live in a culture that puts science and poetry in two separate boxes, in realms that do not overlap, which must the activist choose? My students argue that the activist must straddle both. Poetry presents the vision: “It does not have to be this way. We do not have to stand for what is happening to the earth, our home, our bodies.” Science tells us what we can do: alternative energy sources, integrated pest management, energy conservation, whatever. Poetry and science together will save the earth, if only politicians and the public would listen .....
In The Book of Yaak, Rick Bass explores the tension between advocacy and art: “I still believed in art, but art seemed utterly extravagant in the face of what was happening. If your home were burning, for instance, would you grab a bucket of water to pour on it, or would you step back and write a poem about it?” (Bass, 10) I asked my students to answer his question. One student said, “Yeah, you have to grab the bucket of water, but you also have to write the poem, get people to care, because otherwise you will always be putting fires out all by yourself.” And a forestry student added, “And you need a forestry crew to see how fuel-loaded the woods around your house are ....” An activist needs both, the poetry to stir passion, to get people to care, and science to back up her assertions and to come up with solutions.
I sometimes tease my students about which is more important -- the poetry I will write in my life or the science they will do. Last spring in my literature course, The Book of Yaak led to discussions about the need for activism, the need for art, Bass’ own turning from science to fiction writing. We acknowledged the urgency of the environmental crisis and discussed where we should put our energies: science? poetry? education? direct action? lobbying? legislation? changing lifestyles? We decided to find the balance in our own classroom, the fifteen of us with what resources we had. After much serious discussion, we settled on a plan: we spent one class period writing letters to politicians, lobbying on behalf of Yaak Valley. We spent one class period writing letters, articles, and poems for the school newspaper, to educate our own community. Then later that week, we gathered at 6 am and drove to Montezuma Wildlife Refuge. We spent several hours bird-watching, the two experts in the group explaining how to differentiate among different types of waterfowl, all of us taking field notes in our journals. We found a picnic spot and spent an hour sketching, doing some nature writing, eating. Next, we drove through the Refuge and picked up trash, filling several garbage bags. We took a nature hike and all cheered as Jackie Diaz, an urban student who had never hiked before, hugged a tree. We ended the day at a playground on the shore of Cayuga Lake, swinging, going down slides, and talking about the importance of play and creativity in finding innovative solutions to environmental problems. Both scientists and poets, we felt, need to play more. To symbolize the balance we had achieved, we all got on the seesaws, leaning this way and that, until we were all able to lift our feet off the ground -- perfectly balanced.