Category: Reflections

In Abbey’s Wilderness essay, he discussed the false myth of the wilderness being separated from civilization, noting that wildness can be found in places considered urban if one looks for them. While Abbey sometimes has bigoted views in his work, this idea addresses the issue of this separation. This dichotomy prevents people who are non-white or poor or uneducated from having access to these spaces, making them not realize that nature is all around them. I noted that his take on finding wilderness can occur through “looking into societies of the past and learning how to balance out industrialization/development and idealistic pastoralism”. Finding a balance for a solution and not going to either extreme allows the prevention of the problems found in inherently choosing the extreme options on either side without finding any compromise. Nature writing can help to challenge this binary and show that the natural and human world can really be considered one and the same when one looks close enough. Bergman’s essay, Searching for the Sacred in a Time of Crisis, resonated with me, especially with her discussion of reasons for leaving organized religion in the first place. My queerness and my religion are tied to each other as my queerness is one of the reasons I felt more comfortable in my current practice. It also allows one to write about taking their own stance while still being sympathetic to those of others even if you don’t agree with them. While bashing greedy CEOS who don’t’ wish to enact the change necessary is fun, it is harder to do so with those that are contributing to the problem via ignorance and just trying to survive. This style of nature writing allows us to take an empathic step towards the source of the bashing as a way to gather allies and support. How to Queer Ecology allows us to step out of the presumed straight, affluent, white male perspective to show us that writing about nature should include writing about all nature, all of its complexities and flaws. It should show the rejection of the binaries set up, whether they’re about sexuality, gender/sex, or the separation of humans and nature. It allows people to question who belongs in a natural space and how they can be presented in it to try to make our world just a bit more inclusive. Nature writing has allowed me to gain perspectives on what it can be. It shows what different mediums can present in their format and choices. It shows that ethics and themes within in these types of storytelling can be varied and contradictory.

I have engaged in the ways that memories can shape our perceptions of the natural world. I have engaged in using creative works to connect to higher powers and write from a perspective that I usually keep hidden. I have used stories to convey ideas that I have to deal with regularly within my life and present them in a fictional setting. I have tried to use mythology to connect our views of nature from the past to the present because myths are not always just about the past. I have learned that my writing can become very fluid and stream of consciousness-like without my knowing of it. Many people pointed out to me that my work was able to connect many different ideas together. Most of my life focuses on making connections between different ideas/things and figuring out new concepts in my head that I can utilize in my writing. I am especially proud of the poem that I had written. I have written poetry before, but I have never felt as invested in those pieces as I did this one. The idea came from a tarot card reading that inspired me to connect to the world via a creative outlet. When I was given the chance to in class, I decided to take advantage of it, creating a religious hymn to the pagan gods of the past. I had tried out concepts I hadn’t done before such as an invocation of the muse which is a classic technique that writers in the past have used. I hope to continue to utilize environmental themes in my works of fiction going forward as those are the ones I regularly work on and update.

I really enjoyed the short film, Where the Water Runs, as a form of fiction. I think that its closeness to reality is something that makes the film more striking. A lot of the other fiction texts focus on the far-off future, whether that’s in Oryx and Crake or in Pumzi. Utilizing that setting can be very helpful in showing a possible future for humanity and our planet. But, it can make the problem feels so far off, whereas Where the Water Runs reflects our current reality, but just pushing it to only a few years off than more than a decade, half a century, or more than a century. In my journal, I noticed that both films contained a similar theme of a “conflict between stability and freedom”. Both protagonists had a higher position of power with it being stable work and was a respected profession. Fiction allows the reader to step into the shoes and lives of people that have different lives, different upbringings, and/or different ways of knowing/thinking, so that we can better connect to them and what they’re going through. It was interesting to find and discover nature fiction writing, as most types of fiction that I’ve consumed have been audio and/or visual media, as noted in my journal. That was still the case, even in this class, as we watched films as well as read texts. Fiction can allow for a wider range of mediums to engage with, whereas other forms of storytelling are best conveyed in writing such as poetry or nonfiction. This is its best strength to convey nature and climate ideas to the wider public through visual art, documentaries, films, television, music, and writing.

Ministry of the Future is a text that I really appreciated due to the optimism present in it. Most forms of climate writing can play up the “tragedy porn” for a lack of a better term. Climate change is something cataclysmic and scary and deadly. But, an overfocus on the negative can prevent action or desire for action. The way that I think can best help people understand the crisis is to use the text to convey the dangers of climate change but provide the optimism and hope that we need to see us through, to show to us that we can become more than we thought we could be. Ministry of the Future explores the fallout of a natural disaster but shows how this tragedy can turn into a rallying cry for change. The book gives the example of India pushing out its current political administration and the abolition of the caste system. I also appreciate Bergeron’s story about religion and faith in a time of climate crisis. This really spoke to me because being an environmentalist at such a young age was what caused me to question my religion/faith and convert to one that seemed more suitable for me. Unlike the author in the story, nothing too traumatizing occurred to cause the conversion.

Many of the fiction about nature/human relationships with nature that I have consumed is through audio and visual media. The fiction that I think of most is “The Other Side of the Island” by Allegra Goodman. A lot of the politics discussed in the work is something that I never caught onto as a kid in my initial first readings of it. As such, reading it again allows me to confront topics such as bioterrorism and ecofascism. The challenge of this form of writing is to prevent the metaphors being used in it to not feel too heavy-handed, which has become a common criticism of environmental fiction in the past.

During my freshman year of college, I read one of Edward Abbey’s essays, Desert Solitude.  The essay was about Abbey’s experience being in the deserts of the American southwest. It was mostly set during sunrise and involved observations made by Abbey of the landscape. I had also read essays from Thoreau and Emerson throughout middle and high school. I still currently have two of their books on my shelf on my desk in college. All the authors wrote from different laces and different time periods from one another. But, they all captured the same mystical awe and wonder that comes from being present in nature. This form of writing can allow the reader to get into the head of the author. It allows them to be transported to another time and place and see what the authors are seeing. The challenges of this form can be the limitations of the authors themselves, their biases, their style of writing, and what details they choose to include.

Nature is something that has always been a part of me. My parents grew up in two different places. My mother grew up in the city suburbs of Boston near the Mystic River and would go to Revere Beach on the weekends with her friends. My father grew up in a working-class factory town in Southern Massachusetts with his backyard becoming the woods his siblings would play in. I eventually grew up in a similar environment in Framingham with woods near my backyard and streams to jump around in. I learned to swim not in a pool, but in a pond, diving off the metal dock to explore what lay below the surface. I ventured into the woods around my elementary schools, traversing into the forbidden areas. Our family trips would be to places in the Pioneer Valley, Cape Cod, or Mystic Beach. The natural world felt like who I was as a kid, even if I don’t go outside as much as I used to. I wanted to write my own stories and characters after reading so much as a kid. Most of my works from that point on were inspired by the natural world. I enjoyed setting my characters in settings and scenarios that would allow me to look at some incredible places, whether in person or through a computer screen.

Once a year, I read a book I read back in 5th grade, On the Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman. The book is a science fiction/dystopian novel that discusses the political repercussions of climate change on a newly created society. As I have gotten older, I have noticed broader discussions of topics including eco-fascism, overpopulation, and environmental justice in terms of class that has made me come back to it. Henry David Thoreau was an author I read in middle and high school that helped me shape my personal philosophy. Reading transcendentalism helped me understand what I wanted to worship and believe as I was starting to explore other religions outside of the Christianity I grew up with. Nature writing can allow for people to express their love of the natural world in many ways that allow for humanity to work to understand one another through a universal constant of living on Earth.

I feel like I would want to write my own perspective due to having a less common narrative presented in the society at large. Ecofeminism is something that I would be interested in as well as eco-queerness. The natural world has provided many queer people an example that our lives in terms of sexuality and gender are natural compared to established scientific or religious dogma. I would also write from an environmental justice angle given that I grew up in a minority-majority, ESL, immigrant, lower-income densely populated neighborhood with multiple contaminated/polluted sites. I would also like to write about the explorations of the land and sea and what the coast represents as both a barrier and a meditating place between the two regions.