Chapter 3: Ecoliteracies and Place Based Learning: Encouraging Imaginative Resilience through Art and Related Texts

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in the Spring, or the rustle of insects’ wings… And what is there to life if [one] cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the argument of the frogs around the pool at night? Whatever befalls the earth befalls the [children] of the earth. If [individuals] spit upon the ground, they spit on themselves. This we know—the earth does not belong to [the individual];  [the individual] belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. [Humans] did not weave the web of life; [they are] merely a strand in it. Whatever [individuals] do to the web, [they] do to [themselves]. (Chief Seattle, 1786-1866, Indigenous leader; Suquamish and Duwamish Chief in Myers, N. (Ed.) Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management, p.159).

Chief Seattle’s prophetic words continue to inform environmental writers and visual art today. With empathy, awareness, and creative initiative, important small steps to improve the natural environment and restore the balance of nature can be taken. As a result, larger and far-reaching positive transformations worldwide could occur through reforestation efforts, pollution reduction, and species renewal. These steps involve learning and innovation. Fritjof Capra (2009) emphasizes that “nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities” and that the “web of interconnections” is a vital lesson that we can learn from nature. Capra views sustainability as a dynamic process of “co-evolution” that requires effort and insight to maintain and thrive. He explains:

In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy—our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. This means that ecoliteracy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels—from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals….No individual organism can exist in isolation. Animals depend on the photosynthesis of plants for their energy needs; plants depend on the carbon dioxide produced by animals, as well as the nitrogen fixed by bacteria at their roots; and together plants, animals, and microorganisms regulate the entire biosphere and maintain the conditions conducive to life. ( Fritjof Capra, 2009 The New Facts of Life)

Environmental themed literature and related works of art can deepen our understanding and appreciation of the complex interactions of society, individuals, and nature.  A goal of environmental literacy is to encourage an awareness, empathy, and concern about the environment. By reading and discussing relevant texts, learners can “develop the knowledge, attitudes, skills, motivations, and commitment to work both individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones” McBride, Brewer, Berkowitz, & Borrie, 2013, p. 7). Early on, books such as Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) and Silent Spring (1962) challenged individuals to look more closely at the erosion of the air, water, and soil that resulted from pesticides and industrial pollution. Writers like Carson challenged educators and activists in all walks of life to “speak and stand up” for and protect nature. Decades after Carson’s warnings, communities are rushing to cope with the urgency of environmental devastation, climate change, marine pollution, deforestation, habitat destruction, and species extinction and endangerment. Extending empathy to understand and care for all forms of life is at the heart of Eco Literate: How Educators are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett, and Zenobia Barlow (2012). They provide educators with many excellent ideas for creating inspirational lessons about environmental protection. Valuable lesson plan ideas, reference, teachings resources, and case studies are provided (ecoliteracy.org | Education for the Sustainability of People and the Planet) . At the core of their book, the authors highlight the importance of empathy and awareness from a systems perspective:

Since life began, Earth’s ecosystems have developed ways of supporting the great web of human and nonhuman life throughout certain patterns and processes, such as cycles, networks, and nested systems—all of which reflect the fundamental fact, as Centre for Ecoliteracy cofounder Fritjof Capra puts it, that ‘nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities .’ To understand how nature sustains life then, requires the capacity for systems thinking, or the ability to perceive ow the different aspects of a living system exist, both in relationship to one another and relative to the whole that is greater than its parts (Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012, p. 7).

Inspiration to protect our planet and restore the grandeur of nature can also be from a revisiting of classic poems from the Romantic, Victorian, and early 20^th century poets. This can be paired with artistic images with a critical art perspective that challenges learners to re-vision the content of the painting (landscape, animals, people) from the lens of 2023. What happened to the landscape? The animals’ habitat? The livelihood of the people? How has industrialization changed the landscape from 100, 200, 300 (or more) years ago? What can we do to restore the grandeur of nature? How threatened is nature today and what steps need to be taken to reduce these ongoing threats? What steps can be taken as an individual, a community, and as a world acting collectively? What barriers prevent the restoration of the grandeur of nature? How can we work toward a more hopeful future where the grandeur of nature is restored?

For example, we’re looking at the carbon footprint of fast fashion right now, and taking it all the way back to the 18^th century history of growing cotton and industrial agriculture; others are looking at deforestations, plastics in the oceans, coral bleaching, animal extinction, environmental racism—many important topics….That’s why we teach this information; our students, as world citizens and future managers in their fields, need an understanding of the climate crisis and sustainability (D. Kelly Interview with Dr. Maura Coughlin , 2023)

In her co-edited book Ecocriticism and The Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture, Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (2019) take a closer look at art and community through an environmental lens. Ecocritcism includes the interdisciplinary study of the connections between fields such as literature, art, science, geography, and the environment. The origins, notes Coughlin, of current environmental and climate crises have their origins in early centuries. In referring to a landscape painting by Gaston Roullet that depicted the salt cod drying beaches of St. Pierre and Miquelon (tiny islands off he coast of Newfoundland), Coughlin notes that “bigger than the story of one painting, it’s a story about using up natural resources. It’s a global story about production and consumption, labor and human rights” (Coughlin, 2022, p.2). Coughlin’s ecocritical perspective can be helpful in formulating basic questions to explore artistic landscapes from an environmental lens.

Works by nature painters such as John Ruskin and well- known nature and wildlife photographs can be catalysts for students to explore and appreciate the beauty of nature. Richly illustrated books such as The lost words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (2017) might motivate learners to investigate endangered animals. In their beautifully illustrated book, Macfarlane and Morris examine the “lost words” of nature that were left out in the most recent Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words such as “acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow” are replaced with words like “email attachment, blog, apps, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice mail” (Macfarlane and Morris, 2017, Introduction).

“Hummingbird” by D.H. Lawrence

“Green” by D.H. Lawrence

Metropolitan Museum of Art Notes

“This work, first shown at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in New York City in 1853, depicts a scene near the town of Olive, New York, where Durand spent the summers of 1853 and 1855. During those months, he repeated sketches he had made of a nearby mountain, High Point (also known as Ashokan High Point), on an earlier visit to the region in 1847. In this painting, in contrast to his large “historical landscapes,” the artist focused on depicting light and shade in the type of bucolic setting popular with an increasingly urban American public—represented here by the couple fishing on the bank of the stream, enjoying the bounty of nature.”

 

The sun cuts deep into the heavy drift,
Though still the guarded snow is winter-sealed,
At bridgeheads buckled ice begins to shift,
The river overflows the level field.

Once more the trees assume familiar shapes,
As branches loose last vestiges of snow.
The water stored in narrow pools escapes
In rivulets; the cold roots stir below.

Soon field and wood will wear an April look,
The frost be gone, for green is breaking now;
The ovenbird will match the vocal brook,
The young fruit swell upon the pear-tree bough.

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,
The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,
Will turn its private substance into green,
And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

Ye stray and gather, part and fold;
The wind alone can tame you;
I think of what in time of old
The poets loved to name you.

They called you sheep, the sky your sward,
A field without a reaper;
They called the shining sun your lord,
The shepherd wind your keeper.

Your sweetest poets I will deem
The men of old for moulding
In simple beauty such a dream,
And I could lie beholding,

Where daisies in the meadow toss,
The wind from morn till even,
Forever shepherd you across
The shining field of heaven

“Reading the world” (Freire, 1997) from a pedagogy of place challenges individuals to become more aware of their geographic, spatial, and community surroundings. For example, Gruenwald (2003) refers to urban community life which has been eroded by gentrification and capitalist development can be analyzed and re-visioned and constructed with a new meaning of “development” that is linked to greater sustainability and life-affirming values. Gruenwald details the parallels between environmental and ecological education and experiential learning, outdoor education, Indigenous education, bioregional education, community-based education, and problem-based learning. While the concept of “living well” differs:

geographically and culturally a politicized, multicultural, critical place-based education would explore how humanity’s diverse cultures attempt to live well in the age of globalization and what cultural patterns should be conserved or transformed to promote more ecologically sustainable communities (p. 9).

Gruenwald refer to the Western Apache wisdom that “the interior landscape of mind, spirit, and mortality is composed of places, place names, and stories that teach about the relationship between people and between people and places.” From this Indigenous perspective, there is a localized sense of place and a shared identity (Basso, 1996, in Gruenwald, p. 626). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore some of these examples in more depth, the idea of encouraging environmental literacy through poetry and artistic images can be a valuable starting point.

Ecopoetry can be described as poetry that can inform our awareness and understanding of nature. Climate change, species decline, habitat destruction, and the erosion of the natural landscape are themes through (Ecopoetry Definition).  Eco poetics refers to its theorization, and ecopoets to the writers themselves. These terms emerged in the 1980s and continue to be refined, debate, and extended. For the purposes of this book, we are looking at selected nature poetry from different centuries (up to the mid- 20^th century) that can be explored from an ecological and environmental lens. Poets such as Mathew Arnold and Thomas Hardy saw the industrial revolution and increasing mechanization of work as being destructive to a  holistic vision of nature and human life.  The Poetry Foundation describes ecopoetics as being not quite the same as nature poetry but it shares some similarities:

Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry. (Poetry Foundation, Poetic Terms- Ecopoetry)

Writers like Johnathon Skinner connect poetry, photography, experiential learning, and deep ecology as a way to activate personal and social change. For more information, please open the link here. 

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). Giant Redwood Trees of California, 1874. Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts. Public Domain.

Excerpt from “Song Of The Redwood-Tree” by Walt Whitman

Landscapes in Nature: Hope for the Grandeur of Nature

Silent Nymph, with curious eye,
Who the purple ev’ning lie
On the mountain’s lonely van,
Beyond the noise of busy man,
Painting fair the form of things,
While the yellow linnet sings;
Or the tuneful nightingale
Charms the forest with her tale;
Come, with all thy various hues,
Come, and aid thy sister Muse;
Now, while Phoebus, riding high,
Gives lustre to the land and sky,
Grongar Hill invites my song,
Draw the landskip bright and strong;
Grongar, in whose mossy cells,
Sweetly musing, Quiet dwells;
Grongar, in whose silent shade,
For the modest Muses made,
So oft I have, the ev’ning still,
At the fountain of a rill
Sate upon a flow’ry bed,
With my hand beneath my head;
While stray’d my eyes o’er Towy’s flood,
Over mead, and over wood,
From house to house, from hill to hill,
‘Till Contemplation had her fill.
About his chequer’d sides I wind,
And leave his brooks and meads behind,
And groves, and grottos where I lay,
And vistas shooting beams of day:
Wide and wider spreads the vale,
As circles on a smooth canal:
The mountains round, unhappy fate!
Sooner or later, of all height,
Withdraw their summits from the skies,
And lessen as the others rise:
Still the prospect wider spreads,
Adds a thousand woods and meads,
Still it widens, widens still,
And sinks the newly-risen hill.

Now, I gain the mountain’s brow,
What a landskip lies below!
No clouds, no vapours intervene,
But the gay, the open scene
Does the face of nature show,
In all the hues of heaven’s bow!
And, swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight.

Old castles on the cliffs arise,
Proudly towering in the skies!
Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires!
Half his beams Apollo sheds
On the yellow mountain-heads!
Gilds the fleeces of the flocks,
And glitters on the broken rocks!

Below me trees unnumber’d rise,
Beautiful in various dyes:
The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir, that taper grows,
The sturdy oak, with broad-spread boughs;
And, beyond, the purple grove,
Haunt of Phyllis, queen of love!
Gaudy as the op’ning dawn,
Lies a long and level lawn,
On which a dark hill, steep and high,
Holds and charms the wandering eye!
Deep are his feet in Towy’s flood,
His sides are cloth’d with waving wood,
And ancient towers crown his brow,
That cast an aweful look below;
Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps,
And with her arms from falling keeps;
So both a safety from the wind
In mutual dependence find….

*Grongar Hill is located in the Welsh county of Carmarthenshire and was the subject of a loco-descriptive poem by John Dyer. Published in two versions in 1726, during the Augustan period, its celebration of the individual experience of the landscape makes it a precursor of Romanticism. As a prospect poem, it has been the subject of continuing debate over how far it meets artistic canons. ” (Wikipedia).

To learn more about Gronger Hill please open the link here.

The idealized images contrasted with the brutal reality and the destruction of both the Indigenous people and the natural terrain that was ongoing. How is this land being used today? Are there damages to the environmental that are irreversible or are efforts at work to reverse the damage and restore the balance?