#bradleytian

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final project

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VBAPTVUXphsLT0wm6V3bdjUZvNxlK3qd

Sorry, forgot to add them all to a folder with my reading responses!

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Final Project Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FwPWGTvFQtkBqdoFKC69D5u5koRokUVdl6Va0YcraAo/edit?usp=sharing

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 9 Writing Assignment

I chose to manipulate President Trump’s proclamation to impose a tariff on solar cells earlier this year. I did not know about it until Ben Segal mentioned it during his proclamation, and upon further research I found out that it was actually quite controversial. Economists and environmentalists alike took to news outlets to say it would greatly damage both our economy and our prospects for sustainability in the long term. I was upset that the administration once again chose to prioritize short-term economic interests over long-term environmental ones, and I tried to convey that in my poem using the President’s own language.

The original document was very long and hard to decipher; it was a bunch of bullet points citing other legal documents––“ITC under section 203(a)(5) of the Trade Act (19 U.S.C. 2253(a)(5)” and “subheadings 8501.31.80, 8501.61.00, and 8507.20.80”. So I picked one page of the document and worked from there. I was particularly intrigued by the use of first-person voice in the document. The tone, if there was one, was triumphant. I have determined this is necessary, I have determined to implement it, I have determined to protect all countries. I found this ironic considering that slowing down the development of solar energy––“jailing it”–– in one of the largest countries in the world actually hurts the entire world. I left those first-person parts in and a signature to create a sense of responsibility for the action. I felt kind of “dirty” for taking the words so far out of context, but I suppose that is the point of this exercise.

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 9 Reading Response

I found the epigraph by Arthur Sze very illuminating in reading Whereas. “No word has any special hierarchy over any other.” In her book, Long Soldier emphasizes the power of formal and legal language to create arbitrary hierarchies and divisions among its subjects, stifling emotion and disembodying history. She laments the emptiness of the term American Indian recommended by the Oxford dictionary, a term coined in recent years to be inoffensive and politically correct. “The term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us anywhere but to rot” (62). Perhaps it is so neutral and empty that it erases a history of aggression that in some ways continues today. 

When I first read page 66, I did not think the quote “the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples” could possibly be lifted from the apology; it seemed too neutral and detached, like a textbook. I Googled it and was directed to the actual text of the apology, and was taken aback by the sometimes defensive language; “peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”. It seems stripped of emotion and the sense of true responsibility. Even though the statement is true, that is no way to apologize. The rest of the poem rails against this hiding of emotion: “Stop it, my girl. If you’re hurting, cry” (66). 

Another time she directly quotes the apology is on page 70, and before I even read the rest of the page I was drawn to the line “Native Peoples are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” "Their Creator" continues to place the “Native Peoples” in a box and quarantine them. It is this power of formal language that Long Soldier deconstructs in her first words: “Now / make room in the mouth / for the grassesgrassesgrasses” (5). “Make room in the mouth” refers to the word, and “grassesgrassesgrasses” conveys freedom from the constraints of linguistic rules, like real grasses growing freely on a prairie as depicted on the cover.

-Bradley Tian

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 8 Writing Assignment

Bottlebrush grass. Virginia wild rye. Timothy-grass (non-native, but not invasive). The Field Museum’s “Common Plant Families of the Chicago Region" has labelled diagrams of all the city's grass species, but I still can’t tell which is which; their faces are chopped off. No bottlebrush leaves or flared seed heads to identify. A season of fertilizer, pesticides, and sprinklers to get non-native but not invasive plants to grow where they don’t want to, and we mow them down. Lend nature an unwanted helping hand and then knock it down. An endless battle.

The field guide says the grasses family Poaceae is defined by hollow stems and narrow leaves. “Though they are commonly called ‘grasses’, seagrasses, rushes, and sedges fall outside this family.” I guess their leaves aren’t narrow enough. Sometimes our ways of classifying nature feel so arbitrary. At the end of the day, they’re all plants. They all have leaves, they all have cells with chlorophyll, and they all capture energy from sunlight.

Humans, too, capture energy from sunlight. Solar power plants have rows upon rows of cells in rigid arrangement, as if divided by cell walls. Our photovoltaic cells use anthocyanin pigment derived from leaves. They use light to excite electrons and capture energy, the same process used to capture carbon into glucose. Perhaps if we poured our resources into raising these plants instead of doomed non-native grasses, we wouldn’t always be battling nature to live.

Process notes:

I did not really know where to go with this week’s assignment. My final project is on solar energy, a very man-made phenomenon unrelated to natural environments and local species. Thinking about this led me to ponder the nature-human dichotomy of popular thought and whether that’s justified. In Peter Frase’s book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, he points out that humans, too, are animals. If we count termite mounds as part of nature, why are not our constructions ever considered natural? In biochemistry, I learned about how photovoltaic solar cells closely mimic the process of photosynthesis in the way they use light to fuel reduction reactions that store energy. So I thought I would try to blur the lines of this dichotomy by comparing solar power plants to real plants. I figured poetic form would not work very well because the topic necessitates unpoetic scientific diction and directness. I do not think this piece really accomplishes that goal because it is a bit too direct; it almost reads like an essay instead of “prose.”

Regardless, I am happy with it because I was experimenting with a different writing process; I tried to take Prof. Scappettone’s advice and not map out a moral or message too thoroughly before starting my writing. I treated this piece as kind of an exploration; just starting somewhere and seeing where it leads. The beginning is just ruminations I had while walking around, which is why it maybe does not link very well with the last paragraph, or why the final connection at the end feels forced.

Source:

https://fieldguides.fieldmuseum.org/sites/default/files/rapid-color-guides-pdfs/503_plant_family_pages_v2.pdf

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 8 Reading Response

(sorry, accidentally posted to my personal blog at first)

I was a bit confused after reading The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century because it hardly seems to be an ecological piece at all. Ruskin describes an environmental phenomenon, but his plague-clouds are characterized only in an abstract, supernatural way. Nowhere does he mention people’s health or physical environment being affected in any way other than aesthetically or emotionally, which is definitely a departure from environmentalist works like Silent Spring. The wind is “strange, bitter, blighting” and looks as if it were “made of dead men’s souls.” Furthermore, Ruskin casts doubt on whether it’s even wind in the scientific sense, calling it “a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any quarter of the compass.” Wind always blows from one place to another in a global system; detaching this quality from “plague-wind” suggests it’s not real wind at all. He also writes that it cannot be detected with “fine laboratory science” or scientific instruments. Unlike environmentalists, Ruskin does not blame economic activity for damaging the environment; he specifically states that it is not industrial smoke.

Instead, the plague-wind seems to be a representation of religious decadence. He frequently invokes references to the Divine Power and the system of the heavenly Firmament, or witches and phantoms and the Dead. He cites the cause as nations “blaspheming the name of God deliberately and openly…Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, 'The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof.’” The solution is “regaining the paths of rectitude and piety” to “open the windows of heaven.” Because the piece seems to be of such a religious nature, I was not sure of its connection to ecopoetics. While critics have praised the author’s prescience regarding modernity’s atmospheric destruction, I am not sure based on this chapter that air pollution or climate change was really the issue here.

-Bradley Tian

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 7 Reading Response

My main takeaway from Everything Sings was that an argument is made or a story is told in the successive pages of an atlas–– “an essay is being written through the sequence of world maps that opens a typical student atlas” (13-14). At first, I questioned why The House that Crack Built was assigned this week, as it had little to do directly with landscapes and mapmaking. Yet its narrative is similarly and essentially constructed in layers. Denis Wood writes of a type of story that can be told in no other way than as a series of maps, and perhaps The House that Crack Built is the same way. It would not be the same without the gradual unveiling of all the different twisting causes, and it is only made more powerful by its simplicity.

In Lake Superior Niedecker wrote about how (to quote my own post) “place is not just the present orientation of objects, but a cumulative history and dialogue. She emphasizes the materiality of time and language; to know an object is to appreciate how it came to be and who has touched it, not just what it’s like today.” The same idea shines through in the interview with Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, who “intensively research the history of places, often going back hundreds of years, to understand how landscapes were understood and manipulated by earlier generations.” Like Niedecker, they treat geography as a historic narrative; the way explorers drew maps of the Mississippi imposed a design on it, one that must be taken into account in redesigning it.

Something that confused me about Everything Sings was the author’s assertion that "The project’s not done. It may never be finished. What you’re holding is a piece of a dream—maps for a narrative atlas, not the narrative atlas itself—but it is this dream that has driven the mapmaking and that infuses the maps with whatever quality they may possess.” My question is, why would you publish something unfinished? What is the value in releasing an unrealized dream without a predetermined quality?

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Week 6 Writing Assignment

At our current consumption rates, natural gas will last us around 62 years and coal will last us around 130 years. Fossil fuel resources are finite and, based on the calculations, will not allow human societies to flourish for timespans longer than 50-200 years.

Wind gathers clouds to choke out the sun. The last hope is a lantern shining in the dark, a tiny candle flame shivering within an iron cage. A storm brews. Drip. Drop. Dead melted snow begins to fall, threatening to drag the flame to its watery grave. Wind howls through the bars, stealing the fire’s breath. They say the breeze can topple mountains given time; what can a tiny candle flame do against that? Through the night it darts and dodges rain and wind until, finally, the sky is clear. Now on the horizon rainbows leap and birds sing, and the candle seems to dance along. But still you hear it––that ominous drip, drip. Hot wax dropping onto the stones. It fizzles for a second. The candle will die, after all.

The sun's energy can be used indefinitely without diminishing its future availability. In 40 minutes the amount of energy contained in the light of the sun that reaches the Earth is equivalent to the amount of electrical energy used on the planet in a year's time.

Wind gathers clouds to choke out the sun. But the lantern in the dark shines with the sun’s light. A storm brews and rain begin to fall. But the sun lies above the clouds and does not fear water. Wind rattles the lantern but cannot extinguish the sun as the sun creates the wind. The lightest breeze can topple mountains given time, but the sun is timeless. Fear not the storms or the ticking clock; this light will not die so easily.

Working notes:

For my final project, I want to examine solar power by visiting “the largest urban solar installation in the country”: the Exelon City Solar power plant on Chicago’s South Side. So for my assignment this week, I wanted somehow to connect my immediate environment to solar power. I walked around campus at night and saw the beautiful lanterns all around the Main Quad, some of which seemed to serve a decorative rather than functional purpose. It reminded me of all the lights you see around Christmas time, which always make me sad because, while beautiful, they’re unnecessary. Knowing the unsustainability of mainstream (coal, natural gas, nuclear) energy sources, their beauty is one that seems almost wasteful and definitely on a time limit.

The first passage is my attempt to capture this feeling of “running out of time” with nonrenewable energy. I describe a light source that is very fragile and build tension by having it barely escape all these obstacles, only to point out that it doesn’t matter because the candle will burn itself out eventually. The onomatopoeia of the rain (drip, drop) and characterization of the wind (toppling mountains given time) embody the passage of time, which the light withstands but ultimately succumbs to.

The second passage provides a contrast to the first, describing a lantern as an incarnated sun since it is powered by solar power. The points about the sun being above the rain and wind show how, unlike fossil fuels, the sun is not limited by time at all. The tone is supposed to be more triumphant than the ominous first passage. Before each paragraph is some research I copy-pasted with slight modifications, which are intended to sound more academic and provide guidance and context for reading the two passages. Like my text, the copied sentences emphasize the unsustainability of fossil fuels and the great sustainability of solar power.

-Bradley Tian