The Jehovah Project

Nature school open for business.




I sometimes think that "syllabus" is short for "silly business," because these documents present students with a coherence which typically has more to do with the business of the university as it organizes and funds its knowledge categories than with any obvious unity in the subject matter. Nevertheless, existence is rife with unities of all sorts, and if we want to hold some of these connections fast in a syllabus for twelve weeks, well, that's not so bad. Here's my offering for Fall, 2006. Future semesters below. The three courses are roughly on these three topics: nature, cities, goodness. As far as I'm concerned, anyone with an enquiring mind is invited.

David Thomson
Natures’ Futures
Fall, 2006

University of Toronto CompLit
COL5060[H/F]:
Tuesdays 10-12
georgianbay2004@yahoo.com
Other materials at: The Jehovah Project: http://www.jehovahproject.blogspot.com/ and at Ground Below Zero http://www.groundbelowzero.blogspot.com/


Course description
What if nature weren’t a fact around which we might want to assemble some values, but one proposition amongst many? What if we add an “s” to nature? In this course we will consider the present moment and its need for environmental action as a history viewed from the future as the past. Any regrets? I will attempt to make the case for militant ecology in an environment in which no entity in the surround can be taken for granted, neither human nor nonhuman subjects, nor science, nor nature, nor even the French love of wine. I will float a number of claims (for example, “no one is responsible for what he or she has done and therefore no one is responsible for the environment”) and we can see what treating them as propositions in our collective might entail.

Evaluation
Research paper: 60%
Critical Responses, Oral Presentation, and Participation: 40%

­Prequel
You won’t need to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars nor Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for the course, but they will tend to have a ghostly presence.
Quotes from Red Mars:
“The planet is the lab.” 312
“What we can process won’t sublime.” 312
“What’s nice is we can pollute all we want…” 317
“The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. ‘Well’, he finally said. ‘We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.’” 440
“Well, here we are.” 452
And this from Moby-Dick:
“But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms…” 423 (Penguin!)

Quotations about hawks
“I see a circling hawk, high, skyward, needing identification.” --Aldo Leopold, 60
“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.” –Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea [Frederic Jameson says that SF fans look down on fantasy fans according to the same measure they themselves are despised by readers of traditional narratives.]

Readings, or, The Scholar’s Idle Times
For Emerson, nature was the main business of life, and books were for the scholar’s “idle times.” In addition to the readings below, there will be photocopies from time to time, and an occasional screening. The course is designed for a limited number of students in order to maintain flexibility in the choice of readings.

Week 1 (Sep 12): No taxation without representation: this course in a complit department is, after all, comparatively literary (concerned with the many forms of representation).
*Selections from Moby Dick

Week 2 (Sep 19): What if “nature” is the word for our pretending to know what the environment is, then hiding [naturalizing] that pretense?
· Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, Intro and Chpt. 1

Week 3 (Sep 26): Nature in globalization’s infinity of images. [short response paper due]
· Latour Chpt. 2
· selection from Mattelart (if the globe is Exhibit A in our case for nature, Mattelart wants to consider the way in which real-time networks, and their histories, are shaping the way the planet is organized.)

Week 4 (Oct 3): Does Canada have “nature”?
· Aldo Leopold, “The Upshot,” part IV of A Sand County Almanac, 1949
· Latour, review of Chpt. 1 (viewed through Chpt. 3)
· Selections from Lowbagger.org: this week’s articles by Elba Kramer (my veranym) and by Earth First! founder Mike Roselle.

Week 5 (Oct 10; no Thanksgiving break): The American desert as Mars.
· Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

Week 6 (Oct 17): Plato’s cave, American style.
· “Nature,” Emerson, 1836

Week 7 (Oct 24): Gift: falling into history.
· Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, chpts. 1-3
· Winona LaDuke, “Social Justice, Racism, and the Environmental Movement,” 1993 [http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barladuke.htm, has some good stuff on gift and reciprocity]
· Green Mars, 1994, pages 1-294 (especially 289-94 on gift)

Week 8 (Oct 31): Representations, the future as heuristic.
· Green Mars (cont)
· Selections from Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future

Week 9 (Nov 7): Eco-nomy and gift.
· Thoreau, “Economy” in Walden, 1854
· Student presentation on Winona LaDuke, Native American economist.

Week 10 (Nov 14) Outside (theory and practice).
*Cary Wolfe, “Nothing Fails like Success: The Postmodern Moment and the Problem of the ‘Outside’” [this is the short introduction to Theory Out of Bounds, and there is a play on the term “outside” as both outdoors and as philosophically about whether there’s a privileged outside from which to form a critique of nature.]
*----. “Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism” [http://www.altx.com/EBR/EBR4/wolfe.htm, a short book review suggesting that there might be things that are worse than Deep Ecology]
*Student presentation on Antarctica.

Week 11 (Nov 21) Forests: the storage of carbon and memory for futures.
*William Cronon, “Taking the Forest,” in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
*----. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” http://history.wisc.edu/cronon/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html
*Jeffrey St. Clair, “Forest or Against Us” in Counterpunch (1993) http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair08232003.html
*Selections from: Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, 1993
*Selections from Robert Macfarlane’s Guardian series.

Week 12 (Nov 28) Car praxis: where the rubber hits the road. 2030 versus 1958: What if the future were in the past?
Research Papers: drafts or title and first pages due.
*Derek Wall, “Earth First!” and “Car wars” in “Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement” (1999)

Week 13 (Dec 5) Review: Are we crazy?
*Selections from Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1982.
Research Papers due 15 December