While it is important to recognize to recognize the impact that humanity has on the environment and the natural world, it is an entirely different level of commitment to draw those realizations to ones own discipline (regardless of how simple or complex doing so may be). I found it interesting how a professor focused in literature and specifically the English department was able to address some of these issues of climate change and the current detriment that humanity is having on the natural world. Striking moreover, was Dr. Helnsley’s use of such an iconic text when considering the state of our planet. Leaving the talk, I found myself considering the power of this in the relation to our topic: the presence of the past.
While Helnsley spoke about the ever changing nature of our planet, he seemed to dwell on the issue that we lack the language to explain exactly what state of nature we are in right now. This is an interesting paradigm, and I see ways in which he is spot on and arguably slightly off course in his discourse. While he uses Alice in Wonderland to contextualize another place where lack of proper language existed, I do believe this example also struggles because of the fictional narrative it brings forth. While there is of course a need to analyze and respect fictional works in the lineage of contemporary English literature, placing them into the context of such a real issue like climate change brings upon slight issue in my mind.
I felt as if the legitimacy of our climate problems and the way we talk about them was potentially not as strong as it could have been given the textual reference. I would imagine my point could be easily countered, and one could argue that then we should also discount the work of George Orwell in his book, 1984. However, I found it notable that this left me feeling slightly off put.
Thinking about climate change more broadly, I think it is great and important to see multiple disciplines tackling the issue. While an English department may not commonly confront works on climate change, that is not to say they should not. I think to my own major, of Art History, and consider the ways in which we should be better about breaching the topic within our discourse on the history of art. While some artists bring upon the issue in very apparent and well respected manners, as a historical discipline we struggle to use these works for further analysis because their meaning is often quite straightforward and requires a minimal amount of unpacking. Artists such as Maya Lin create works (one of which is in the Colby College Museum of Art titles, Pin River) that represent the deterioration of our natural world, yet historians fail to put these issues into context of what has come before us in terms of other periods of hardship and struggle.
While this lecture was not immortal at fulfilling and I found myself leaving with a bit of uncertainty surrounding the strength of Dr. Helnsley’s arguments, after a bit of reflection I think he is headed in a direction that is not only positive for departments of English, but academia as a whole.