Professor Nathan Hensley from Georgetown introduced his thoughts on the climate crisis and how we can learn from literature to help combat it. He began his talk with a personal history of his home town in Fresno, California, a major agricultural hub. Initially, I couldn’t understand how this was relevant to his new book and research as he spoke about the farm that his family owned and remembering what it was like to grow up in that environment. He went on to discuss his memories of the farm and how they were idealized to conform to conventional ideas about what a farm is and means. This was evident when he showed the photographs of Fresno today and discussed the environmental changes that have occurred since he left his hometown. While Fresno remains an agricultural hub, the technologies and industries have developed, and it has become a center for industrial agriculture. The word agriculture to me suggests organic farm where you can enjoy all of your fresh vegetables and fruits and pasture raised chickens and cows, but this is not the case. The industrial agriculture business in Fresno has created such pollution and sickness that it is no longer close to what Hensley remembers from his childhood. The pollution in the air has caused some of the highest rates of asthma in the country and its in not solely impacting the humans that live in the area; 95% of the monarch butterflies that used to populate the area have died as well.
This problem is not only isolated to California and Hensley’s personal experience; it is a global issue. Hensley suggests an entire overhaul of the ways in which we think and the systems in place that guide our actions. A concrete example of this are the devastating hurricanes that have plagued the United States in recent years and the probabilities that we assign to them. By the probability that is currently in place, Houston, Texas has experienced 3500 years of storms in the past ten years alone, and who knows what will happen if this continues on the same trajectory.
The one literary example that was well developed throughout his argument was the story of Alice in Wonderland and the transitions that she endures within the story. Alice runs into problems in this novel environment because she attempts to bring principles from her normal world into Wonderland. This causes a mismatch between two frames of reference and distinguishes the two different realities. I understood this to be a metaphor for how we think about our world as it develops. Clearly there is something that must be changed in order for survival on this planet. The current way in which we treat the environment with reaction as opposed to action will not continue to work as is illustrated by Alice in Wonderland. Similar to Alice, adapting to a new mindset is the sole way to living in a new reality.
Hensley ended his discussion with a few suggestions for how to make this shift happen. He suggested a collaborative approach as opposed to the individualistic one that we often take, including the past and thinking about how this relates to past historical events, opening our minds to multiple approaches versus one specific plan. Upon reflection I have a better understanding of his argument, however, someone asked how this translates into action, and I think this concept may need more development before we are able to accept the idea.