This week’s lecture by Dr. Wai Chee Dimok seemed to be an incredibly appropriate continuation of the subject matter in this lecture series. As noted by others, it felt very in line with many of the ideas brought to us by Dr. Hensley in a prior lecture. While Dr. Hensley sited The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland in his lecture on the transitionary period that we are facing in regard to climate change, Dr. Wai Chee Dimok used William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop to iterate a similar point. In many ways however, I found Dr. Dimok’s argument to be slightly more pointed and concrete (regardless of my slight disagreement with its potential success and necessity in the modern world).
Dr. Dimok had a very commendable conclusion of her talk, in which she made her point simply while prompted by questions: Sciences should be more in conversation with arts and humanities. Many others in the series responses have has some issue with this idea, and to this I find myself agreeing. At a meta level, there is clearly need for the sciences to come into closer contact with the humanities, however I do not believe that this is the fix for the crisis that is noted not only by our speakers, but raw science itself. Dimok cited the overall complexity in the realm of sciences taking away from one’s ability to understand (and therefore aid) our current situation yet did not offer solution besides the inclusion of an emotional component of the sciences.
This push for an emotional connection, while interesting and likely grounded in a true realization that less people interact with science daily than we should hope, seemed lofty to me. Even discounting these ideas, herself during the question section of the lecture, Dimok admitted to rarely remembering anything she reads in her daily routine of reading Scientific American. I find it hard to believe that this should be the first consideration when thinking about ways to confront our climate crisis due to these reasons exactly. While emotional connection to the content is clearly important to grab the attention of a wider audience that can inevitably make a difference, this connection I would imagine will likely need to be grounded in the sciences and not the humanities.
Additionally, I found her information regarding the worldwide meat and animal product industry shocking when thinking about our world in a climate change crisis. This industry, while we all know is not necessarily clean and clear of evils, certainly did not sit high in my pre-conceived intuition of industries that had the most detrimental impact on our planet. Learning this was interesting, yet also a bit disheartening considering the nature of the industry and the likelihood that much can be done in the short term to change some of these overarching issues that surround it. While this is a place where her push for an emotional connection could be useful, differentiating between an emotional connection and a call for concrete action seemed absent in the discussion. It is this disconnect that I think we have seen consistently through this series, and one that all presenters so far have tried to address in their discourses.