On February 25th, Nathan K. Hensley, a professor from Georgetown University, gave an insightful talk titled “Action After Nature: Climate Crisis & the Force of Literature.” He began his talk highlighting the importance of the relationship between thought and action, and how it is influenced by past events. He was forward in giving his opinion on how everything we are now, is an expression what has been. From this, he drew the comparison to our physical body, the air we breathe, and the words we speak. I found it particularly interesting how he went into how we speak the past – as we speak the “language of the dead.” We are able to tell from moments into his lecture how Dr. Hensley has a passion for what he was talking about. He employed humor and powerful language into his talk which left a lasting impression. I also enjoyed how he illustrated non-obvious parallels from points of his past to the topic of his lecture. It was not until into about ten minutes into his talk that the class room got a full understanding of the purpose of the talk, which was to prove the powerful force which literature plays in our collapsing ecological world.
Dr. Hensley began by stating his passion for studying the relationships between systems. Then what seemed to be abrupt, he pasted a picture of his grandmother’s house in Fresno, California. This is where he grew up. This photo pair with a handful of others from his youth were all accompanied by flushed out personal anecdotes which captured our attention. From this, he elaborated on how our minds and memories are constructed by conventions of the past. I found this portion of his lecture to be very interesting at it was directly correlated to our first Presence of the Past lecture by Jennifer Yoder, The Presence of the Past in Angela Merkel’s Political Discourse, where we learned about the role which memory politics plays in the German Government. After his youthful photos, Dr. Hensley elaborated on his move from California to New York, in order to attend Vassar College. This was his main turning point towards talking about our ecosystem as he started his this chapter of his life story by saying that the town where Vassar is located is the “epicenter of 19thcentury pollution.” He talked about how the remnants of such a distructive carbon economy made him feel and how the lasting effects of fossil fuels impact our world today. Dr. Hensley then circled back to his hometown of Fresno and flashed a picture of the visibile pollution effected his home. This is what drove his sentimental feelings surrounding our developing world.
Dr. Hensley then shifted to a new point saying as students, we have “grown up after the end of nature;” a reference to the 1989 book by Bill McKibben. This image stuck with me as it made me think about the world as I know it and what it may look like in 50 years. He then talked about a book by Christina Sharpe influenced his idea towards when nature will / did end. I enjoyed how he talked about how we have all the tools to make a liveable world live in the ecological wreckage and how they are just looking to be sharpened. This brought in allusions from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Dr. Hensley stated that Lewis Carroll is a student of transitions and he aplouds that. Caroll studies the moment in between states, where two different systems or orders are competing. For example, Alice’s world is in between 2 sets of regular orders, both which have their own rules. Dr. Hensley works to explain the world in between two sets of regularities through the written word in order to explain where we stand as a nation and world when interacting with our ecosystem.
To finish the lecture, Dr. Hensley took questions where a peer asked how he sees his book connecting to our word. He discussed in length the main points of his book and his process of thought. However, I was hooked by his idea of singularity—how things are either true or not true and how nothing comes out of nowhere. Dr. Hensley said how people “model a historical game” and how no literally work comes from a uninfluenced perception. Our ideas, thoughts, speech and language have all been tampered with by our past history.
Overall I found Dr. Nathan Hensley’s discussion to be a great addition to our Presence of the Past lecture series and it left me wondering how climate change is a problem for thought, which can only be cured if we rebuild our thought process.