I found Dr. Wai Chee Dimok’s lecture very intriguing. Using literature, she was able to explore some ideas of climate change. Using Elizabeth Bishop and William Blake’s work, she was able to give insightful examples of how science and humanities come together.
She started her presentation by giving us the term “weak environmentalism”. She described this as, “to desolate a sense of foreboding, an oblique or incidental relation. Environmentalism by porous not concentration of purpose.” When I heard this, I connected it back to Nathan K. Hensley’s lecture on Action After Nature: Climate Crisis and the Force of Literature. Both of these lectures explain how literature is a medium to present ideas on climate change.
Dr. Wai Chee Dimok referenced Peter Singer’s, “Animal Liberation” in her lecture and explained how he believed that eating meat is the worst kind of human speciesism and was a proponent for giving animals more rights. She then followed his text up with an article by the Scientific American Journal: “How Meat Contributes to Global Warming”. I was not sure how this related back to Blake and Bishops work though. However, I connected it back to her idea of weak environmentalism. To me, weak environmentalism is when climate change activism attacks individuals as opposed to the bigger forces at play. The Scientific Journal’s article basically blames climate change on poor people for not being vegan instead of the 100 biggest companies causing 70% of global gas emission that is messing up the climate. In the previous lecture, Hensley said that awareness in literature manifest itself as tangible action when people rewire their brains from an individual level to more collective thinking in order to create real change.
Going back to Blake and Bishops work, Dr. Wai Chee Dimok argues that they represent two different realities and positions on climate change. The “Sandpiper” conveys more of an urgency to modern problems like ocean acidification and a decrease in the food supply. While “Auguries of Innocence” has more of a leaning against animal abuse and research done explaining the devastating effects, animal abuse has on the environment.
During the question and answer part of the discussion, one of the professors asked Dr. Wai Chee Dimok about the difference between scientific thinking (orientated by end result) and literacy thinking and how do we make sense of that? Dr. Wai’s response to that was that we need a mixture of both. Science and humanities need to come together and co-educate each other. Science needs to provide the objective, tested, and stated facts. While the humanities need to articulate this information into feelings that invoke emotions and meaning.
After reflecting on Dr. Hensley’s lecture and adding it to my understanding of Dr. Wai’s lecture I believe that the answer to climate change awareness requires the collaboration of both the sciences and the humanities. We may not be able to solve climate change with this alone, but this lecture helped me see that by bridging these two concepts together we can position ourselves on a path where we are better able to combat this environmental crisis.