Category: 05. March 11

I truly enjoyed Professor Dimock’s lecture this past Monday titled “William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop in the Anthropocene”. It was an intricate presentation that incorporated real life problems with past pieces of literature. Professor Dimock provided a variety of messages meant to connect to a deeper understanding. Though the information was extremely captivating, the presentation was slightly difficult to follow and perhaps this explains why there were not too many questions being asked. Because no one was stepping up, I decided to ask about the end of her presentation where she went into detail about ocean pollution and more specifically, ocean acidification. I essentially asked Professor Dimock if, as a 21 year old in this country, we are doomed for the future? She started out by saying “Scientific research and information has no emotional impact on people”. She emphasized that the most impactful way to promote climate change and garner people’s attention is to SHOW them. She illustrated how the coral reefs in Australia are on track to become virtually nonexistent. Professor Dimock then implored upon the class that we are the ones who are going to be facing the repercussions for this mistreatment of our planet. Our generation must do a better job of utilizing all the information we have at our disposal. Professor Dimock further this point by stating how educated we are socially and on the internet. She made an amazing point when she told us how important it is to educate and teach ourselves about what is happening in the real world. No, I cannot go to Australia, swim around the coral reefs, and truly understand the horrors that are taking place there. Yet, I can surf the web and find someone whose made a detailed video of firsthand experiences and encounters that I would not have seen even if I were to witness the reefs first hand. Professor Dimock’s message was quite clear: older generations (and current) are not the ones wanting to deal with these issues. We are the generation that will have to face the consequences and assume responsibility. If we do not tune in now, then yes, maybe all hope is lost. Yet, overall, Professor Dimock did explain how we can slow the effects of climate change by limiting things like methane and carbon dioxide releases. As someone who is truly invested in our planets’ well-being, I really did enjoy Professor Dimock’s lecture as well as her overall work as it was both educational and entertaining.

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.

This lecture from Dr. Wai Chee Dimok was very enlightening and encouraging because it really emphasized the importance or collaboration between the science and humanities. She was able to do this using Elizabeth Bishop and William Blake’s work and it reminded me a lot of our lecture from this series a few weeks ago involving Alice in Wonderland and linking these themes to environmental issues.

 

I think this is a very powerful way to frame these issues and it can help influence more people to be more cautious with their carbon footprint and their overall pollution output. By using science for the more critical proof that these issues are dangerous and serious, and then using literature as the relatable side of it to emphasize how these issues reoccur throughout our human history, we should be able to draw more people to action or to at least make them understand the scope of the situation at hand.

 

In the previous lecture about Alice in Wonderland the global environmental issues were connected to very old literature displaying how people are able to communicate real dangers through alternate realities. I think this relates to this lecture as well because Bishop and Blake represent the two different sides of this coin. The difference is in their thinking about the impact of human actions on global warming, and a lot of this lecture discussed how there isn’t agreement on this from both sides of the topic.

 

One part of this lecture was very new information to me and that was the portion regarding Singer’s “Animal Liberation.” Dr. Wai Chee Dimok pointed out how he believed that eating animals and meat is leading to global warming and I had never heard this idea before. I know all about many other forms of pollution and I know that our carbon emissions from out homes and cars are a very serious problem. I do not know how much people are negatively impacting the environment by eating meat, especially when it is locally sourced and not directly from these larger companies with monopolies on the industry. I personally love eating meat and it makes up a large portion of my diet and although I try to be conscious of where I buy meat and what brand I buy, this definitely made me question how much I was contributing to the overall issue of global warming by so regularly eating this meat.

 

Although this section of the talk was extremely interesting to hear about and research further, I am not sure about its direct relation to the presence of the past theme and especially its relation to connecting the humanities and science. I personally thought a lot of the other points brought up were really strong and I definitely think collaboration between the sciences and humanities is necessary to help society as a whole. However, I don’t know how vegetarianism and eating less meat directly relates to intertwining this disciplines to create a better and more environmentally conscious world. I do think that this discussion was very thought provoking and made people think about all of these issues and more which in itself is effective for helping to create change and more open-minded people.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock from Yale University gave a similar talk to that of professor Nathan Hensley of Georgetown. In both instances the professors proposed that in order to understand and overcome the current issue of climate change, we must turn to literature to fully understand the phenomenon. Professor Dimock, took a slightly different approach than Hensley and compared the works of Elizabeth Bishop and William Blake in order to describe the lack of understanding and knowledge that currently exists around the future of the environment and the changes that are occurring as a result of global warming. The difference between Bishops and Blakes poetry is that one acknowledges the future and the unknown compared with Blake who describes the environment in a concrete and unchanging way. This is a mindset that makes it impossible to understand work towards reversing the current climate change as it focuses on the past and doesn’t accommodate for the ever-changing nature of the environment and even more broadly the world.

I was particularly interested in Dimock’s understanding of Peter Singer and his stance on vegetarianism. I have read his book Animal Liberation as part of an ethics class my freshman year in high school, his arguments were so convincing that I even converted to vegetarianism for six years following. I thought it was interesting how Singer addresses the problem of vegetarianism and how to help people understand why it is important. Although he feels that animal lives are worth the same as human lives and he argues that in his book, he knows that it is not a common belief amongst humans and that is not a way to convert people to vegetarianism. Instead, he takes the approach of the contribution of meat towards the global warming problem. This is a way to address the larger audience in a more effective way because global warming directly effects the lives of humans, and the amount of green-house gas generated in the meat process is alarming.

One of the major commonalities between Professor Dimock and Professor Hensley’s talks was the need to merge the scientific and the literary world. Dimock suggested that literary thinking can bridge the lack of understanding that often goes along with scientific works and help us understand the true gravity of the climate change issue. Clearly, there has been difficulty with a scientific approach to understanding climate change. People who don’t understand science don’t believe that climate change is real and we need to bring the emotional aspects of the humanities to help people understand the science behind climate change. The development of STEAM groups on college campuses shows that sciences arts and humanities must be in collaboration in order to fully address the issue of climate change and make it a more widespread issue. I admire this observation and agree with the need to address the disconnect between the science of climate change and the lacking emotional understanding of certain populations who do not depend on science. However, this does not seem to be a true solution to the issue of climate change, but the first step is to understand that it is real and happening.

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.

My overall impressions of this talk was that it was somewhat similar to the talk linking themes from Alice in Wonderland to some issues of the current state of the environment. There are similar calls for science and the humanities to join forces, with science providing empirical evidence and data, while humanities can bring more nuance to the problems that need to be solved. However, like some of the points made in the previous talk, some of these connections are strained, and causes me to question the validity of using a humanities perspective to tackle issues such as global warming. While there are natural pairings between disciplines, such as biology and psychology, anthropology and history, some are simply not compatible, and would not be able to help each other in the grand scheme of things.

The speaker used examples from William Blake, and used his opinions on global warming among other issues to show a merging of two disciplines. And while of course poets like Blake are free to discuss any subject of their choosing, this does not represent a merging of disciplines as I personally view them, where knowledge from one discipline goes toward solving problems in another. What humanities can do towards the sciences is provide more nuance to the data being presented, and allow the public to have more of an improved understanding of the subject matter referenced in the scientific work. However, science is done with a spectrum of complex language, and many scientific papers are done with a understanding that the public needs additional awareness on this topic. For example, in the field of epidemiology, it is imperative that the public have a solid understanding of diseases and how they spread, along with any new developments surrounding the spread and natural history of disease.  These findings are written in a purely scientific manner, and humanities does not play a clear role in facilitating these findings into improved public understanding.

To conclude, while it may be intriguing to suggest a new angle of studying science, the rate at which science is advancing suggests that they way things have been going recently has led to some phenomenal breakthroughs and discoveries. The realm of humanities has seen some themes of science pop up in writing or art, but in terms of a full integration between fields, both need to be able to help each other solve problems or accomplish significant things. When this speaker, along with others, continue to emphasize the need for the humanities and the sciences to be linked, it does not seem to me as pressing of an issue as these speakers (of a more anthropological background rather than scientific) are making it.

To start, I am relatively unversed in the English world (I’m a science person if you will) and had to go in and do slight research on Elizabeth Bishop and William Blake to gain a much better understanding about Dr. Wai Chee Dimok’s lecture. By the end of the lecture I found this to be funny because one of her main points was that it is time for the sciences and humanities to merge. One of the questions asked by an audience member was all about why such a large amount of people cannot see that climate change is real and happening right now. And the worst part- they don’t see that it can be helped by humans just changing their actions. Dr. Wai Chee Dimok urged that people often struggle with doing their own research, which is why they do not understand. She pushed the idea of science and humanities merging so science can lay down objective evidence, statistics, and studies while the humanities can take that information and lay it out into a version that many more people would understand.

Continue reading “One Piece to the Puzzle”