Professor: Barbara Mossberg

4 credits

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value . . . what poet has sung this? —  John Muir
Instructions for living: 1. Pay attention. 2. Be amazed. 3. Tell about it. — Mary Oliver
I’ll tell you how the sun rose—Emily Dickinson 
Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star's stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun's birth at dawn, Fresh courage glimmers from planets. And lights the map printed with the blood of history--Joy Harjo
 
You come to Eco Literature at a momentous time—not for your learning only. Never has eco literature been more important to the future of our planet. What a large claim! But that is our story and I am honored you have joined your forces to our learning community to interrogate this idea: we need you. We need your energies, commitments, ideas, eccentricities, major and minor interests, goals, hopes, experience, and visions-- everything unique and whole you bring to the table, to the topic of how literature calls to consciousness and conscience our environment and living world—how we tell about it. 
There are life and death stakes in how we see the world, and tell about it—for us, for our habitat, our planet, our world.
Eco literature has always been important to humanity. Eco literature’s symphonic harmonies with earth systems is sung in earliest societies, central to indigenous experience on earth. Homer sang it. Aesop fabled it, Shakespeare sonneted it, Milton made it epic, Wordsworth gave us our words’ worth, Thoreau thought it, Emily expressed it, Mark Doty doted on it, e.e. cummings elated it, Joy Harjo joyously proclaims it: since Gilgamesh scratched it on clay in cuneiform in 2700 BCE, eco literature has been a dynamic portrait of human engagement and concern with our world. We will consider in what ways literature from everywhere on the globe, since the time of oral and written records, is and has always been “eco” literature. 

Whether expressed in joy, gratitude, anger, or sorrow, what is at stake in how we represent earth and understand our relation to it? Our class takes up writing that turns our heads upwards, brings us to our knees, inspires us to climb and leap, make and break laws, save savannahs, wage war and peace, fight for civil rights, declare love, and try to preserve our earth. In the study of literature of our environment, we marvel at the fanged, the fierce, the lofty, the flowing. We rejoice at weeds and spiders. We ponder icons of the environmental humanities movement, beginning with the January visit to the University of Oregon by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of our Common Reading, Braiding Sweetgrass, and other contemporaries Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo, and founders of the environmental movement, Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, and the transformational poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Cullen Bryant, and Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Joyce Kilmer, and Pablo Neruda, and contemporaries such as Diane Ackerman, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Alicia Ostriker, Mark Doty, Story Musgrave, Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry, and others. AND we will read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass as one of a few classes of the University who will get to meet and engage with her. We’ll read our local eco writers as well, including Oregon’s own (and our CHC own) Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. We are inviting Kim Stafford to visit our class, through Zoom or in person, to engage with him. We’ll also consider iconic American and Nobel-prize literature in terms of an intrinsic eco consciousness and purpose (Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Ken Kesey, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker). We’ll note how leaders of countries (such as Charles, now King, Wangari Maathai of Kenya) and organizations (such as Humane Society’s Wayne Pacelle, Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard), and the Supreme Court (William O. Douglas) write about the environment. We take a gander at ancient and classic foundations of eco literature as we consider how we present our world to our children, from Goodnight, Moon, and Pat the Bunny, to The Snowy Day (urban U.S.), The Paper-Flower Tree (Thailand), Bertolt (France), Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, The Blue Songbird, On a Magical Do-Nothing Day, I Love You Like a Pig, and works of Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, and  E.B. White. And we’ll break our hearts a little (okay, a lot), with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. And on the note of empathy, we’ll look at our future in terms of your own discoveries and work in eco literary imagination and conscience. You’ll share what you find—and all weeping and pondering aside, we’ll end our course on a high note, with your own tree-mendous poet-tree slam.

In the process of asking, how does the human mind conceive and express nature, we are reflecting on how we see: such exploration reveals a consciousness and conscience for what it means to be human. You will choose your own text to report on, from works narrated by pigs and dogs and elephants, to Kenneth Bennett’s eco-thriller set in our Pacific Northwest, Exodus 2022 (! Isn’t this 2022?), Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Canticle for Liebowitz, to writers such as Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Scott Sanders, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Abbey, and John McPhee, to Orion, ILSE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and CHC student-nominated favorites. Students select examples of contemporary and modern eco-lit classics for our, and issues relevant to you in terms of how writers address and shape issues for the public conscience, discuss a work in progress of a drama musical on trees, engage with local and regional eco writers, create an original “poet-tree slam,” and your own eco-lit project channeling your inner Thoreau with “My Walden,” as well as showing your "eco crit cred” as both creator and critic. We’ll consider Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.  You will engage with ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. We will reframe the walls of eco lit learning by our own learning wildness, meeting up on the trail, journals in hand, for a field trip through leaves of grass, to our own Walden Pond, as the sun rises.