5. Heather Houser — Deluged by Data in the Climate Crisis

1h 25m · Chrysalis with John Fiege · 14 Jun 13:16

Here’s something we hear all the time: if only more people knew more about environmental problems, then they would certainly act in some ecologically beneficial way. But the problem is, it’s not true. We’re now deluged with data about the climate crisis; and yet, this abundance of available environmental information has not led to an abundance of environmental action.

This deficit model of climate communication is flawed, even though scientists, environmentalists, and other proponents of climate action continue to speak and act as if people would do more if they just knew more about the climate crisis and understood the science of climate change.

Heather Houser writes about environmental ideas and themes in art, literature, culture, and the humanities. Her work blossoms with keen insights about the importance of culture in confronting ecological crisis.

Heather is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. I met her many years ago in Austin, when I was developing a film about dance and environmental justice. She is both a dancer and an environmental humanities scholar.

Our conversation explores climate information overload, the idea of what she calls eco-sickness in literature, the thorny topic of human population size, and whether artists should reject or rework artistic tools of the past that might be tainted by colonialism, racism, or other forms of oppression.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Heather Houser

Heather Houser, Ph.D, is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of two brilliant books: Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020), and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014), which won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize. She is also a co-founder of Planet Texas 2050, UT Austin’s climate resilience-focused research challenge, and has led the following initiatives for the environmental humanities: 2015-16 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies, Environmental Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas Ecocritics Network.

Quotation Read by Heather Houser

“It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body - the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

- James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Recommended Readings & Media

Intro

John Fiege

Heather Houser

I mean, especially if you are an environmentalist, you pay attention to these issues. But really, even if you're, you know, you're not, there's a lot just so much like information coming at us about, say, the percentage of extinct mammals, right, how many mammal species are extinct, or bird species are extinct? All the data about climate crisis, whether it's like warming temperatures, ocean acidification, you know, how much of the ice sheet has melted? You know, it's all all this data is like, how do you make sense of that? Yeah. What do you do with that? I mean, what do you do with that, not only as a way to understand the phenomena at maybe, you know, objective or straightforward level. But what do you do with that emotionally if you're an artist or communicator.

John Fiege

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.

Heather Houser is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. I met her many years ago in Austin, when I was developing a film about dance and environmental justice. Heather is both a dancer and an environmental humanities scholar.

Here is Heather Houser.

---

Conversation

John Fiege

So, I'd like to start with an essay you're working on about your childhood, which you shared with me. In this piece, you talk about the instability of your upbringing - from your parents' rocky marriage to their financial woes. And the constant moves that resulted. You moved about thirteen times in your childhood, largely around the Poconos region in Pennsylvania, I think, and to other states as well. In the midst of that instability and constant "shifting ground" as you call it, you found a sense of stability, grounding and joy in dance. You write:

“At this age I hadn't yet met the idea of the plateau or of the precipitous fall. This was the time for the joy of movement, the satisfactions of devotion, and a belief that the alchemy of body, space, music and time can make you other than who you are and where you came from.”

I love this idea of seeing your childhood and who you became through this lens of dance. Can you talk more about where you come from and maybe what your relationship to the rest of nature was as a child? And how this, this alchemy of body, space, music, and time led to your interests in the environment?

Heather Houser

Yeah, thank you. So I was born in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania, which is in the North East part of the state right along the New Jersey border. And if you know it at all, you likely know it as a tourist destination for urbanites, you know. When - this was, I should say I was born there in 1979 and grew up there with one one gap when I lived in Massachusetts, but I lived there from 1979 to 1997.

I think things have changed, but back then, it was - certainly there were a lot of resorts, honeymoon destinations, summer camps, so a large tourist influx from New York and New Jersey and Philadelphia. But then there were the locals like myself, so it was a place of abundant nature, I would say. You know, the Appalachian Trail ended and started there. Lots of lakes. It's a hardwood forest area, lots of ponds and creeks, or, as I say, in that essay, "cricks" my grammy and pappy said. I didn't pick that up, but that's what parts of my family called creeks.

But that was actually not my family's orientation. So I lived in this place with so many things I now wish were right outside my door. And, of course, Austin, TX has its own beautiful environments, but, I honestly did none of that. There was one swimming hole we would go to called the 40-foot. It was a 40-foot jump, which I did not do because I was afraid of heights, but I don't remember swimming in the lakes or the "cricks" aside from that. We never went on hikes, except for maybe, you know, walks in the woods near our house (or houses, since there were many of them).

So that relationship that I now have, like the appreciation and really the need to be outside is, is something that developed really in my college years when I lived in Portland, Oregon. When I think about dance and the environment, personally - and my relationship to it - is about movement. Being able to move in space, I think is one of the continuites from my dance persona to my like, environmental appreciation. And even though those are completely divorced - or separate, just didn't really exist when I was a kid - I feel that continuity now for sure.

John Fiege

And you know when you were in the Poconos area as a child. Did you have a, did you have a sense of people from the cities coming there as like a location of nature and looking for this kind of pristine wilderness experience, did you have a sense of that?

Heather Houser

Oh absolutely, and you know, I mean, this is - I was very hard on the place when I lived there. I mean, I really wanted out. I went almost as far as you could go within the continental United States when I went to college. Kind of foolishly to go to a private liberal arts college across the country. But it worked out OK. But I did not - I mean, I definitely knew that people were coming to the Poconos for that experience of nature, and wilderness. And you would, quite honestly - I interacted a lot with tourists because I worked at an ice cream shop - one of those time-honored things you do on the summer vacation is going to the ice-cream shop.

John Fiege

How iconic.

Heather Houser

But you know, I was there - not stuck there, I wouldn't say that. Because I did like that job and my bosses and coworkers so I didn't feel stuck, but certainly different experience. And so I had a lot of contact with tourists that

The episode 5. Heather Houser — Deluged by Data in the Climate Crisis from the podcast Chrysalis with John Fiege has a duration of 1:25:53. It was first published 14 Jun 13:16. The cover art and the content belong to their respective owners.

Permalink

More episodes from Chrysalis with John Fiege

13. Forrest Gander — "Forest"

Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems that there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis, and some scientists have suggested that lichen could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal, in some sense of the word.

In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, “Forest,” lichen are a sensual presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us, strangely, despite our dramatic differences.

The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest’s marvelous reading of the poem adds a panoply of meanings and feelings through his annunciation, his breaths, his breaks. It’s phenomenal.

This poem, and his work more broadly, is about nothing less that who we are on this Earth and how we live—how we thrive—in relationship.

Forrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book, Be With. As an undergraduate, like me, he studied geology, which became foundational to his engagement with ecological ethics and poetics.

Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with the photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with the photographer Jack Shear, called Knot (spelled with a “k”). He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called “In Your Arms I’m Radiant.”

His poem, “Forest,” is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.

Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series, which focuses on a single poems from poets who confront ecological issues in their work.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Forrest Gander

Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia. He spend significant years in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), Eureka Springs, and Providence. With the late poet CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both Geology and English literature. He lives now in Northern California with his wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat.

Gander's book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others.

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translates. Recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido, and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.

Gander's books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy for the Academy of American Poets and is an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Gander co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Frances Mayes, Steve Stern, Zuleyka Benitez, and René Char.

“Forest”

By Forrest Gander

Erogenous zones in oaks slung with stoles of lace lichen the sun’s rays spilling through leaves in broken packets a force call it nighttime thrusts mushrooms up from their lair of spawn mycelial loam the whiff of port they pop into un- trammeled air with the sort of gasp that follows a fine chess move like memories are they? or punctuation? was it something the earth said to provoke our response tasking us to recall an evolutionary course our long ago initation into the one- among-others and within my newborn noticing have you popped up beside me love or were you here from the start a swarm of meaning and decay still gripping the underworld both of us half-buried holding fast if briefly to a swelling vastness while our coupling begins to register in the already awake compendium that offers to take us in you take me in and abundance floods us floats us out we fill each with the other all morning breaks as birdsong over us who rise to the surface so our faces might be sprung

Recommended Readings & Media

Forrest Gander reading his poem “Unto Ourselves” from Twice Alive.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis. And some scientists have suggested that lichen, and could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal in some sense of the word.

In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, "Forest," lichen are an essential presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us strangely, despite our dramatic differences.

The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest's marvelous reading of the poem as a panoply of meanings and feelings through his enunciation—his breaths, his breaks; it's phenomenal.

This poem in his work, more broadly, is about nothing less than who we are on this earth, and how we live; how we thrive in relationship.

I'm John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

Forrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book Be With.

Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with a photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with a photographer Jack Scheer called Knot. He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called In Your Arms I'm Radiant.

His poem, "Forest," is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.

Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.

Here is Forrest Gander reading his poem "Forest."

Poem

Forrest Gander

“Forest”

Conversation

John Fiege

Thank you. It's so wonderful hea

12. Dave Cortez — The Education of a Chicano Climate Warrior

Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.

Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the high desert of West Texas. And from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso Community. But cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his hometown wasn't easy.

Dave is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.

I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.

Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Dave Cortez

Dave Cortez is a 3rd generation El Pasoan now based out of Austin where he lives with his partner and six year old daughter. He grew up and learned organizing on the frontera, where industrial pollution, poverty, gentrification, racism and the border wall are seen as intersecting issues. Dave serves as the Director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and has been organizing in the Texas environmental movement for 18 years. Dave is supporting staff and volunteers across Texas who are organizing for power by centering racial justice and equity alongside frontline communities directly impacted by polluting industries.

Quotation Read by Dave Cortez

"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.

We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.

We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.

Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." - Audre Lorde

Recommended Readings & Media

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of this same ecological web: from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground or the clearing of wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.

Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre mountains, and the high desert of West Texas—and it came from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air, and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso community but cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his home town wasn’t easy.

Dave Cortez

Two of my close family members worked at the plant. My dad's brother worked at the plant and then worked at Chevron on the other side of town. And then his brother in law, worked at the plant and retired. And here I was, this younger punk, you know, sort of just not super close to the family, showing up at events and they asked what I'm doing and, oh, they think I'm a paid protester, you know, forget my education, forget what's at what I'm actually saying. You know, it's, deep cultural assimilation. It's deep colonization, sort of this Stockholm syndrome that develops out of poverty and repression. It's horrific, and it's sad to watch. People fiercely defend the only thing that has helped them in their eyes and not be able to acknowledge the harm that's been done. It's not different from, you know, addiction in that way, or depression.

John Fiege

Or domestic abuse.

Dave Cortez

Exactly. It's heartbreaking. It still hurts me to talk about.

John Fiege

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.

Dave Cortez is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.

Here is Dave Cortez.

Conversation

John Fiege

Well, you grew up in El Paso in Far West Texas, and it's right on the border of Mexico and New Mexico. Can you tell me a bit about growing up there, and your family and how you saw yourself in relationship to the rest of nature.

Dave Cortez

I've got a little picture I'm looking at my my very first demonstration. It's a bunch of kids, kids meaning college kids, my my age at the time, about maybe 22, 23, and a big peace flag and we're hanging around what was called Plaza de Los Lagartos, Plaza of the Alligators. And we're there I think we're protesting, must have been continuing invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know, I keep it up. And I keep pictures of the mountains of West Texas, the edge of the Rockies is what cuts into the central central part of El Paso, the Franklin Mountains. And then you have the Rio Grande, the heart and soul of that land. And on the other side of the ri

11. Elizabeth Bradfield — “Plastic: A Personal History”

When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?

Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry.

Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have?

Elizabeth Bradfieldis the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology,Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared inThe New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion,and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Elizabeth Bradfield

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Elizabeth Bradfieldis the author of five collections of poetry, most recentlyToward Antarctica, which uses haibun and her photographs to query the work of guiding tourists in Antarctica,andTheorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro.

Bradfield is also co-editor of the anthologiesCascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, andBroadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020.

A professor and co-director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University, Bradfield has received a great deal of recognition through awards and fellowships. Her work has appeared inThe New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, Orion,and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship.

Based on Cape Cod, Liz also works as a naturalist, adding an engaging and proactive component to back up the prowess of her evocative literature. She also is the founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, a journal and grass-roots initiative that, through monthly publications, aims to expose the broader community (beyond academia) to relevant literature and art.

“Plastic: A Personal History”

By Elizabeth Bradfield

How can I find a way to praise it? Do the early inventors & embracers churn with regret? I don’t think my parents —born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew & chew & chew on plastic. But of course they do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air. And their parents? I remember Dad mocking his mother’s drawer of saved rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red, corroded jerry can, patched and patched, never replaced for new, for never- rusting. Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even for gum. We hate the $5 minimum. Bills paperless, automatic, almost unreal. My toys were plastic, castle and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches ever get wrapped in waxed paper or was it all Saran, Saran, Saran? Sarah’s mom was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still, brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing. For everlasting. You, too, must have heard stories, now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic. Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin. Of shared syringes. All our grocery bags, growing up, were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top crunched into grab. We used them to line the kitchen garbage pail. Not that long ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof and light. Clever. So clever. I regret them. And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus less wasteful, then. What did we do before to-go lids? Things must have just spilled and spilled. Do you know what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms around a grain of plastic in an oyster? Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it? Would you buy it for your daughter so she in turn could pass it down and pass it down and pass it down?

Recommended Readings & Media

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?

Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.

I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

Here is Elizabeth Bradfield reading her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History.”

---

Poem

Elizabeth Bradfield

“Plastic: A Personal History”

---

Conversation

John Fiege

Thank you, that's so beautiful. And there's so much going on there, in this poem.

Elizabeth Bradfield

It's funny it started, this poem started kind of just, you know, as a bitter rant.

John Fiege

Well, it didn't end there.

Elizabeth Bradfield

No, it didn't end there.

John Fiege

So, tell me about that. What's the bitter rant?

Elizabeth Bradfield

Oh, just plastic. You know? Honestly, the poem started when my friend Sarah, you know, she's my age. I'm 50, 51. And she showed me this little bag her mom made and I started thinking, "Wow, imagine being the generation that discovered plastic, right? Wow, plastic, so handy," tupperware parties, all that stuff, right?

10. Salma Arastu — We Are All One

Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world, and often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony, and unity of the world.

The canvasses in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.

Salma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when she was living in the Middle East. She was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India, and then embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim.

It was this continuous line that became a central element of her approach to painting and a central technique she uses to express the ecological views she finds in the Quran.

She seeks to transcend difference through her art and find oneness and interconnectedness in a world that continually ravages ecological systems around the planet.

Since the 1970s, Salma has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally and writing about art. She currently lives in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio and seeing so many of her wonderful paintings.

This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Salma Arastu

An Internationally exhibited artist, Salma was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India. She later embraced Islam and moved to USA in 1986. Her work creates harmony by expressing the universality of humanity through paintings, sculpture, calligraphy and poetry. She was inspired by the imagery, sculpture and writings of her Indian heritage and Islamic spirituality. She was born with a left hand without fingers. Because of her all-encompassing God, she was able to transcend the barriers often set-forth in the traditions of religion, culture, and the cultural perceptions of handicaps.

After graduating in Fine Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India, she lived and worked in Iran and Kuwait, where she was exposed to a wealth of Islamic arts and Arabic calligraphy. Calligraphy, miniatures, and the folk art of Islam and the Hindu tradition continue to influence her work today. She has been invited to Germany twice, as a Resident Artist at Schwabisch Gmun in 2000 and by the Westphalia Wilhelm University in Münster to publish her paper “Art Informed by Spirituality” in God Loves Beauty: Post Modern Views on Religion and Art. Further she was invited to Morocco for a one- month Artist Residency Program in March of 2018 through Green Olives art Gallery. She has presented work at Stanford University, Commonwealth of San Francisco, Seattle University, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis Missouri.

She has displayed at 45 solo shows nationally and internationally and has won many distinctions: the East Bay Community’s Fund for Artists in 2012, and 2014, and 2020, The City of Berkeley’s Individual Artist Grant Award in 2014, 2015, and 2016. She has public art pieces on display in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and San Diego, California and has written and published five books on her art and poetry. Her most recent book deals with ecological consciousness from Quranic verses “Our Earth: Embracing All Communities.”

Selected Works

A more comprehensive collection of work is available here.

Recommended Readings & Media

Salma Arastu Sharing process of her art.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world. And often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony and unity of the world.

The canvases in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.

Salma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when she was living in the Middle East. She was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions and Rajasthan, India, and then embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim.

It was this continuous line that became a central element of her approach to painting and a central technique she uses to express the ecological views she finds in the Quran. She seeks to transcend difference through her art, and find oneness and interconnectedness in a world that continually ravages ecological systems around the planet.

I'm John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Artists series.

Since the 1970s, Salma has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally, and writing about art. She currently lives in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio last summer and seeing so many of her wonderful paintings. At ChrysalisPodcast.org, you can see some of my photos from that trip and images of her paintings, including those from her We Are All One series.

Here is Salma Arastu.

---

Conversation

John Fiege

Could you start by just telling me a little bit about your project, We Are All One?

Salma Arastu

Yes, I believe in oneness. And these are kind of my oneness projects, you know, like, I want to bring the whole humanity together. And in my work, initially, they were abstract figures, you know, that they are coming together in groups, you know, celebrating together, sharing together, chanting together. So this has been my theme always. And from that, you know, gradually, as I was looking around the nature, I live on the bay in this area. And so nature has been great friend, I would say, you know, I keep watching the plants, the water, the clouds every morning. So this has been part of my daily schedule that I look at the nature and absorb it and go to my studio. And so somehow the nature, the the birds, the animals, and the plants, they all got into my work, and I realized we are all one, we are all breathing, we are all connected. So I think gradually I started doing work, which showed all living beings in my work, and I call it We Are All One.

John Fiege

Great. And And can you talk also about Our Earth, and as part of this project, and what did you do there?

Salma Arastu

As a daily practice, I do read Quran, my book of faith. And, you know, suddenly I started noticing the verses, which talk to me about the planet about, you know, like Earth and the communities. So let me tell you the first verse, which really, really was holding me for some time, you know, before I started the project, and that verse was so related to my thinking, we are all one. So that particular verse, it says, “There's not an animal in the earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are communities like you.” So then I went to the description of that verse and amazing results I found because different scholars have given the beautiful description of this verse. And understanding this verse was like a divine invitation to follow the concerns of these all ecologists in our time. So I went deeper into it. And then especially one scholar, Dr. Fred Denny, who said, “The verse presents a paradigm of interconnectedness. Communities necessarily interact with one another. And we are enjoined by the Quran to view the animal world, not merely as parallel to us and organized into communities but signals interconnectedness between their existence and well being and our own, as no community on Earth exist in isolation of the others, and what affects one community ultimately affects other communities.” So this was amazing revelation to me. And then I started you know, noticing these verses which talked about the plants, the mountains, the ships, the see the fish, you know, the ant, bees. It was a beautiful revelation for me, and I started noticing them down and I found 90 verses like that, almost, which is my limited knowledge, you know. Then I started to shorten the list because I really wanted to do this project. I said I want to bring this positive from Quran to the mainstream in the world, so they understand the positive side of Quran.

John Fiege

Oh, that's great. Yeah and it seems like with that project in particular, it's almost a theological process of, it’s almost like through art you have been studying the Quran. Is that accurate?

Salma Arastu

Yeah, I would say through, yeah, through my art, I was reading Quran, in the sense—or from Quran I was doing art. In Quran, the God has ordained us to look at the nature to study the nature, because—I read something here. “Quran describes nature, presents signs of God, as divine is manifest in nature, and guides to study nature as reference to the wisdom of Quran.” So in fact, as I understand, Quran is a textbook, and the nature is a workbook. Believe me, and that's how I worked on it.

John Fiege

Oh wow. That’s great. Yeah and and my understanding of Islamic law is kind of these basic elements of nature, like land, water, fire, forest, light, are all living things, not just humans and animals as living things.

Salma Arastu

Yes, yes.

John Fiege

You have a really interesting relationshi

9. John Shoptaw — “Near-Earth Object”

I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.

John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.

John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series, which focuses on a single poems from poets who confront ecological issues in their work.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw is a poet, poetry reader, teacher, and environmentalist. He was raised on the Missouri River bluffs of Omaha, Nebraska and in the Mississippi floodplain of “swampeast” Missouri.He began his education at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with BAs in Physics and later in Comparative Literature and English, earned a PhD in English at Harvard University, and taught for some years at Princeton and Yale. He now lives, bikes, gardens, and writes in the Bay Area and teaches poetry and environmental poetry & poetics at UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. Shoptaw’s first poetry collection, Times Beach (Notre Dame Press, 2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and subsequently also the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; his new collection, Near-Earth Object, is forthcoming in March 2024 at Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Jenny Odell.

Both collections embody what Shoptaw calls “a poetics of impurity,” tampering with inherited forms (haiku, masque, sestina, poulter’s measure, the sonnet) while always bringing in the world beyond the poem. But where Times Beach was oriented toward the past (the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the 1983 destruction of Times Beach), in Near-Earth Object Shoptaw focuses on contemporary experience: on what it means to live and write among other creatures in a world deranged by human-caused climate change. These questions are also at the center of his essays “Why Ecopoetry?” (published in 2016 at Poetry Magazine, where a number of his poems, including “Near-Earth Object,” have also appeared) and “The Poetry of Our Climate” (forthcoming at American Poetry Review).

Shoptaw is also the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press); a libretto on the Lincoln assassination for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); and several essays on poetry and poetics, including “Lyric Cryptography,” “Listening to Dickinson” and an essay, “A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses,” on his Ovidian sequence “Whoa!” (both forthcoming in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination at Bloomsbury Press in July 2023).

“Near-Earth Object”

Unlike the monarch, though the asteroid also slipped quietly from its colony on its annular migration between Jupiter and Mars, enticed maybe by our planetary pollen as the monarch by my neighbor’s slender-leaved milkweed. Unlike it even when the fragrant Cretaceous atmosphere meteorized the airborne rock, flaring it into what might have looked to the horrid triceratops like a monarch ovipositing (had the butterfly begun before the period broke off). Not much like the monarch I met when I rushed out the door for the 79, though the sulfurous dust from the meteoric impact off the Yucatán took flight for all corners of the heavens much the way the next generation of monarchs took wing from the milkweed for their annual migration to the west of the Yucatán, and their unburdened mother took her final flit up my flagstone walkway, froze and, hurtling downward, impacted my stunned peninsular left foot. Less like the monarch for all this, the globe-clogging asteroid, than like me, one of my kind, bolting for the bus.

Recommended Readings & Media

John Shoptaw reading from his collection Times Beach at the University of California, Berkeley.

Transcript

Intro

John Fiege

John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.

I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.

John Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer. You can see some of my photos from that visit at ChrysalisPodcast.org, alongside the poem we discuss on this episode.

John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.

Here is John Shoptaw reading his poem, “Near-Earth Object.”

---

Poem

John Shoptaw

“Near-Earth Object”

Unlike the monarch, though

the asteroid also slipped

quietly from its colony

on its annular migration

between Jupiter and Mars,

enticed maybe by

our planetary pollen

as the monarch by my neighbor’s

slender-leaved milkweed.

Unlike it even when

the fragrant Cretaceous

atmosphere meteorized

the airborne rock,

flaring it into what might

have looked to the horrid

triceratops like a monarch

ovipositing (had the butterfly

begun before the period

broke off). Not much like

the monarch I met when I

rushed out the door for the 79,

though the sulfurous dust

from the meteoric impact

off the Yucatán took flight

for all corners of the heavens

much the way the next

generation of monarchs

took wing from the milkweed

for their annual migration

to the west of the Yucatán,

and their unburdened mother

took her final flit

up my flagstone walkway,

froze and, hurtling

downward, impacted

my stunned peninsular

left foot. Less like

the monarch for all this,

the globe-clogging asteroid,

than like me, one of my kind,

bolting for the bus.

---

Conversation

John Fiege

Thank you so much. Well, let's start by talking about this fragrant Cretaceous atmosphere that metorizes the airborne rock, which is is really the most beautiful way I've ever heard of describing the moment when a massive asteroid became a meteor, and impacted the earth 66 million years ago, on the Yucatan Peninsula. And that led to the extinction of about 75% of all species on Earth, including all the dinosaurs. This, of course, is known as the fifth mass extinction event on earth now, now we're in the sixth mass extinction. But but this time, the difference is that the asteroid is us. And, and we're causing species extinctions at even a much faster rate than the asteroid impact did, including the devastation of the monarch butterfly, which migrates between the US and Mexico not far from the Yucatan where the asteroid hit. And in your poem, these analogies metaphors parallels, they all bounce off one another. paralle

Every Podcast » Chrysalis with John Fiege » 5. Heather Houser — Deluged by Data in the Climate Crisis