New Verbs in Your Mouth:

Changing the Weather of a Learning Community

DRAFT

**ESP 475 Hot Stuff: Climate Science and Action | Day 2 of Climate Fresk activity**

This image reminds me that I have learned many things this semester. First among them: names, facial expressions, and the winter-wear of thirty committed souls. This is V.’s photograph, I think, and I’m imagining her teetering on a chair to get the bird’s eye perspective that shows us K. in the near-center, explaining feedback loops, and J. near the chalkboard, listening, the brightly colored cards of one group arranged on the table before being affixed with many pieces of blue painter’s tape – see, the pieces are rolled and lined up, ready to go. There are cards for ocean acidification, fossil fuels, deforestation . . . human health. All the parts and their relationships get arranged and rearranged on a big map. This is an image of engagement and focus. Problem-solving. That’s part of what we’re learning. How to make a better map.

My “action” for the semester is greening the learning community. Zero-to-sixty change of any sort isn’t possible within an institution, like a university, so I take many steps, talk to many people, map out ways even when I should be doing straightforward things like . . . grading papers. (No, that’s not actually straightforward.) Our learning community needs to communicate its environmentally focused curricular offerings and build relevant co-curricular events. We need to get real: to embrace innovation for the future that centers climate optimism and the importance of action as we engage students from their first-year to commencement. No time like the present.

In the UN’s climate change web article, “Everything You Need to Know About the IPCC Report” (7 April 2022), we learn the present situation is dire: “unless we cut emissions quickly and meaningfully, we will bring about a climate catastrophe. The bad news is that emissions are at their highest level in human history. In 2019, emissions were about 12 per cent higher than they were in 2010 and 54 per cent higher than in 1990.” The next sections of the report say there is hope, with 826 cities and 103 regions setting targets of zero emissions, but the window is closing. The numbers are hard to visualize, but the analogy of a window closing conjures images of wild weather outside our windows – forest fires, high wind speeds, hurricanes – that we must keep at bay.

Wild weather in Maine this season has the students wishing for more ski days. A student in another class tells me he’s in love with skiing, after spending time in Vermont over the holidays with a friend’s family. He is researching the effects of the warm winter on ski resorts in New England, looking into how climate change is affecting this industry. While I’m glad to only shovel the steps and the deck a handful of times this season, I do notice the mild temps with alarm. The radio announces this past year as the warmest on record, globally. I wear out my rain boots and search for a new pair that doesn’t chafe. On the loop walk in my neighborhood I am hyper aware of puddles. Of the moisture in the air that makes a spa for the face. While walking, I think about ways to “acclimatize” the learning community I’m responsible for at work. Walking is best for thinking. Three miles per hour is good idea-speed.

January 8 at noon, work lunch: I meet the Dean at Big Sky Bakery on Forest Ave. Except he’s fasting: a year of being Interim Provost has been a year of fast meals and not enough exercise. I try to talk with him about “polymathy,” and how our community may get involved in this new initiative, with an interdisciplinary angle on environment and arts, and he is amenable, but the bread slicer is nearly deafening. Staff shortage means one person uses the slicer non-stop and yet they won’t make sandwiches today. My plateful of raisin bagel seems larger across from his just-coffee. I like the Dean. He likes poetry. He says if he were me, he’d use the next two weeks to sit down and write a proposal. I nod. As if in agreement. But I don’t have time to write a proposal.

Digital artist Jan Piribeck’s animated video looks at climate change through an artistic lens. She seems to conflate the figure of a contemporary woman kayaker with a tradition of indigenous Arctic lifeways on the water, showing a journey through rising seas that ultimately cover the tallest skyscrapers. When the kayaker is swallowed by the orca . . . gasp . . . what are we to think? Is she dead? Has she reached a safe-haven? A Job-like moment of Biblical trial? Is this a depiction of our dark night of the soul, a reckoning of all things? I am reminded of a recent article I read about the architectural innovations of houses built on water in the Netherlands. Not houseboats, but true homes afloat. Are we safer shoring up our shores or planning a future lived on the water itself?

Oh I am in mourning. We’ve just learned that three parcels of land very near to our home – two beside and one across – have been bought, sold, and face a future that includes new houses, new garages, new neighbors. The bright side could be the new neighbors themselves, who knows, but the earthwork and construction will consume the summer. During super high tides, the salt marsh already creeps up the field. But the human desire to be close to water persists. We are not without stain; before our house this land was . . . land. What is to say the new neighbors won’t be environmentalists?

The bright side of program change is meeting more people friendly to the cause. I talk to the Director of Sustainability at an evening reception for “transgender ecologies” in poetry. Catered, delicious food: curried vegetables and a whole pallet of naan bread I imagine layering into my pockets to take home. It’s an intense evening. There is a content warning about difficult topics. The DS has a high forehead and a look of surprise. We have a student in common who labors in the rain garden and the pollinator garden. The DS is happy to get together – later – after his new twins arrive. I make a mental note to email him post-babies.

Kevin Goodan’s Spot Weather Forecast opens with an invocation – maybe a prayer – to the heady allure of fire. First principle, correlate to life, animate with movement, appetite unending, fire to the firefighter is both a way of life and threat to life:

Because the first condition of the universe is fire

Because fire is the emergence and culmination of a cycle

Because fire is a product of rise over run

Because fire itself is narrative . . . (1)

These lines tell us fire is “first,” or primal, both a universe-starter and the completion of something. How fast it moves and where it goes can be graphed, algebraically, but because it can also depart the graph, being a living thing, it is an unpredictable story. When we learn about Native American practices of burning the land, we appreciate the predictable, smaller-scale upsides to this kind of “tending” that prevented larger, uncontrollable fires. But the traditional practice of preventative burning is hard to balance against today’s prohibitions against fire and the drought that has led to recent, raging wildfires in Canada and California. And Hawaii. Content warning: How can anyone be in love with fire in this context? Does love always carry the possibility of being consumed? What exists between fire and flood? Can we make a policy for achieving that?

How do you argue for a vernal pool? I make a recording on my phone of the frog mating calls on the loop walk. I don’t usually walk out there, below the road, in the scrub brush and dead leaves, but now I feel the urge to document. There used to be a fox den here. Deer pass through in numbers from spring to fall. In winter they yard up, on that third parcel just sold. Taking the land out of “tree farm” status incurs a $60,000 penalty but what’s that, to a developer? I learn all this from a neighbor whose own house is missing panes of glass in the old third-story windows and whose trees are swathed with a bittersweet vine that is killing them.

I take three college students out to Gorham Elementary School and meet the land trust rep, Brenna, at the trailhead right behind the parking lot. The Art teacher joins us, with a group of fifteen fifth graders and some drawing paper. We all traipse off over patches of snow and bare ground, following the trail to the Presumpscot river. On a little bridge we stop, sketch, write the names of things on our paper. We are all speaking for the river, the birds, the shrinking snow bank. Being outside in the cold air with the kids and with my students brings a sense of physical refreshment. Not quite like a spa, but like a reconnection with the natural world in good company, in a way that matters and brings us all back to ourselves more fully. We are alive and together, walking and seeing and speaking.

In some ways, our syllabus flirts with extremes. Fire and ice. What to do now so we don’t ruin the future. The class’s title, Hot Stuff, is supposed to conjure climate change in terms of temperatures but also in terms of urgency. We learn about species’ range as shaped by permafrost melt. We encounter dystopian landscapes in speculative fiction while we try to envision a desirable, sustainable world that still looks like the one we live in. Travelers to the still-cold places send words back to us: Jan Piribeck, with her animated kayaker and her own photos of Greenland, writer Gretel Ehrlich, accompanying a scientist friend in the Arctic. Erhlich’s poem cycle from Arctic Heart shows us a kind of close looking – scientific and spiritual – that bumps against big mysteries:

Brendan cuts a large hole in the ice so

seals can visit us in the night.

From my bed I peer down

into empires of turquoise,

past walls of white where ice ends and

blue becomes liquid darkness, and I tell him:

This is the eye into the universe

that has gone past its own seeing. (26)

Imagine sleeping on the ice like a transparent bed. Would that we all had seals visit us at night! Ehrlich’s work tells us some of the ways we can look. Pursue science. Encounter wild creatures close-up. Learn about the living world with measurements and with soul. Value indigenous ways of knowing that understand ice is a narrative, too (not only fire). Wonder if the universe, in its infinite complexity, can help us understand the practical and the spiritual – the “how to” and the “why.” Allow for new verbs in your mouth. Know beauty as a force on your daily walk, in your sleep, beyond all the methods you commonly use as measure, beyond even light.

Further up the loop, the pond waits for me. The mild winter filled the ditches with runoff. The level will lower, but by April the deepest pockets of the ditches will glisten with the egg clusters of salamanders. Then the race is on for the eggs to morph from eye-blobs to tailed bodies before the sun bakes them into dust. I am looking carefully for the blur that is not dead leaves, that holds a watery bit of patient life.

When the database goes “live” we’ll need to think about a balanced curriculum. Balancing environmental humanities and the arts with the Core writing classes. Balancing schedules. Balancing absorbing and doing, personal agendas and ethics. My takeaway from a semester’s focus on sustainable program development: all classes should carry an ethics attribute, all classes should be climate-conscious, all classes should ask students to consider what they learn in light of what they believe. “Live the questions,” Rilke wrote to a young poet. Building a sustainable learning community is a way of living the questions of what’s possible with Gen Z, post-Covid, mid-climate challenge. Maybe we’ll change the language describing our new community. Our new world. These are some of my three miles-per-hour ideas: