Sunday, May 4, 2014

Poetry, Painting, and Personal Sustainability

(Inspired by StoryADay's suggestion to write 2,000 words today. It seemed like an appropriate way to get down some thoughts on the work of sustainability that I've been doing through the past couple of years.)

I moved to Saratoga County, New York, in 2010, a largely rural area, after living in the hip, urban cities of Seattle, Honolulu, and again in Seattle for twenty-years. I learned in Seattle to recycle every possible material under the sun, and Honolulu that vegetable scraps buried into soil will decompose rapidly and create new nutritiously dense soil. I drove as little as I could in both of those locales, and rode buses and bicycles or walked whenever I could. Coming to Saratoga made me dependent upon a car for the first time in more than two decades, and to see such natural products as trees not as species that unqualifiedly needed to be saved without question but rather as "renewable resources" that were far better to use for such purposes as heat and furniture than the oil, electric, and hydro-power that consumed so much of my previous home cities' carbon footprints.

I was surprised, as a result, when I received a survey from a sustainability group on my campus asking if I would be willing to take the bus instead of drive, or to carpool with co-workers.

"Sure," I scrawled back. "If a bus existed."

I live eight miles from my office in what feels like a different world. Goats, chickens, dogs, horses, cats, and llamas outnumber the human population within my immediate neighborhood by a ratio of probably four-to-one. This is not a land where the nearest house is two miles away; my neighbors on either side of me live within a one-minute walk, and we're all wired into each other's lives via cell phones, text messages, and the Internet. Yet, it is the country. Which means our homes are served by personal septic tanks, not a countywide sewer system. We receive our water from wells on our property, not from a municipal source. And when we need to get anywhere, we turn to our cars. It is possible for me to walk or bicycle to my office; it is not possible for me to ride a bus. The nearest bus stop is the local Amtrak station, located about one-third of a mile from my office.

The survey also asked me if I would be willing to consider recycling my household items instead of throwing them into the trash. I found the query fairly incredulous: our rural waste service truck comes every other week to empty two bins: one for trash, one for recycling. The trash bin is usually close to empty; the recycle bin overflows.

These findings caused me to look at the term sustainability in an entirely different way. I realized that while I had learned much about protecting the planet in my previous lives as an urban dweller, I had to rethink the equation in rural terms. I also felt that it was incumbent to rearticulate the meaning of sustainability so that it might hold some value for the bulk of our college's students, who, like me, were residing in fairly rural environments. How can we push bus commuting on people who reside in areas without buses? Does bike commuting really present a viable alternative for areas whose roads are covered with snow at least four months out of each year? And what about recycling? And saving trees? Do these adages of the urban really make sense in an area where if you don't trim out some trees, the trees will choke the growth out of everything else? Does it really make sense to promote recycling when those who make their living in agriculture -- as many rural dwellers still do -- repurpose and reuse virtually everything, who were born into families whose motto for generations was to not let anything go to waste?

I did not realize that these ruminations would lead to a series of projects that a colleague (who happens to be a poet) and a librarian (who happens to be a painter) and I (a professor who happens to be a creative writer) would develop over the next two years under the umbrella term "The Poetics of Sustainability." My poet colleague and I came up with the name when we decided to create a workshop for a conference on Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology on understanding the impacts of natural disasters (such as Hurricane Sandy, which had ravaged the northeastern coasts of New Jersey and New York) on student and faculty life in ways that would transcend words. The work underwent a series of interesting twists and turns but ultimately turned into a question that we had initially asked explicitly but gradually made more implicit: What does the word "sustainability" mean to you? What words and images come to mind?

So, to give a few dates. My poet colleague and I first presented our thoughts on sustainability in a two-hour workshop at what's called The 3Ts conference: Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology in March 2013. We generated an audience of three. The three individuals, however, were keenly and tightly drawn into the discourse on defining sustainability for themselves and then trying to find a way to extend it out toward care of family, community, and planet that the two hours stretched into two and a half hours, perhaps three. That scenario repeated itself when we presented a session on sustainability six weeks later at an annual distance learning conference. And it repeated itself again when we proposed the project in April 2013 as a yearlong endeavor that we would develop for students, faculty and stuff, and the overall community in a 2013-14 Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning. In the latter case, nobody -- including ourselves -- could quite figure out what we were trying to accomplish. But everyone was intrigued. We had tapped some sort of personal chord.
"I don't know how to offer a simple response to this project," said a librarian, who later became one of our project collaborators. "But there's something about it that attracts me. I don't know what it is. It just feels so personal."

My poet-colleague and I grappled, too, partly because we represent different demographics, or appeared to initially, at least. While we share much in common, she lives near the downtown of our small city, and thrives on the natural grocery stores, health food stores, yoga studios, and ecstatic dance clubs that abound in the area. I live on a farm and find that while I occasionally frequent the natural grocery and health food stores, I consider much of their produce unnecessary or overpriced. Overpriced often because it is shipped in from the West Coast where I once lived. Unnecessary because I can grow my own food much better. Having hit the age of fifty-one, I also have found that while I once enjoyed yoga classes and ecstatic dance quite a bit, I'd rather spend my evenings at home with my cats and my husband. There's little that new up-and-coming yoga teachers can teach me, and I find their rituals off-putting for their lack of cultural literacy and sensitivity. Like so many things, yoga has evolved from a communal to solitary pursuit.

These differences of opinion returned my mind once again to the questions we initially asked: What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind?

As the summer of 2013 wore into fall, I found myself feeling weary by the questions. I felt grumpy and nervous. Because we had signed on to be a part of the Institute of Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning, I felt a certain level of expectation awaited. We needed to produce something. It didn't have to be brilliant. But it had to be something. Yet, that didn't satisfy. I didn't want to recreate mediocrity. To ask questions about bus commuting and recycling that were of high relevance perhaps to urban residents but not suited for our demographics. I wanted to look at what sustainability meant in a meaningful way. But there wasn't a unified sense of what meaningful meant, either. The differences of opinion between myself and my colleague exemplified that.

In a November 2013 conference call conversation with other participants in the institute, I surprised both my colleague and myself by stating straight out that I felt stuck. That I didn't know what to create, that I wasn't a content expert on sustainability, and that I wasn't really all that interested in the term in an environmental sense. I also intimated that I felt that the term was somewhat racially coded; discourses on sustainability seemed aimed at a white, urban middle class crowd. People of color, the poor, and the rural were always left out.

One person suggested we organize our workshop around feeling stuck, and use the experience to gather data on what others thought sustainability meant. I didn't really want to take this route because I felt that we had already done it. I wanted to find a way to give people who might attend our workshops something they could apply to making their own lives better.

My colleague visited me in my office soon after the conference call.

"Himanee," she said, "I think you're looking for problems where none exist."

She went on to describe how her workload had felt so overwhelming at the time that we proposed the workshop that she was left with no energy to write poetry. She felt drained, and had considered cutting back her position to a 75 percent role so that she would gain at least one extra day to create. Thinking about the workshop had led her to look at how I -- her partner -- had made writing a priority in my life. She said she started to reflect on what was vital to her energy and sustenance, and began to incorporate those aspects of her life with deliberation and consciousness. She gave herself time and permission to write. She allowed herself the privilege to take vacation days and go into the mountains to commune with  nature and reflect. And she pushed herself to seek professional development funding to attend the sustainability conferences that educators throughout the region were hosting.

"I feel like I've been doing the workshop on myself."

I laughed as I took in this remark. As she spoke, I realized that she was right. When we proposed the workshop, I, too, was drained. Not so much by the lack of time and emotional energy to write but by the scarcity of money that seemed to pervade my life. My income was stagnant, and my expenses were increasing. Every day after payday seemed like a bated breath, as I wondered if the money would last to make it to the next payday. Somewhere in the midst of the summer and fall, as a deficit reduction program sliced about $70 off my twice-monthly paycheck and increases in health insurance costs took another $60 off, and as the accumulated effect of these slashes forced me into a series of negotiations with billers, I stopped worrying about money. I realized that I had everything I needed to survive from one day to the next, and that the bills I needed to pay were only bills that needed to be paid. If money was short, I simply needed to tell the truth. People would work with me if I was direct, communicative, and up front with them. My colleague's words made me realize that I, too, had been spending the summer and fall doing the workshop on myself.

And, so, that's where my first batch of philosophical musing leaves off. I came to realizing my own way of interpreting the question "What is sustainability? What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind" was not necessarily specific to just me. My word of choice in playing this free-writing question game generally was "hold" or "prolong" or "to make last." It never was a value judgment about recycling, bus commuting, or the right way to do yoga. It was about thinking politically about getting to Marx's vision for a classless utopia without destroying all of the systems of society and the planet itself in the process.

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