Recently in environment Category

Nebraskans, other Midwesterners, bird-lovers, protectors of unique and fragile ecosystems:  if you'd like a quick and painless overview of the ramifications of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, you can read Prairie Fire's recent piece about it.

Then, if you'd like to sign a petition against the pipeline, which will run for over 100 miles through the Nebraska Sandhills, go here.

And if you'd also like to join with the League of Conservation Voters and the National Wildlife Federation in sending a message protesting the pipeline directly to President Obama, you can go here, too.

Gentle readers, the electricians left this morning.  My new office has walls, a door (with a lock), lights, and the Internet.  I'm so happy.  Photos soon. 

It awaits paint and a floor.  Oh, and furniture.  But it's standing, and I love it. 

Thanks so much to whoever nominated one of my blog posts as "Best Writing Advice" for Jane Friedman's blog at Writer's Digest.  The titles of all 20 blog posts look fascinating and useful; link to the list here.  What a nice surprise, to be in such good company.  Thank you!

If you live in Lincoln and need to buy some gifts (or spoil yourself), shop tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, at Ten Thousand Villages in the Haymarket.  Ten Thousand Villages is an amazing enterprise, period, but tomorrow, ten percent of their profits tomorrow go to Voices of Hope, a center that helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.  So get your shop on and do some good.  Thanks, Ariana, for the heads-up.

I'm very excited to have received, just yesterday, an acceptance from Indiana Review of my creative nonfiction piece "Hip Joints."  It's about sexual harassment and strip mining in West Virginia in the '80s, when I was a high school senior and my boss at the factory hadn't yet heard of women's rights.  (Pre-Anita Hill, sexual harassment wasn't a term very many people anywhere knew, and it sure hadn't trickled down to rural Appalachia back when I was sixteen.)  "Hip Joints" (which are what we manufactured at the factory, but you can see the possibilities) is an ecofeminist piece that also incorporates issues of ethnicity.  I'm happy that it's going to have an audience soon.

Here at UNL, there's one week left in the semester, and it's total crazy-time.  Students are writing their final papers, and graduate students are defending their theses and dissertations and taking oral exams--which means we professors should really have cloned ourselves by now to handle it all.   Somewhat counterintuitively, I've taken to revising a chapter of THE DESIRE PROJECTS every morning before the work-day starts.  (I had been revising one chapter a week, and calling it good.)  This makes me much happier.  I can go around blithely, knowing I've paid my dues to writing first. 

In other news, my Little Sister Amara turned 16 this week, my marriage to the HH turned 15, and Grey is counting down the days until his college graduation.  Spring is always such an exciting time.  And damn, it's good not to have to wear a coat everywhere!


 

Seriously:  Camille T. Dungy's book Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry is a major, major intervention in nature writing, and I cannot wait to hear her talk about it next week.  The introduction alone is brilliant, and the poems and essays are a treasure-house.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers interviews Camille about the book.

(FYI, those who plan to join us for wining and dining:  Camille assures me that tippling around her is no issue.)

But on a less joyful topic:  Academia's endless judging is working my last (raw) nerve, and it has to do with judging.  "There is no reason, no need, to make a contest out of anything," writes Zen Buddhist Cheri Huber.  Sufi mystic Rumi wrote something like, Out beyond good and bad, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.  "I cannot count one.  I know not the first letter of the alphabet.  I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.  The intellect is a cleaver," writes Thoreau.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.   

Yes, the soul replies.

But academia, required to fetishize the cleaver of intellect, makes a contest out of everything.  Right now, we're furiously judging all kinds of folks:  a multitude of job candidates, a record-breaking number of graduate application files in English (due, sadly, to the recession), et cetera . . . The mind can do that.  Yes.  But the mind needs rest.  The mind needs to loaf and invite its soul. 

I'm craving downtime, nature, and peace.  And my pace of blogging on here has dropped; sorry.  I should just declare a January hiatus.  The pace of work is always ridiculous in January.

And judgments, I'm guessing, will only get more stringent.  UNL's chancellor today announced that he'll be looking for ways to cut an additional $5.2 million from the budget this spring.  Cue mirthless laughter. 

Obama's address this week was kick-ass, though.  That was a cheery 70 minutes of telling it like it is.    

Uh-oh.  The heat shut off in my office building--it does that automatically for the weekend--and I can feel it getting colder in here.  I'd better bundle up and head home.  Stay warm, sweet people.  Keep writing. 

This Wednesday night, March 11, at 9:00 p.m. here in Lincoln and for y'all down in Texas (and 10:00 p.m. Eastern), the Discovery Channel will screen the optimistic Earth:  The Sequel, which details the ways in which new, green, low-carbon energy sources can turn global warming around.

If you're going to watch, Van Jones of Green for All would love it if you'd click on the "Count Me In!" button on the Earth:  The Sequel website.

I just read the opening whirlwind manifesto on the blog Streetheart:  Ethics of Graffiti.  The writing's good, and the anonymous author really throws down:

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

He/she's not pulling any punches; see for yourself.  I'm curious to see what comes next.

I love this hopeful passage from Barry Lopez's introduction to Maps of Reconciliation:  Literature and the Ethical Imagination, the latest issue of the beautiful journal Manoa:

"Someone will have to make an outline, draw a map and pass it around, with a pencil and an eraser and no thought of ownership.  The voices of individual authorship and the duly elected will need to give way to the repositories of community wisdom.  For the first time in centuries, wisdom will need to be seated beside intelligence, a second light to cut the deep and unknowable dark."