HW for May 19 - Telling Stories about Ecology (anthology, pp. 251-258)

 In the article "Telling Stories about Ecology", William Cronon commnents on the history of "the Plains' States" (included by Joel Garreau mostly in the "Breadbasket" region, but also in "the empty quarter"), zooming in the episode of "the Dust Bowl" in the 1930s and arguing that such a history can be told in basically two different plotlines: the progressive and the tragic. Answer to either:

- How do these plots differ in terms of protagonists, opponents, human-environment relations, and progress?

- What other environmntal-geographic-human interactions have we studied in this class that can be said to have two plots, and what are the consequences of following either?

HW for May 7 and May 12: Comparison of texts

Answer to either or both:

1. Compare/contrast the two excertps, in light of the concepts of "border", "im/migration" and "Mexamerica" (Joel Garreau's idea, in, The Nine Nations of North America, of a cultural region ecompassing the American Southwest and Northern Mexico). Tip: for the first two concepts, you can peruse the 2007 edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies in moodle).

"The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. (...) The term is an elastic one, and, for our purpuses does not need sharp definition. (...)
       In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins too little to the Aerican factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist." (F. J. Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", anthology, p. 207).

"Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrwo strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (...) Gringos in the US Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens - whether they possess documents or not, whethter they're Chicanos, indians or Blacks." (Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: the New Mestiza, anthology p.227)

 

HW for May 5: Ecotopia

  Watch this video with Ernest Callenbach about his visionary novel Ecotopia (1975), about the secession from the US of the eco-minded in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. Comment on two good ideas devised by the citizens of Ecotopia and/or two that would have met with serious challenges or resistance.

HW for April 28th: Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893)

  Comment on one or both:

1. How can you relate the above picture with Jackson Turner's "thesis of the frontier"?

2. Turner codifies types of manly behavior in accordance with their mobility/progression and fixation in the land. Describe how this typification works and comment on it.

HW for Apr 23: Leo Marx, intro to The Machine in the Garden

Answer to either (or relate them in one answer):

1. Read Leo Marx's text in pp. 194-206, and comment on how what you read added to your understanding of "pastoralism" in the United States

2  Comment on the following image, called "American Landscape" (by Charles Sheeler, 1930) in light of Leo Marx's thinking: 

Leadership compass and environmental determinism?

 Remember basic concepts of "Cultural Geography" by Mark Paterson in our anthology, p. 26, where the author asserts that the Berkeley School in the 1920s was the starting point of the discipline and further states: 

"The influence of the Berkeley School persists in cultural geography in the US. This movement focuses on cultural interventions in transforming the surface of the earth, and is thus most interested in material culture and space. It emerged against the prevailing background of "environmental determinism" in the early twentieth-century, where human-environment relations were specified as determined by a starightforward causality." (p. 995 of the encyclopedia entry).

The word "straightforward" is key and should make us wary of simplistic attempts to define behaviours or human types according to geographical locations. One such example is perhaps the "leadership compass" positied by some corporate preachers of leadership:

                                                  in www.monitask.com

Environmentalism without class struggle...