News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’ve now posted the schedule for the fall conference, which is happening in just three weeks. Registration closes a week before the conference, and we’re looking forward to the renewal of old friendships and the start of some new ones.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on love, landmarks, and chestnuts.
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Jon Schaff considers the process that South Dakota followed to revise their K-12 Social Studies standards. Schaff served on the committee tasked with this responsibility, a responsibility particularly fraught given the polarized debates over history and education, and he was encouraged by the outcome: “The future of education, in South Dakota and elsewhere, is typically murky. This proposed set of standards, though, is the fruit of a movement in South Dakota and elsewhere to replant education on more fertile soil. To do so will require a reconsideration of what we expect of students, teachers, and teacher education programs.”
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Chris Franklin responds to Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind: ” Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it what we want; it is rather a cosmos with a nature independent of our wishes, demanding us to conform to it and pointing us back to its Creator.”
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Doug Sikkema reviews This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World by Norman Wirzba: ” Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself in the real, to feel awe at all that’s been given to you, and to consider living a life of creaturely gratitude and creativity.”
I’ve been meaning to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for awhile now but just got to it this summer. It’s a wonderful and wise book, and she deftly reconciles many of the binaries that devil ecological discussions—between humans and nature, between science and Indigenous ways of knowing, between using land and leaving it wild. In one essay, she warns of the dangers that obsessing about environmental doom poses:
When my students learn about the latest environmental threat, they are quick to spread the word. They say, “If people only knew that snow leopards are going extinct,” “If people only knew that rivers are dying.” If people only knew . . . then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn’t working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet. So quiet that protection of the environment that enables them to eat and breathe and imagine a future for their children doesn’t even make it onto a list of their top ten concerns. . . .
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying “Help”? Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro