The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

Switching on Light Bulbs and Blowing Up Mountains: Ecoliteracy and Energy Consumption in General Education English Courses

365 I’m a native Kentuckian teaching Kentuckians, a strange bird in higher education where so many teachers find employment far from their roots. Having a background similar to many of my students—religious , provincial, basketball obsessed—I’m uniquely situated to develop courses in which students can better understand their native state. I’m also aware of the complexities bound up with this word native. Shawnee people roamed my home county, called “Barren,” long before I did. I’ve found their arrowheads near the creek bordering my grandfather’s farm. And does merely living in a place make one “native”? Wes Jackson’s essay collection Becoming Native to This Place suggests that nativity requires more than establishing residency: it requires knowledge of place gained from long-term dwelling and interaction. Jackson urges universities to educate students in “homecoming”: “Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers—not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native” (97). Bioregional thinker Wendell Berry, never one to use fancy language or claim allegiance to “isms,” summarizes succinctly the requirements for such W e s B e r r y Switching on Light Bulbs and Blowing Up Mountains Ecoliteracy and Energy Consumption in General Education English Courses Wes Berry 366 nativity in his essay “Conservation and Local Economy,” a vision he revisits frequently in his work: In our relation to the land, we are ruled by a number of terms and limits set not by anyone’s preference but by nature and by human nature: I. Land that is used will be ruined unless it is properly cared for. II. Land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately, who do not know how to care for it, who are not strongly motivated to care for it, and who cannot afford to care for it. III. People cannot be adequately motivated to care for land by general principles or by incentives that are merely economic. . . IV. People are motivated to care for land to the extent that their interest in it is direct, dependable, and permanent. V. They will be motivated to care for the land if they can reasonably expect to live on it as long as they live. They will be more strongly motivated if they can reasonably expect that their children and grandchildren will live on it as long as they live. In other words, there must be a mutuality of belonging: they must feel that the land belongs to them, that they belong to it, and that this belonging is a settled and unthreatened fact. VI. But such a belonging must be appropriately limited. . . . there is a limit to how much land can be owned before an owner is unable to take proper care of it. (3–4) Put in scholarly terms, Berry advocates here what Berg and Dasmann call, in their bioregional tract “Reinhabiting California,” “living-in-place,” defined as “following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site” (399). The cynic in me wants to say that my students’ native place is the computer screen and text windows of their cell phones, since that’s where they often place their attentions. Even in a largely rural state like Kentucky, where some of my students have lived on farms and experienced outdoor play during childhood, electronic media now occupies much of their days. I’m pretty sure my students spend more time on Facebook than they do observing details of the world outside of the numerous screens that hold them captive. In short, teaching bioregional ideals to today’s wired students poses special problems. I’m no longer amazed that my students, growing up in a major coal-producing state, don’t realize that over 90 percent of the electricity they use to power their computers comes from coal. Fewer Switching on Light Bulbs 367 understand how that coal is mined. Hardly any of...