Days of Epiphany
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre..."
Many words are pouring from many people since the results of last Tuesday’s presidential election here in the US. Lines from Yeats’s poem of apocalypse, quoted above, have been coming to my mind, particularly for the way in which, in the swirling chaos of his cascading imagery, something is also revealed—something terrible, perhaps not entirely comprehensible, but something critical. We are all trying to find out what exactly has been revealed this week—in the “turning and turning” of this country’s politics, where next do we go? The poet doesn’t give us that.
I hope many of us are taking stock of our lives and questioning whether we are using our time, energy, and other resources to do as much as we might be able to do to build a better world—a world resistant to the rhetorics of hate and division and paranoid distrust. I hope we are thinking seriously about class politics, and civic education, and universal access to education and healthcare, and, and, and…
I don’t really know what happens now, but I am trying to re-examine my values for the road ahead. On Wednesday, after teaching my three classes at Centenary College of Louisiana, I reluctantly said goodbye to my wife and daughter, in a moment when I would have really rather stayed home, and flew to Pittsburgh. (The clouds, as you see above, proclaimed along the way the majesty of the intricate, delicate ecosphere that today is so endangered by the carelessness of the powerful.) I was scheduled to moderate a panel focused on the book I produced as editor that was published at the beginning of the year, The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings by Liberty Hyde Bailey, alongside the book’s foreword writer, David W. Orr, and two other scholars of education and society, Ellen Doris and Paul A. Morgan, at the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE) Annual Conference. We had a sense that David would draw some folks, as his writings have been very influential in the environmental education space for many years, to say nothing of the quality of the panel as a whole—but our initial proposal for a 90-minute “symposium” intended for a large crowd had been bumped down by the conference organizers to just a 40-minute “traditional panel” in a small room that would give us each less than ten minutes to speak if we wanted any time for a real discussion with the attendees. I would have been happy if a dozen had shown up.
Despite that, we had around sixty come to the panel, with some standing in the back of the room and sitting on the floor in the front and the aisle, and I have to believe that the reason, in addition to the quality of the panelists, had to do with the presence of “democracy” in our panel’s title: “Climate Change, Democracy, and Teaching with Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Nature-Study Idea.” We were all, panelists and attendees, thirsty for ways to apply our work to what will clearly become the critical project of preserving—or reforming, reimagining, enabling—democracy across the coming four years and more.
The following comes from my opening remarks. If you already are relatively familiar with the book, you can skip the first two paragraphs:
Thank you all for coming out for this panel on “Climate, Democracy, and Teaching with Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Nature-Study Idea.” My name is John Linstrom, and I’m an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana and the editor of The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings by Liberty Hyde Bailey, published earlier this year by Cornell University Press, the book that will be the subject of our discussion today.
This edition presents the authoritative text of The Nature-Study Idea, Bailey’s classic and foundational book on environmental education from 1903, along with a wealth of related nature-study writings by Bailey; an introduction, historical essay, and explanatory endnotes by me; an essay for educators by Dilafruz R. Williams; and a new foreword by David Orr, who we’ll hear from today. It is the first volume in a historic effort by Cornell Press to reintroduce Bailey’s overlooked and important literary and philosophical writings to the twenty-first century in the form of a series: The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library, which I also oversee as series editor.
Bailey wrote The Nature-Study Idea for teachers. In its day, over a century ago, it inspired and provided direction for a burgeoning movement, led by elementary educators (most of them women, and many of them African American), not merely to introduce nature topics into the public schools, but to redirect the whole thrust of all the disciplines in education toward the experiential and the near-at-hand, opening the eyes of the child to the wonders of the commonplace world they walked through every day. It was not exclusively a science movement, and Bailey defended its women leaders from the attacks of university scientists (most of them white men) who accused nature-study teachers of “sentimentalizing” and even “effeminizing” nature—typically because the interdisciplinary methods by which teachers learned to excite children’s curiosity were not “systematic” enough.
Bailey’s book was largely successful in reaching and inspiring a generation of nature-study teachers to take up the call and revolutionize education, in a movement that gave us such concepts as the “field trip,” 4-H, and outdoor learning as we know it today. But for Bailey, this was all part of a greater project, which Paul Morgan and Scott Peters have described as “worldview transition.” As he would begin to explore in The Nature-Study Idea, and more fully argue in later works, Bailey saw the human relationship with nature in the industrialized world as broken along some critical fault lines—as agriculture modernized, he worried we were losing a spiritual relationship with what he called, over a century ago, our “mother earth,” with grave moral consequences. That he would provide a model for Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and inspiration to Wendell Berry is no surprise. He also believed that, among political systems, democracy was the earth’s best safeguard, but democracy would only function if bolstered by a robust and universal educational system that would orient our vision to our foundational relationship with the earth and our resultant responsibilities. Such an education, in a democracy, would empower communities to identify and find solutions to ecological problems at the local level, and that grassroots work would filter up to the halls of government for issues that required state or federal action or cooperation. But true democracy, Bailey maintained, was less a system than a state of mind achieved by such education—and no society had yet achieved it. Still, he held hope for the American experiment, hope born of experience working in rural communities across the country.
Let’s be clear about how apocalyptically relevant this conversation has been made by the recent election of a presidential candidate who denies both climate science and basic democratic values, who in a cruel twist was catapulted to power yet again, in large part, by disaffected rural working people with whom he has nothing in common and for whom he could not care less. I hope we remember that the old word “apocalypse,” like revelation, refers to a revealing of truth, a tearing back of the curtain—just such a curtain has been torn yet again, fellow educators, and much of the most important work ahead of us is no doubt educational.
You can read more about the book, and even download the open-access ebook edition (and read David Orr’s compelling forward, which puts nature-study into direct conversation with the challenges of democracy), at the Cornell Press page here, and you can also use the code 09BCARD to get 30% off the cost of the paperback if you order from them.
I am going to be called upon to speak in front of a crowd again this Tuesday, November 12, at 6:00 PM in the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College, where we will celebrate the Louisiana launch of my poetry book, published in April, titled To Leave for Our Own Country. I hope to see some friendly faces there. In the meantime, I will close here with that book’s title poem, which concludes the collection. It has felt newly relevant for me this week, and as it has not appeared elsewhere I wanted to share it here. At readings, I like to remind listeners that the old church holiday known as the “Day of Epiphany,” or “Three Kings Day,” always takes place the day after the twelfth day of Christmas—which means that each year it falls on January 6.
Day of Epiphany, 2021 Queens, New York The laundry machines whirred and clanked. A child approached his mother and wrapped his arms around her thigh. She put her fingers through his hair, eyes fixed on the TV, where newsmen spoke in Spanish over images of the mob grotesquely pouring up those granite steps in waves and waving flags that bore the name of some false king. The fingers of her other hand touched her upper lip. In my headphones, a sober senior correspondent spoke in English of 1812, the Crown's invasion, when that dome was burnt to ash. But this king was not a king. It seemed the rot was in our very land: darkness covered it, and thick darkness the people. I wondered if the little family at the laundry might return home to a kings' cake, its plastic baby hidden from the TV, the mobbing of innocence. Perhaps they would light a candle. Arise, shine. In the humble business of our days, in this epiphanic conflagration, what is the plan? Millions find the plastic child, and for the day become a king. May he judge the people with righteousness, and the poor with justice? Each day another little king is frightened, a president seeks to unravel the slightest commission of grace, to threaten our honest routines. A scattering of neighbors mutter, shake heads, lean against particleboard tables, linens piled fragrant. Lift your eyes and look around—something has revealed itself in a humble laundromat, and we must leave for our own country by another road.