Stanford University Press Blog

Plastic Pollution and Poetry

How American poets contend with the downstream consequences of today’s ecological crises.

by MARGARET RONDA

CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, the world marked Earth Day, the theme of which was plastic pollution. Environmental organizers around the globe are calling for increased awareness of plastic consumption and its protracted environmental effects, and hope to achieve a dramatic reduction in plastic pollution by Earth Day 2020. Contemporary poets, too, have been calling attention to the impacts of plastic on ecosystems and biospheric processes in their writings. In “The Age of Plastic,” a piece published in a recent anthology on the poetry of climate change, Chamorro eco-poet Craig Santos Perez catalogs the innumerable ways plastics are embedded in contemporary life. Found in household goods and medical products, technological, military, and transportation networks, bodily interiors and industrial processes, this synthetic material plays an enabling role in virtually all spheres of human activity. Perez highlights some of its beneficial, life-sustaining applications:

plastic keeps food fresh—
delivers medication and clean water—
forms cable and clothes—
ropes and nets—even
stops bullets—
“plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies”—

In other sections, Perez explores how plastics facilitate the prenatal development, birth, and newborn care of his infant daughter, pointing to the birth tub in which his wife labors, the Ziploc bag holding the placenta, the plastic nipple that feeds his baby milk. Drawing together this personal description of plastic’s role in his own family’s reproductive dynamics with the larger imbrications of plastic in everyday existence, Perez portrays plastic as an intimate container for and enabler of bodily experience. He wryly contrasts this synthetic substance against the delicate, vulnerable bodies of new baby and mother, calling attention to the uncanny endurance of the “perfect creation” of plastic.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration.

The Creator’s Journey

The creative process is about much more than the “aha!” moment.

by MATTHEW A. CRONIN

Public domain via Pixnio.

If there is a part of the creative process that captures people’s imagination, it is the moment of inspiration. Stories of creativity via a sudden spark of inspiration abound; I am sure you, dear reader, can think of some as you are reading this. These stories trace the emergence of some fabulous invention or discovery back to a single fundamental insight—some breakthrough idea that grows out of a serendipitous, revelatory moment that others could not imagine. Not to be a killjoy (for we so love these stories), but it turns out that this fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality. But on the positive side, there is a better alternative—one that may be more useful if you actually want to take the creator’s journey.

Kepler—a case study in creativity

An example that illustrates the journey, and how it can be overlooked, was astronomer Johannes Kepler’s seventeenth-century “insight” about planetary motion. At the time, the universe was all about circles, which were both perfect and heavenly. Orbital paths were modeled as “circles-within-circles.” Once Kepler had had his say, however, he had literally changed the universe, or at least how people saw it. His insight could be summed up in a single idea: planets moved in elliptical orbits at a varying speed, not in circular orbits at a constant speed. But while Kepler’s journey may have ended at an idea, it did not start there.

The fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality.

Christian Theology’s Economy of Conquest

Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the American church’s capitalist God of war.

by DEVIN SINGH

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

As an extension of his fight against racist laws at home, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly critical of US policies abroad. Indeed, many speculate that King’s progressively strident critique of US militarism and intervention, particularly in Vietnam, and his challenge to American market priorities were factors that accelerated plans for his assassination—the 50th anniversary of which we recently marked as a nation. Among his many detractors were white clergy who, already incensed at King’s challenge to segregation and Jim Crow, were dumbfounded that he would move to oppose US warmongering and to call out the evils of capitalism. As King’s confrontation revealed, their theology was not only implicated in their racist vision of society, but also in a worldview that prioritized economic supremacy by any means necessary.

On April 4th, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was murdered, King gathered with other religious leaders to protest the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, where he delivered his famous sermon, “Beyond Vietnam.” As he began, King addressed his critics, those who asked, “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?”; “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” To such complaints, King responded: “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

China’s Political Paradox

The hallmark tensions in Chinese politics today first took shape in the 1911 Revolution.

by XIAOWEI ZHENG

Public gathering in Chengdu on November 27, 1911, for the Great Han Sichuan Military Government. United Church Archives, Toronto.

In the winter of 1911, legendary revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen returned to China after years of exile and found the country in the grip of a sweeping transformation. Between October 10, when junior officers in the Hubei New Army mutinied in Wuchang, and November 22, when the Sichuan constitutionalists declared independence from the Qing, fourteen provinces had severed their ties with the government of the Manchu dynasty.

Political elites throughout China were defecting from the court en masse. Among the most influential were the constitutionalists from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, who proposed a plan for uniting all of the southern forces into one polity under the banner of republicanism. It was they who initiated the truce between the Qing Beiyang Army and the revolutionary armies in Wuchang, elected the southern delegates to negotiate with the northern leader Yuan Shikai, promoted Sun Yat-sen as the first provisional president of the republic, and penned the abdication edict for the Qing court.

 

Imperial edict for abdication. Public domain.

 

This edict, which claimed that “the power to govern is now transferred to all in the country (tongzhiquan gongzhu quanguo)” and that “a constitutional republic is now the state system of our country (gonghe lixian guoti),” signaled the end of the monarchy and the birth of the Chinese republic. This seismic political shift was premised on the belief that “republicanism had been accepted by public opinion (yulun) in China,” and the constitutionalists looked to the federalist system of the United States as their model, vowing to “immediately emulate the United States of America in calling upon a national convention, regarding it as our temporary authoritative legislature.”

Crowdsourcing American History

A free, open, online history textbook offers a democratic alternative to the American past.

by JOSEPH L. LOCKE and BEN WRIGHT

George Caleb Bingham, “The County Election,” 1852.

Exploding costs plague higher education, and textbooks are at the center of this crisis. Over the past forty years, textbook prices have jumped fifteen-fold—three times the rate of inflation, and the College Board has found that the typical student now spends $1,200 every year on textbooks and supplies. Community colleges and other educational institutions catering to nontraditional or first-generation college students still rely heavily on traditional textbooks, which means that the very students least able to afford these ever-increasing costs are the most likely to bear them. Moreover, many students forego buying their textbooks altogether— found that two-thirds of students reported not buying a book because of cost, and nearly all of those did so knowing that this would affect their grade. As our campuses ring with calls for authentic assessment, we are left to wonder how authentic our assessments can be if over sixty percent of our students determine that they cannot afford to earn an A.

Our goal was not simply to create a free textbook. We also wanted to collaborate to make a better textbook.

Enter The American Yawp, the first massively collaborative, open U.S. history textbook produced by scholars of American history. We conceived of the project while teaching at community colleges in the greater Houston area as graduate students at Rice University. Frustrated at the high costs and occasionally uneven quality of existing U.S. history textbooks, we were shocked to find that an open alternative didn’t yet exist. And so we went to work. Our project was designed to achieve two goals: the first was to address the soaring costs of textbooks by creating an open alternative; the second was to experiment with new collaborative methods to build a textbook that was not only cheaper, but better.

The Promise of Peer Coaching

Helping relationships between peers can lead to significant breakthroughs.

by ILENE C. WASSERMAN and KATHY E. KRAM

Public domain via Pxhere.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts a small educational nonprofit called Breakthrough Greater Boston is changing the academic trajectories for underserved middle school students. The organization, which offers year-round, tuition-free instruction outside of regular school hours recruits college and high school students to teach in the program and act as coaches for the younger students. Breakthrough calls this its “students teaching students” model, and the resulting success of its programs have been phenomenal: the high school graduation rate for its students is 98 percent. Better still, college-bound students at Breakthrough—which has strong partnerships with local universities likes Tufts and MIT—have a college graduation rate of over 95 percent.

Peer Coaching at Work » delivers a hands-on guide to a powerful relational learning technique.

What the success of Breakthrough teaches us is how valuable peer coaching can be. We define peer coaching as a focused relationship between individuals of equal status who support each other’s personal and professional development goals, like the student teachers and their pupils at Breakthrough or that colleague you collaborate with closely at your office. Whether in not-for-profit entities such as Breakthrough, in learning circles to support CEO development, or in health care, business, or government sectors, people are forming collaborative relationships to support their growth both in and outside of the workplace. These helping relationships involve two or more individuals who supportively learn from, actively listen to, and judiciously question each other, which leads to breakthroughs that otherwise may lie dormant and prevent growth and effectiveness. In today’s turbulent, globalized, and complex world, collaborative relationships with peers are an important resource for tackling the challenges we face.