Environmental Sustainability

In April, Earth Month, we will be completing our serious on the three dimensions of sustainability by discussing environmental sustainability. In previous columns, we have discussed the economic and social dimensions of sustainability.

There are several ways to define environmental sustainability, but Sphera, a company that helps mitigate environmental impacts, summarizes it as:

“the responsibility to conserve natural resources and protect global ecosystems to support health and wellbeing, now and in the future.”

Understanding environmental sustainability requires us to understand science, but the arts have allowed us to understand it on a more personal level. That is why this month we have chosen to speak with a professor who has dedicated their life to understanding the environment through the Arts, Dr. Ann Fisher-Wirth.

Dr. Ann Fisher-Wirth has worked at the University of Mississippi for 33 years as a professor in the Department of English and has been the director of the Environmental Studies Minor since its inception. She has received fellowships from the Black Earth Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Mississippi Arts Commission, among others. In 2006 she received the Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year and College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year. She has received numerous awards for her work, which appears widely in journals, online, and in anthologies (Find her list of selected publications here).

How have your life experiences shaped the way you understand the environment and sustainability?

I think a number of things allowed me to connect the dots. First of all, I was an army brat and traveled a lot as a kid which means I saw a lot of different places. I remember, my father was stationed in Japan in 1955 and we joined him there. And that was not long after WWII and Japan of course was pretty devastated. So I remember being a little kid driving in a Taxi somewhere with my mom, my sister, and my dad. And I saw this hillside or rather cliff side with a cave in it with a quilt hung down in front of the opening of the cave along with a women and some kids. And I said to my mother “what are they doing?” and she said “honey, they live there.” And I thought ‘oh my goodness’…so that was the first jolt I can remember to my idea that everybody had a kind of Dick and Jane childhood with a home and a dog and a mommy and a daddy. Because I grew up in a very safe, well cushioned environment.

So that was one thing that made me start thinking, as a child does, about the fact that there are such differences in the world and that there can be such a thing as poverty, destitution, incredible need, and incredible damage.

And then later, I grew up in Berkeley and I was really lucky to grow up in Berkeley as I did during the late 50’s and early 60’s because I had friends who were pretty political and I was dating this guy who would lecture me about the inequities of capitalism and so on and that got me started thinking about that too.

And I remember, so I was an English major at Pomona College and we were assigned to read Walden and I had not really spent that much time in the natural world, but I stayed up all night reading Walden and I was absolutely transfixed. I was so blown away by the combination of this retreat, this solitude, this spirituality to be found in that kind of view of the natural world. I was just profoundly moved.

So that was one thing, and then later, much later, I lived in Belgium and traveled Europe and I just saw a lot of things that didn’t really feed into my environmental consciousness, but just an awareness of the world. The incredible beauty of the world. 

Then a much later I moved in with my husband on a farm south of Charlottesville in this little guest cottage, and we had 5 kids between us. The house was tiny but the farm was big and so the farm sort of became our extra rooms. It was beautiful and you could just send the kids out to wonder around and there were barns, lakes, peach trees, apple trees, forest and so on. I learned a lot more about just being in nature and I felt like this is something I have always longed for, but I didn’t quite know it.

My husband Peter is a passionate walker, he loves to walk and he loves forests and he loves trees and so I started learning a lot more about the natural world by being married to him. And we started vegetable gardening and so on and so forth. Also Peter is very political and we would talk a lot about political issues and I started following environmental issues. So when we came down here, I knew that we needed an environmental group. Students needed to be able to share that interest and share that knowledge. So for a while we had these tiny tiny groups, I’m talking one or two people, that worked year after year to create the Environmental Studies Minor. Once it came into being, I became the Director for it and have been ever since, it has just been a really consuming passion for me. I really love it, I really do.

Can you describe the interdisciplinary work you have experienced?

I am not a trained scientist and as an undergrad at Pomona College I was so not a trained scientist that I didn’t do my assigned experiment to pass Botany, I just hated it. But I’ve learned a lot from teaching Environmental Studies 101 and I’ve learned a lot from reading science writing, I have good friends who are science writers, as well as my colleges like Jason Hoeksema and Steve Brewer in biology and Cliff Ochs, who I’ve done collaborative work with, and I’ve just learned so much from them. 

So actually to my delight, I am a part of a a new book edited by a woman in California named Lucille Lang Day, called “Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery.” So we each wrote an essay and we each had some poems in this book. Environmental Writing needs to be knowledgeable about the world. Not all environmental writing needs to involve a lot of science, but it helps if you can write knowledgeable and in a real sense not just a fanatical sense about the world you are focusing on. That knowledge has been important for my poetry, I write an awful lot about what I would call poetry of place, because I’m not from Mississippi, although I’ve lived here for 33 years and it fascinates me, and I write a lot about, for instance, the Whirlpool Trails (South Campus Rail Trail) or the Catalpa tree on campus or my yard, the birds and trees and flowers in my yard. That is all interwoven with the lives of people.

I’ve worked with Maude Schuyler Clay who is a photographer to collaborate on  a book of poetry and photography called “Mississippi.” It’s her gorgeous photographs and then through those photographs I was able to, almost literally, hear voices that would tell me stories about people who aren’t in the photographs but people who were conjured for me by the photographs. They are poems about the Bayou about the trees or the waterways and the land or the ruined buildings and the lives that are connected with those places. 

And so it is all interdisciplinary, it’s all collaborative, the boundaries are nowhere. That’s what is so exciting about it. You can be interested in absolutely anything.

As you prepare to retire, what do you hope your legacy will be on our campus?

At the end of Environmental Studies 101 I ask students to write an essay about the course, just a personal essay, and it’s 5-7 pages. They talk about what they’ve learned and the books we’ve read and so on, but so many of them have said Environmental Studies 101 should be a required course for everyone on this campus. And I’m not asking them to say that, they are just feeling like we are learning stuff that really matters, we are learning stuff that is shaping our lives. And we are responsible for helping shape the world. And they are saying that they want this to be more widely a part of this campus culture.

That is the legacy I would like to leave. That there has been, oh I don’t know, a few hundred students that have taken my course and whose lives have really been changed. They have gone into career paths based on that or they have live differently, but I would like to see that much much more widespread. It is just so important. It might not be fun to think about but it’s reality. It doesn’t just go away by being ignored. And by it I mean, for instance I just read yesterday that something like 55% of all rivers and lakes in this country have water that is unfit for drinking and that’s not going to change just because we don’t want to think about it.  The damage caused by over use of pesticides and herbicides and so on that’s not going to change just because we don’t want to think about it. So it’s important to know. It’s important to know what’s involved with deforestation or with the pollution of rivers or toxic runoff and then find the energy and the courage and the knowledge to change it.

That is what I have found that is so meaningful about this minor and about these courses. As well that it is just so fun. It’s fun to take students to a farm or a nature walk or have them have to write nature journals and be quiet for an hour a week. And they often have said “this is the most peaceful time of my life”, “this is the time I can really rest”. Just because they have to not be using their phone, not be talking to their friends, just be under a tree quiet and it is just a healing experience. So there is all kinds of healing that is possible, all kinds of fun that’s possible and there’s all kinds of hard work that is possible.

What work has been most meaningful to you here at UM?

Creating the minor, definitely creating the minor. But I’ve also been involved with the MFA program since its inception, the MFA program in the English Department. And I’ve loved that too, teaching a lot of poetry workshops and so on has been a lot of fun. And since I have my PhD I can also teach graduate level seminars and I’ve done a bunch of those and I really loved that. I’ve taught eco poetry and the american long poem and women poets and that has been really rewarding for me.

Where do you find positivity in environmental sustainability work?

[Belly laughs] I’ll just have to choke a little bit. I don’t even know how to start answering that. I do see more people caring more. More young people caring more. The students I teach, caring desperately. I was just at the Associated Writing Programs conference, and I was on a panel again, and a young women stood up and said I’m apart of the Sunrise Movement, and I’m like yes that’s great. I think it’s great that young people are coming out, taking to the streets making their angers and their hopes and their determination known.

The woman said “you all have been talking about joy [in the natural world] but I want to talk about grief.” She said “where is the literature that is talking about grief that we feel?” Well there is plenty of it, but she wanted to insist on what’s called solastalgia, which is this great feeling of grief for the loss of a beautiful environment.I do think that our environmental situation is disastrous. I think it’s only made worse by this horrible war in Ukraine. I would like to think that raising gas prices would cause people to turn away from fossil fuels rather than turning away from the people they are angry at in the government. I think there is a lot more lip service than action when we have these climate summits and so on. People keep saying that great progress is being made and then you have to ask yourself “Well, how slowly do we slide backwards?” Well quickly or slowly it still is sliding backwards. I’m sorry if that’s not the hopeful answer you may have been looking for.

One thing I do think is really good is when communities spring up. For instance what the [Oxford Community Market] does here in Oxford, I think, is just phenomenal. It’s a real outreach program that is not only helping people have better food and more sustainable food sources but also educating people about raising food, eating in a nourishing way. There is a big economic component to that too. You know, reaching out  to people who have less money and just trying to provide really good food for them. That kind of thing I think is terrific. Things like Hill Country Roots with tree planting out at the Biological Field Station. I think that that is absolutely phenomenal. So sure there are things to feel really good about and take pride and take hope in, but at the same time with global capitalism, it’s not designed to provide sustainability. It’s designed to provide profit and there are a lot of governmental structures in place that help sustain that profit motive.

Sustainability work has no shortage of tasks in the coming years. Dr. Ann Fisher-Wirth is an example of someone who, despite all odds, continues to push for sustainable progress. While the task seems insurmountable, we can all do our part in creating a better tomorrow.

 

–Story by OOS Project Manager, Kathryn Kidd