GRAD STUDENT – Classical Studies PhD Candidate
“I was born and raised in rural Appalachia, like super rural. Technically Virginia, but [at] the intersection of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. [It was] a very poor area, coal country, an area hit hardest by the opioid crisis. And when I was there, just seeing so many people who were suffering physically from ailments and not being able to afford health care, even if we had had good health care systems nearby, I just thought that was so sad, and so wrong. So I wanted to go to college to be a medical doctor, and I was pursuing that route. And I started taking classes on the ancient world, just for fun, as my alternatives to [organic chemistry] and whatnot. And over time, I just kind of fell in love with the study of ancient Greece and I’d already done some languages like French and Spanish. I knew I liked languages, and just decided to jump into this field that I never studied. And it’s primarily Greek and Latin language, and I had never done either. So I graduated with no background to get into grad school and took a corporate position with a coffee company. And I did that for two years [while] saving up money and [also] bartending around the clock, so I could finance taking Greek and Latin courses, to get them on a transcript so I could apply to grad school. And somehow I got in here, which was my dream school. And some days, five years later, I’m still like, did they really admit me? But they did.
So when I was growing up, my great grandparents and grandparents were very connected to the land. [They] raised their own animals, had massive gardens, [were] tobacco farmers. They also grew hay for horses and cows, and they would sell that to other people too and there was just this very direct connection to your diet and to nature. And the older I got, the more there was kind of this divorcing of my family and nature. In large part because there were just so many of us, it wasn’t practical to keep feeding everyone from the garden. I mean, my grandparents had like seven kids. But then also just financially, it became so much cheaper and easier, and just less of a gamble to just go to the store and buy like a can of green beans instead of growing them. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, but you have to grow them, you have to watch them, you have to go pick them, then you have to bring them home, wash them, take the strings off and break them and then cook them and it’s a process. Especially as my family transitioned forward in time, [being] a farmer as a job wasn’t really like a thing anymore. It was something that you had to do, like you supplemented your income with farming but you had to have like a nine to five job and it just [wasn’t] practical. [But] it was also a way of connecting, with the green beans. Like, we would sit around, there would be four generations of my family at a table just talking and like, it’s an arduous process. And I was never very good at getting the strings off the beans, so my grandma would always have to go back and redo them for me. But, you know, my great grandma, grandma, my aunt, and I would just sit there. And at the time, I didn’t appreciate it, but looking back, that’s a really amazing thing.
The past few days, [I’ve been] thinking more about [the intersection between sustainability and my degree] and at the heart of western intellectualism with the birth of western philosophy and ancient Ionia, the immediate reaction was not just abstract philosophy, it was natural philosophy. And so the birth of this intellectual movement in the west was built on looking at nature and saying, nature is not divine. Nature is made up of elements — what are those elements? It’s kind of this demystification of nature that is at the heart of western rationalism and philosophy and all these things. And the more I thought about it, it’s like, wow, that really impacts the way that we think because these early philosophers were responding to deification of rivers and whatnot. And for me, I see it as due reverence for these natural things, but these early scholars who influence us to this day and the way that we think– for them, that was their first step into being rational, to say nature is not that great. It’s something we can explain. But like growing up with that, I just thought it was so magical. Like I remember when my grandpa [told me] hey, put this potato in the dirt and let’s see what happens and not long after there was another potato [that] had grown. I [thought] wow, how did that happen? And even though I understand [now], it’s still just so amazing. So I think, you know, if I could get a bunch of classes in a room, and we could talk about that stuff, it could be really enlightening.”
“[As a sustainability champion], it’s been nice to feel like there is some sort of centralized endeavor [saying] let’s formally work on this, as opposed to independent actors just trying to do things at home and not really bringing it into the workspace. And a lot of times, [talking with others means] not having to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something sustainable. [Right now] I have a few things I want to do. I really want to have a little presentation, or just some sort of discussion about digital waste, because, you know, we don’t talk about that enough. I learned about it through a fictional piece of writing, [the book Cloud Cuckoo Land actually]. And I was like, is that real? Or is this creative license? And then I looked into it, and I was like, oh my goodness, what are we doing? Every time I send a text, I’m hurting the environment.
So Anthony Doerr [is the author of Cloud Cuckoo Land]. [He] and his wife, Shauna, are just two of the most amazing humans I’ve ever met. And they are such friends of the environment, and they are just so big on sustainability. And if you read Cloud Cuckoo Land, you can see that. I mean, it’s just throughout the whole thing in a way that’s just beautiful and heartbreaking. It really does impact you. And so he came here to teach a miniature course on defamiliarization and writing. My department and the honors program were able to put their funds together and get him here for half a semester, and I was fortunate enough to be his assistant for that class. And basically, the whole semester was [focused on] how can you get students to think outside of their thought habits? And one of the things that they did: he brought doughnuts to class. And he put a list of animals on the screen and said, choose one of these animals and react to this donut in the way that you think that animal would react. And so it was just a way of like, getting outside of our human perceptual world and thinking about, oh, what would a butterfly do with this donut? Would it be sweet enough? Too sweet? Like, what would it think of sprinkles? And, again, it just gets back to this [idea of] connecting us with nature and getting outside of these great anthropocentric views that we have in the world. We are human beings, and we are at the center of every experience we’ve ever had, right?
[In the class, we discussed this through the lens of] the semiotic concept called the Umwelt. So every organism has its Umwelt. Umwelt is German for environment, but it gets taken on to mean perceptual environment. And basically, my perceptual environment is limited by my sensory organs, right? So I can only see the colors that my cones in my eyes allow me to see, I can only hear the frequencies of my cochlea, and so forth. And then all of that is colored by my subjectivity, right? Like my past experiences, my attentional bias, and so forth. And my Umwelt. It’s just part of the whole world, because I can’t access everything. There are colors that I can’t see that a mantis shrimp can see. And like, plants make noises, but we can’t hear them. Like, my pothos plant is screaming at me right now, it’s so upset and I don’t know what to do for it and I’m like, I wish I could hear you! But, you know, it doesn’t mean that my Umwelt is more accurate, or better than that of my dog, right? Like, he can smell ridiculous things that I can’t smell. My olfactory system can’t access the world in the way that his can, so why is mine [considered] better or more accurate than his?
One analogy that gets used for the Umwelt is like, we’re all in a house. And we all have different windows that are different shapes and sizes, and we’re looking out onto a garden. And it’s like, I can see this part and, I don’t know, this hummingbird can see another part and so forth. But nobody can see the whole thing, right, because their walls are blocking off the rest of our view. And I just think that’s so wonderful. I noticed students were really into that concept and that something we all took with us was, you know, thinking about what’s the Umwelt of the person beside me, right? Like, what’s this person going through? And what does my behavior do that might impact that person’s Umwelt? And, you know, just recognizing [that] there’s this whole world out there that we can only access a little bit of, but we share it with other creatures and we’re just part of it. We’re no better, no worse. We’re just one with everyone else, right? “
As part of the LSA Year of Sustainability, LSA Dean’s Fellow Cherish Dean sat down with a range of students, staff, and faculty across the University to illustrate the various relationships people across campus already have to this work, to showcase ways people can get involved, and to highlight the reasons that this work should matter.
To view an abbreviated transcript of Cherish’s full conversation with Brittany, click here.
Cherish can be reached at cherishd@umich.edu. To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team as a whole, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu .