of everyday life; 2) a person who practices the magical arts of regenerative design.
Wor(l)dplay: The art of using words to challenge worldviews and change the world.
The essay is a standard literary form, a useful way of arranging words to make meaning. In college, the most common kind of essay is the expository essay, a persuasive argument supported by reason and evidence. This book has many features of the expository essay—ideas, evidence, facts, endnotes—but it’s ultimately exploratory. The expository essay tries to prove all of its contentions, while the exploratory essay prefers to probe connections. Exploring links between personal life, cultural patterns, and the natural world, this essay leaves space for readers to reflect on their own experience, and invites them into a conversation about the meanings of college, and the personal and institutional possibilities of a culture of permanence.
Words structure our worlds but they can also change the world. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner suggest, “We act on the basis of what we see. If we see things one way, we act accordingly. If we see them in another, we act differently. The ability to learn turns out to be a function of the extent to which one is capable of perception change. If a student goes through four years of school and comes out ‘seeing’ things in the way he did when he started, he will act the same. Which means he learned nothing. If he does not act the same, it means he changed his way of talking. It’s as complicated as that.” With any luck, the words in this book will help to change ways of seeing, ways of talking, and ways of acting.8
A Final Note: “Us” and “Them”
For several reasons, I’ve resisted writing The Nature of College about “them”—a group of alien beings called college students—and tried as often as possible to write about “us,” learners struggling to learn how the world works so that we can make the world better. I do this, first, because even though I’m an aging college professor, I still consider myself a college student, learning from professors I know, from the students in my classes, and from the books I read and love. Second, I believe in empathy as a way of knowing, and in this book I’ve tried to imagine, from the inside out, what it feels like to be a college student in America today. Third, I want to invite students to take this text personally, to think deeply and carefully about their assumptions and intentions, their institutions and cultural patterns. And finally, many Americans (myself included) share many of the ideas and ideals of today’s college students, and many of the environmental impacts as well. Still, there are times when, because of generational or historical differences, it would simply be ridiculous for me to group myself with college students. It is my great hope, however, that even when I refer to students as “they,” you’ll understand that we are all in this together. Of course, in all cases, you’ll need to decide for yourself if you’re a part of the “we” I’m describing.
1
Waking Up to Nature
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose”
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
Edward R. Murrow, as quoted in Mad about Physics (2001), by Christopher Jargodzki
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Although some wait until afternoon, most college students wake up early in the morning to the maddening sound of an alarm clock. As the contraption beeps or buzzes, Joe College reaches out of his slumber, hits the snooze button, rolls over, and goes back to sleep. This sequence replays repeatedly until at last he throws back the blankets and gets out of bed. He’s late again so he’ll have to hurry if he wants breakfast before class.
Stumbling toward the bathroom, Joe begins a morning routine so well choreographed he should get a credit in dance for its flawless execution: He steps up to the urinal, relieves himself, flushes, shuffles to the sink, pumps the soap, washes his hands, dries them on a paper towel, aims a fadeaway shot toward the wastebasket, and reaches for his toiletries. Grossed out by his morning breath, he grabs toothbrush and toothpaste, turns on the water, wets the brush, spreads paste on the bristles, and begins to brush his teeth. In the mirror, his familiar face seems to be sporting a caveman wig, so today is a shower day, or at least a hat day. Spitting in the sink, Joe reels toward the showers and the dance continues.
Joe’s sister, meanwhile, follows a related routine. She checks her e-mail, scans the news feed on Facebook, clicks the syllabus for Environmental Studies 101 to make sure she has the reading right, pulls up her Google calendar to confirm today’s activities, and heads for the showers. She lathers up, shampoos her hair, rinses with conditioner, shaves, and enjoys a few additional minutes of hot, steamy water before she concludes. Toweling off, she’s ready to brush and blow-dry her hair, and maybe apply a little makeup.
Both students glance out the window to gauge the weather. They can’t really be sure how it might feel out there because they’re moving between rooms that are heated or cooled to temperatures in the seventy-degree range. Nature is burning or blowing to create this comfort zone, but they don’t notice because that’s just “natural.” So, naturally, they check weather.com and head for the closet with today’s forecast in mind.1
Like other college students, and most Americans, Jo and Joe College are practicing what Tim Clydesdale calls the “disengaged pragmatism” of everyday life, focusing on the tasks at hand and the day ahead, but not the meaning behind them. So far, the only time they’ve noticed nature was in the weather report. Waking up at college, they’re waking up in nature, but they haven’t noticed that yet. In this chapter, therefore, we’ll try to wake them up to the nature of their mornings as well.2
Alarming: The Cultural Work of Clocks
It can be alarming to think deeply about an alarm clock. Normally college students notice it just twice a day, setting it at night and hearing it, regretfully, in the morning. But the time it tells transforms the whole day, and the world.
Most Americans are obsessed with time, as our language suggests: We’re saving time or spending it, marking time or killing it. We have free time on the weekends—which seems to suggest that we have slave time most of the week. Many of us even feel like we’re doing time, caught in a prison of work and obligations. Whatever we call it, however, all of our times are structured by clock time, the social construction of weeks and days and hours and minutes that shape our appointment books and our lives. Like many of our technical marvels, clocks and watches are machines that do the work of social construction, converting nature into culture, and in this case, nature’s time into human time.3
Historically, human beings adjusted their life cycles to the rhythms of day and night, and slept until they were rested or until they were disturbed—often by the call of nature. It’s a natural fact that human beings need sleep, and that animals, including humans, have circadian rhythms—cycles of brain-wave activity, core body temperature swings, hormone production,
