Chapter Introduction

Interacting with our surroundings and forging connections are both fundamental parts of the human experience. We befriend the people around us, we utilize tools that let us achieve the impossible, and we take advantage of the earth’s resources to survive. Every aspect of our lives has some form of give and take. From everything around us, we take experiences, knowledge, emotions, and everything else that is key to prolonging our survival, and in return, we give our respect, appreciation, and care. But what happens when the amount of resources that humanity collectively consumes grows exponentially while the care and respect we should be showing our environment fade into the wind? According to environmentalist author Edward Abbey, “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” Abbey suggests that this is an issue that should be at the forefront of society’s concerns, a sentiment echoed by Shelley and the authors of “Chained and Carved.” Our planet’s ecosystem has supported humanity for millions of years, but now civilizations are contributing to their own downfalls through their modern habits of extreme resource exhaustion by biting, chaining, and carving the hand that feeds them.

Many of this chapter’s selections feature the appreciation of our natural environment that, despite its importance, seems too often overlooked in our busy modern world. Jennifer Alexander’s “A Love Letter to Blooming Point” is a poem that personifies a local piece of nature as a comforting, even loving, presence for the speaker to retreat to in order to escape the ugly noise of modernity. Similarly, A.J. Godden’s short story, “Teapot of Sparrows,” explores not only the relationship between the narrator and her new love, but also between the narrator and the natural Newfoundland landscape around her. In both pieces, the speakers find more comfort in the natural world than the civilizations in which they live.

The balance between giving and taking from our environment is an incredibly fine line. We must take to survive, but we must also give back so that there remains something to take. In “Trouble in Paradise,” Darragh Clayton explores how the tourism industry in Hawaii has allowed for the State’s economic prosperity while simultaneously damaging the landscape that tourists are flocking to see, as well as the potential steps towards environmental reconciliation.

“The Butterfly is Victim to My Haste” is a poetry fragment by Jacob Saunders that blurs two scenes together. The first half of the poem focuses on an incident in which a butterfly is hit by the speaker’s car, then subtly shifts into a scene from the past. This composition explores what can or is lost in both environmental and emotional senses and the inextricable relationship these two systems have with each other.

Finally, Abby Lacey’s poem, “the world’s best and hardest worker,” through its cynicism criticizes the exploitation of capitalism. The poem highlights the hypocrisy of those who praise the megarich billionaires of the world when their money is made off of the backs of their underpaid workers and the resources they carve from our planet. Lacey ends the poem with a vision of the not-so-distant future, depicting the best and hardest worker moving on to another planet, leaving the depleted earth and its poor residents behind, a vision that is quickly becoming our reality.

All of the pieces from this chapter encourage the reader to see our natural environments as something beautiful, comforting, to be protected, rather than as something to be chained, carved, and used up. We hope that, through reading these pieces, you question what responsibility you owe to the plants that surround you and that you will be filled with a newfound sense of appreciation for the foundation supporting us.