In Search of the Green World
Global Indigenous Cultures, the Human Imagination, and Environmental Justice
Welcome to our RIGS-sponsored series of Montclair University based awareness-building public lectures and discussions, roundtables, walking tours/visits, and workshops on the science and culture of especially indigenous approaches to the environment. The series includes literary, historical, anthropological, artistic, and scientific (biological, botanical, evolutionary) approaches.
The idea that wild places surround us, and contain a kind of magic that can help us heal our social rifts, is the powerful metaphor behind the series.
The literary critic Northrop Frye once saw in Shakespeare’s plays glimpses of what he called “the Green World,” that is, imaginary wild places conjured up by a playwright in order to create a separate, wild, and partly magical environment where the human characters in the play, not in control anymore, would enter to be transformed—and in fact would then return with their small, un-magical human problems partly resolved through of the healing power of that wild space they had visited.
We want to draw public focus to the many different ways in which we can learn about the underappreciated natural environment we live in—wild spaces, plants & animals, medicinal value and possibilities, coexistence, and especially indigenous cultivators’ approaches to sustainable ecological stewardship in forms such as agriforesting and intersowing. How can we bring more knowledge and practice of indigenous ecological stewardship into public conversations and policy around the environment and climate catastrophes? How can we use our imaginations, cultural traditions, and social and scientific research to rethink our relationship to the plant and animal life that surrounds us? How can social justice be served by this reconsideration?
Let’s see what we can learn from the wild spaces we visit this year–some hiding in plain sight, on the Montclair State University campus.
How can we offer these free events?
Each academic year RIGS nominates its Fellows who carry out a global, interdisciplinary project with other members and external partners. Click link for more information about RIGS Fellows.