2007-08 American Writers/American Places

Red Barn

Toward a Poetics and a Practice of Sustainability

The primary task of American citizenship and of American writing, Henry David Thoreau suggested, was to continue to discover America — “to discover the discovery” — not as an affair of conquest, colonization and exploitation of nature but as a humanistic exploration of new possibilities of selfhood and community deeply informed by the profound lessons nature has to teach.

In Walden and other writings, Thoreau identified the principal problem of modernity before modernity had begun — the problem of achieving what we would now call a sustainable balance between the aspirations of culture and the limits of natural resources and the environment. The first and longest chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy.” It is about living within one’s means. Thoreau knew that “sustainability” was not purely a practical matter, that living within one’s means was a figurative as well as a literal challenge, a challenge to the individual as well as to the community, a challenge to the imagination as well as to reason, a challenge to art as well as to science. And, finally, Thoreau knew — like Emerson and Whitman — that understanding the past and understanding the future were the same venture. In fact, the past sustains the future — or the future fails, just as nature sustains culture — or culture fails. (learn more)

Schedule of Events:

"The Particulars of Place"
Jane Brox
Oct. 3, 2007
7:30 p.m.
Rooke Recital Hall,
Weis Music Building

"The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas,
and the Coming Death of Americas Coastal Cities."
Mike Tidwell
Feb. 5, 2008
7 p.m.
Bucknell Hall

"Compression Wood"
Franklin Burroughs
April 9, 2008
7:30 p.m.
Bucknell Hall

The Charles H. Watts II Humanities Institute was established in 2006 by the CTW Foundation and its officers to honor the memory of Charles H. Watts II, Bucknell’s 11th president from 1964-76 and then trustee from 1997-2001. The Institute honors President Watts’ love of the humanities, his dedication to learning, and his exceptional leadership at Bucknell by providing annual support for the interdisciplinary study of a selected topic of interest in the humanities.