Originally published by Akiko Busch in The Boston Globe on July 13, 2025
Akiko Busch is the author of “From the Millpond to the Sea,” to be published in November.
A few years back I taught a class on environmental literature at a small liberal arts college. My students were bright, alert, inquisitive. While fully engaged with social media and the immaterial digital world, they were hoping to explore human experience of the very real natural landscape.
The topics that came up in classroom discussions about ecology were not especially new and ranged from environmental ethics and definitions of wilderness to the human use of natural resources and the rights of the natural world. Yet if these are basic ideas, my students’ scrutiny of them was anything but.
I’m a baby boomer. My students were Gen Z. We had different views on things. I expected our classroom discussions to be lively. But still. I heard their thoughts on the reading with outright admiration and stunned incredulity. The whiplash could be unnerving.
Consider poor Basho! The 17th-century Japanese poet walking in the cold rain wearing his sandals and paper coat was apparently an elitist. Wendell Berry — poet, farmer, agrarian essayist, and activist — is crystal clear on his practice of Christian faith, but my students argued that he was actually a Buddhist. And certainly it was jarring to think of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists as imperialist oppressors. Henry Thoreau (no filter!) didn’t have a chance. While rapturous in considerations of solitude, he socialized and dined with friends — often! Obviously, a codependent. And could we read Norman Maclean’s classic “A River Runs Through It” — a story about two brothers, family, God, and trout fishing — from an eco-feminist perspective?
These reactions to the literature startled me, to put it mildly. But it was hard not to see a certain imagination at work here. For all his humility and deficient outerwear, Basho was an educated man, which likely did qualify him as an elitist of his time. Berry himself identifies as a marginal Christian, and his thinking is not exactly conventional; and perhaps there are beliefs in which these two spheres of faith converge. And of course Thoreau infuriates all of us, especially those of us who most admire him. As with so many original thinkers, he contradicts himself constantly and with endless enthusiasm. “He is such a geek. A total nerd. But I still love him,” one student concluded. Mark Twain had an admiration for new technologies of the time yet lamented the loss of river life, conflicting sensibilities familiar to us today.
My students learned about human inconsistencies in belief and temperament. Discovering the ambiguities and minor hypocrisies of those we hold in high regard is part of education. Theirs and mine. Facing up to our own partialities and discriminations comes into it as well. Maybe more to the point, their lack of interest in dogma allowed for unconstrained and broad interpretation. A contempt for established doctrine led them to evaluate the reading in ways that were — needless to say — new to me.
Which is probably as it should be. Confounding questions and alternative perspectives have a rightful place in environmental thinking today. How we think and what we do in the natural world now is often confused, complex, contradictory. Beliefs and behaviors defy one another constantly. Knowledge and experience are often at odds. Our ideals and practices are often freakishly out of alignment.
So what’s a college professor to do?
Meet our students where they are, as the saying goes today. Although we may all still be in the woods, it helps if we can partner up to learn the names of the trees, the shapes of the leaves. And as a new academic year begins, I’d like to think my own abiding regard for the canon can find a convergence with the unorthodox perspectives offered by my students.
Actually, it could even make for the kind of thinking that comes close to what Thoreau advocated more than 150 years ago: not knowledge so much as a “sympathy with intelligence.” He elaborates only by suggesting “that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” an inclusiveness in sensibility that my students and I might even agree on.
