We’re All Critters in the Garden: Environmental Humanities Department hosts first-ever movie screening, showing Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke

The Environmental Humanities (EH) Initiative recently held its first outdoor film screening, where students gathered around a projector in front of Reed’s newest living-learning community, Garden House, to watch Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997). As the waxing gibbous moon came out from behind the pines, the hosts of the night, professors Kristin Scheible of the Religion Department and Rob Ribera of the English Department, led a discussion on student reactions to the film and its perspective on the nature of change.

The lines between humanity and nature are growing ever thinner as the world burns, floods, and shakes around us. There’s a certain terror that comes with realizing how fragile the systems that guide us (e.g. government, college) can be. Solastalgia — the struggle of reconciling the differences between the home in your memory and your home as it is now — captures the nauseating unknown of that worry, asking the question, how do we begin to understand or cope with the disasters originating from Earth and human greed itself? In her book, A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong provides one answer to this question, “We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence [through art]. . . . We still seek heroes” (p. 141).

However, Princess Mononoke is no feel-good movie where the good guys defeat the bad. Not even the labels of “good” and “evil” are pointed out. Instead, all manners of creative and destructive forces tangle are seen. Scheible noted the complex moral universe in Shinto and Buddhist thought, where animacy and samsara complicate the characterization of good and bad. Hatred is the disease, the corruption. Ribera warned watchers that the animated tale “doesn’t give you an answer to any problem at all,” and that both the characters and the audience are “just trying to figure out what’s going on with the Earth and forest around them.” 

Instead of thinking of the world in terms of narrative progression and dichotomies, Environmental Humanities provides us with a different model of sense-making. One in particular is the focus of an EH/Religion conference this semester taught by Scheible: Entanglement. Think of yourself as part of an unfathomably large root system, where everything is constantly growing and giving, and people are taking and giving and growing right along with everyone else (and everything — though there’s not much difference between you, your roommate, a wolf, a tree, and a rock here). While what Armstrong says about seeking heroes and stories may be true, Ursula K. Le Guin captures the scale of entangled storytelling beautifully in her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction:

There is room enough [in the bag] to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still, there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars. (p. 37)

And in this bag, in this tangle of roots, everybody has a relationship of giving and receiving to the fellow roots around them. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi bryologist (moss!) and writer, describes this net as a “web of reciprocity,” where, “our special gift, our responsibility that we offer to the plants in return . . . Our ancient teachers tell us that [this duty/dharma] is respect and stewardship. Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life. We are taught that using a plant shows respect for its nature, and we use it in a way that allows it to continue bringing its gifts” (The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Moss: Gathering Moss, p. 110).

As students, it is all too easy to live entirely in the academic universe inside your head, on your computer screen, and in your classrooms. Truly, when was the last time you went outside (or even stared out your window) for the sole purpose of being? As in, when was the last time people tried to remember that, first and foremost, one is a critter of the Earth? Curled up between the stars, the darting bats, the moths, and the fifty or so other folks gathered in the Garden to watch Miyazaki’s story unfold, a sense of student-self eased and tangled with a sense of the broader critter.

Take some time to pay attention to what is right in front of you — what is all around you. Whether enabling the rebirth of the spirit of life and death or simply moving a slug from the sidewalk to the grass (which may very well be the same task!), remember the gift (and duty) of reciprocity.