Reflections on Place and Relationships in Environmental Change

As part of the new course “Environmental Humanities and Global Health” introduced by Professor Kimberly Theidon in the Spring 2021 semester, Fletcher students were encouraged to engage the emergent trans-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities in analyzing and developing responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas that require the collaborative work of diverse scientists, medical practitioners, engineers, artists, lawyers, and other across a variety of fields.

For the Class Finale project, students chose an environmental issue affecting them, their loved ones, and their communities, and wrote a series of three papers directed to particular audiences in varying tone, style, medium, and genre.

In this finale, MALD student Kelsey Rowe offers a personal recollection and reflection on the environmental and human changes in her hometown.


Where I Grew Up
By Kelsey Rowe

I – Harleysville

when I was growing up
we heard so many stories


my mom grew up on a farm
her childhood narrated our bedtime

we heard about the time
      when she went to get the mail
as a two-year-old
and got lost in the grass

we heard about the time
      her dad slapped his pants
and a mouse fell out

the time my mother and a friend wandered off
      and were found at the top of the hay mow
which I’ve seen in farm stories so much
that it seems like a normal kid thing

the time the swinging stall door froze
      because the bull liked to stand under it
      and scratch his back
and it was so cold
the poop he left when he went outside
      was frozen by the time he came back in
my grandfather had to jump in the stall
      and chip away at the poop
jumping back out every time the bull charged the door

my childhood was full of stories of that farm
the pond
the trees
the cows and horses
the dogs
the gardens
the work

I never saw it, even though it’s in this county.

it’s a neighborhood now.

they cut down all the trees
tore down the barns
and put up a hundred copies of the same house

sometimes I wonder how that changed the water table
those acres went from supporting from one large family,
      their veggies and cows and horses
to a hundred small-ish families with pets and swimming pools

these ‘modern’ developments weigh so heavily on the land.

I grew up in a house
that was never a farm house

where I played with my brother in the woods
      and in the creek
we built forts and watched tadpoles
we sat
walked
looked at six-inch waterfalls
fought with pricker bushes
and wondered if what we’d just picked was aloe

now I’m living at home again and I realize
      that’s not actually woods
it’s a strip
a creek with a couple trees on either side
running from our mailbox to our neighbor’s barn
to the bigger creek down the hill

but it’s not woods

it hasn’t been woods for centuries.

when German settlers took this land they also took out the woods
cut down trees like they wanted to get rid of the sylvania

the Pennsylvania Dutch lived here for a few centuries
farmed this entire corner of Pennsylvania
turned this area into tracts of land
that got divided up
      and turned into housing plots
      when farming wasn’t profitable anymore

there are trees
but I don’t think they can talk to each other
I don’t think they can work together
to prevent insect attacks
to fight off spotted lantern flies

and anyway, they don’t have parent trees
      making sure they don’t grow too quickly
and sometimes branches break
      trunks split
or the deer rub their antlers too hard
      on the young trees
stripping the bark off

but we have yards
yards are important
you have to have one
and so we do


Read the rest of Kelsey’s finale project by downloading the PDF below.