The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
Shove, “is in danger of being abandoned in favour of showering on a daily or twice daily basis.” By itself, this English adjustment might be no big deal, but it’s a small part of an energy-intensive shift in international comfort standards, and that is huge. This also suggests that standards of cleanliness are never universal or permanent. American students now expect free and unlimited water for showers in their residence halls. At one time, however, a trustee at a college in the prairies of the Midwest thought that the purchase of a single tin bathtub was an unnecessary luxury for students. The extravagance only seemed justified when he discovered that the college could charge students a nickel a bath. If today’s colleges charged students for water by the gallon, it might help teach the costs incurred by lingering luxuriously in the shower, and it might be a first step toward full-cost accounting (and accountability) for all the resources in students’ lives.20
We shower ourselves with water, in an artificial waterfall created by culture. Though our morning shower never seems like “getting back to nature,” it’s one place where we could wake up to nature, a place where we could practice mindfulness about our “ordinary consumption.” Usually when we think about consumption, we think about buying stuff or going out to restaurants, movies, or concerts. “Ordinary consumption,” on the other hand, is so routine and repetitive—like water and heat, electricity and embodied energy—that we don’t normally consider it a part of our consumer behavior. In the shower, then, we can fully enjoy the comforts and convenience of the steamy stream, but we can also begin to immerse ourselves in the paradigm shift of conservation that will characterize the coming culture of permanence.
Mirror Image: The Nature of Looking Good
After performing their cleansing rituals, Joe and Jo College usually take part in rituals of self-inspection and self-improvement in front of a mirror. The word “mirror” itself comes from the Latin root mirari—to admire—making a mirror, at its root, a meeting place for a mutual admiration society of one.
Yet while its smooth surface simply reflects the images of objects, a mirror also performs cultural work, reflecting the patterns of American society. It is a visual echo, and, like television, a way of seeing—and not seeing.
As a matter of physics, most mirrors reflect exactly the patterns of light and shade that hit them. But as a matter of culture, there can be significant distortions, because mirrors reflect not just the way we are but also the ways we hope (or fear) to be. For example, when we look at a mirror in the morning, we are trained by years of advice and advertising to see not just our own reflection, but also its relationship to ideal images in magazines or on TV. We are trained to focus on particulars: We don’t usually see the whole picture because we’re concentrating on so-called problem areas that popular culture has pinpointed for us. One student’s mirror highlights his pimples and the size of his nose, while another’s magnifies her worry about her makeup and hair. Mirrors permit us to objectify ourselves, to look at ourselves as others see us, rather than as we truly are. American culture teaches us to be attractive, and to dress for success, and the mirror provides the final exam to see if we have succeeded.
But mirrors can’t do everything. Although they reveal the social self, they divert our attention from the natural self. Contemplating teeth, zits, facial hair, and the dark circles under our eyes, we forget to appreciate the intricacy of the organism that stands before us. We forget, for example, the marvel of our eyes, which allow us to use a mirror effectively. An immense evolutionary advantage, they provided our ancestors with the hand-eye coordination that has made Homo sapiens such a successful species. Containing about half the sensory receptors in the body, our eyes use about 30 percent of the brain’s cortex to see that bleary face in the mirror. But we don’t usually perceive the amazing ecological adaptation staring back at us. Eyeing the mirror to check out the surfaces of the self, we miss the nature of the body and the nature of its connections to the rest of nature. Although he wasn’t talking about mirrors, Thoreau once wrote that he wanted to be “nature looking into nature.” That’s what happens in mirrors of America. But because we bring our cultural preoccupations to the mirror, we often turn out to be nature looking away from nature.21
The Student Body
The student body in the bathroom mirror is both natural and cultural. The human body is, of course, a highly evolved product of natural selection with bifocal vision, bipedal locomotion, and nimble hands with opposable thumbs. It comes with a big brain that supports complex thinking, toolmaking, communication, culture, and even college class work—not to mention autonomic functions like breathing and blood flow. It’s a mammal’s body in the mirror, with warm blood and temperature control, an internal combustion engine we call the digestive system, and a tangle of bloodlines and nerves that bring it all together. Right now, this animal body is brushing the teeth that make it omnivorous, able to eat both animal and plant life. But this is only the beginning. The natural body is in constant intercourse with nature.
We often speak about “people and nature” as though the body is bounded by its skin, but this is a dangerous illusion. The body in the looking glass is constantly sharing elements with its environment, amassing atoms from everywhere. As ecologist Christopher Uhl suggests in Developing Ecological Consciousness, “If you were to put an ink dot on a map of the Earth to designate the origins of the trillions of atoms that make up your body, the map would be covered in ink. Our atoms have journeyed to us literally from everywhere on the planet. We are a part of their cycles.” We are dependent on the Earth’s interdependence, and we forget it at our peril.22
The natural body depends on the natural world, not just abstractly, but viscerally, and not just occasionally, but constantly. For example, the body we see in the morning mirror is breathing, inhaling the oxygen that fuels the combustion of carbohydrates in the body. People can live about three weeks without food, and about three days without water, but only three minutes without air. We don’t think much about that, however, because air is invisible, because it’s not yet a commodity, and because it’s automatic. However, if we had to buy the air we breathe, we would pay a lot more attention. If all of us needed to inhale “Perri-air” (as Mel Brooks does in Spaceballs) or visit an oxygen bar for our daily requirements, we’d be more mindful. If the three thousand gallons of air we take in each day were as expensive as gasoline, we’d notice. But air is still free—an ecosystem service provided by the planet—so we ignore it entirely (and allow industries to pollute it). Likewise, if we had to choose to breathe, we’d keep it in our consciousness, but the autonomic nervous system takes care of air for us. As Christopher Uhl suggests, “Breathing happens on its own; you are not breathing so much as you are being breathed.”
Even more amazing, the body we see in the mirror doesn’t just exist in a natural habitat, it is a habitat for nature, filled with microorganisms that are essential to its functioning. Recent studies show that 90 percent of the cells in our bodies aren’t ours: They ’re bacteria. In the microbiome that is us, some bacteria are helping to convert plant sugars to usable energy for us, some are making vitamins essential to our health, some are neutralizing chemicals that could cause cancer and other diseases, and some are making food for other bacteria, including the cells that line the colon. These life-forms help shape the form of human life. Every minute of every day, we have a relationship with nature more intimate than our relationship with our families, friends, and partners. By nature, we are always in relationship with nature.23
The relationship, however, is not always harmonious, so we protect ourselves against microbes that have proven deadly in the past. In the United States, vaccinations are practically mandatory, so almost all college students are armed against the natural flourishing of organisms that thrive by causing disease. But we rarely stop there: On any given day a lot of the bodies seen in college mirrors are teeming with antibiotics—a word that literally means “against life”—as we try to kill the living organisms that unsettle our digestive and respiratory