differences of birth. It is the optimism of human ecology that differences will be overcome in the common project, including the solecism that human beings are somehow different from our fellow species and exempt from the laws of nature. It would be easy for COA to follow other universities on the road to the localism, relativism and multiculturalism that characterize the postmodern condition. Postmodernism was the right accompaniment for the disintegration of Cold War dialectics, the ethnicities and localisms of the late twentieth century. But now we have turned the corner of another century, the 757s of Jihad have challenged the towers of globalization, the religious right has captured a presidential election, and the world has again become a theater of grand narratives. To understand and participate, human ecology must rediscover the “big picture,” as it says on the course evaluations. Not that we want to encourage France-bashing, but it’s time to put Lyotard aside and resume work on human ecology as a new grand narrative that will allow humans to see their commonality again. Otherwise the subgroup narratives will go on destroying each other into the new millennium. We need to work out a universalizing discourse that will reassert complete human interdependence linked with the demands of our material co-existence on this planet. The new technologies have given us the illusion that humans can transcend the limits of nature. Stem cells and cloning, plastic surgery, Viagra, liposuction, extreme makeover, steroids and Botox—it suddenly looks like we can buy our way out of natural selection and live as “cyborgs” in a nature of our own. OK, let’s go to Botox Night, but in the morning let’s remember that bodily decay and death are among the highest order of universals that bind us to one another and to the earth. The greatest gift of this century to COA is the presence of students from all over the globe. They will be indispensable in assuring that the new human ecology will be culturally and philosophically inclusive. Once it might have been possible for a Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin suburbanite to find the truth all by himself, looking beneath the surface of Walden Pond; but the world is more complex now and teamwork is
needed. As human ecologists we should remember the importance of gathering in a single room so we will all be there when someone leaps up, Roc-like, to draw a big circle around everything. We will have to get unsophisticated and deprofessionalized, find our childish naivete, our amateur spirit, our capacity for belief, and rededicate ourselves to the uncool commonalities that make us one.
Andrea Lepcio ’79 replies... Bill’s question of the grand narrative arrived in my mailbox just in time. The Republicans were coming to town—talk about storytelling. They spent a week making pretend they were our saviors while pushing New Yorkers out of the way, buzzing us with aircraft reminiscent of the days around 9/11, and otherwise disrupting the flow of commerce and art. The citizens responded with an abundance of protests and happenings. In search of New Yorkers’ stories, some friends and I conducted random interviews throughout the city in the month leading up to the convention. Inspired by Martin Luther’s posting of ninety-five theses five hundred years ago, we sought to exhibit the concerns of ninety-five New Yorkers (www.95voices.org). My favorite interview was Keith, who asked of the terrorists: “What do they need?” Need, after all, is the beginning of every story. All narratives—grand or humble—have authors. As the election demonstrated, who is telling the story matters. What is being told and not told matters. Any story can embrace or isolate, delude or liberate, depending on the writer’s objective. In the fall of 1976, my first year at COA, a magical gathering occurred in Susie Lerner’s Women in Nature class. I’m missing a few names, but Cathy Ramsdell ’78 and Loie Hayes ’79 were there along with visiting students Teri Goldberg and Jennifer West. John O. Biderman ’77 was the sole man. Beauties all, glistening with wonder and hope, we came together ripe for questioning and discovering. We read Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Gail Sheehy (now an acquaintance in New York). We responded COA | 41