Category Archives: Week 16: Conclusions

Thank you!

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I was so excited to start this class, and I can confidently say it did not disappoint! Before this class, I was very much in my own little bubble about mermaids, seeing their stories as a beautiful sacrifice for true love. Throughout this class, I was provoked to think deeper, to read the text, and to grasp what, why, and how a piece of text at hand is written. I learned that the interpretation of a piece of literature is endless.

Within these mermaid stories, I learned so much about how a myth can reveal so much about society at the time. With stories of Melusine and Undine, we uncovered themes of patriarchy and women’s agency (or lack thereof), and The little mermaid themes of immigration and homosexuality. With all stories holding a belief that nature is something so grand and different from humans.

To discover how the environment holds history by thinking of the ocean as an archive. I think this moment in class was one of my biggest takeaways. History is more than what we can see, read, or hear. To think about the environment as a piece of history. In discussions about the middle passage and the ocean holding the bodies of those who passed was really eye-opening. With this knowledge, I think I will forever look at history differently, being more interested in the forgotten details.

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to have this class, and I fear this class will forever linger in the back of my mind as I go forward in my academic career, analyzing literature. I feel so lucky to have a class that makes saying goodbye so hard.

Thank you so much for a lovely semester,

Kaila

Reflection

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Before taking this class my mermaid knowledge was not very deep. It was centralized around Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and “Splash” with other media off-shoots and some casual knowledge of non-western mermaids like Mami Wata. I picked up on the transgressive nature of the hybrid creatures as a kid and the one world existing next to another world, internalizing the “superiority”of the human world but really thinking Sebastian had a point when he said “life under the sea is better than anything they’ve got up there”. I still agree with Sebastian, but now having dove deeper into mermaid lore I understand the world of mermaids I was shown was only a reflection of the “up there”.

Mermaid stories tell us more about humans and about how we think about our environment and the ones we don’t have access to, than about mermaids. Studying some areas of the Blue Humanities has made me reframe how I see the land I inhabit and the water that has felt like a neutral space. The language used in western contemporary discussion is still centered on our land experience with, as often as we can, categorizing nature in straight lines and championing the importance of borders. This course taught me even more how deep the roots of colonization run, not just in a cultural or political sense. It has changed how we interpret and interact with what we consider nature, making lines and borders out of convenience and cruelty.

In the last few weeks of class with reading “The Deep” it has also reframed the concept of the mermaid story and the oral traditions that kept mermaids in the conversation. Yes it was helped along with Christianity, but not in the same light and I kind of love how the things mermaids were vilified for are one of the reasons we still love them and have them representing strength and connectivity. “The Deep” is an amazing and heartbreaking story that changed how I looked not only at the stories we read in class, but the nature (or environment) of creativity. Much like how land is designated as “my space” or “your space”, creating art and stories is a collective that does not exist in a vacuum. It is a layer upon layer, a story on top of a story.

Final Post

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Before starting this class I was unsure how vastly mermaids and merfolk stories correlated to our environment. Furthermore, my understanding of mermaids was limited to the more widely told Western stories such as “The Little Mermaid.” I entered this class with an open mind, ready to learn, and as each week passed I found myself bewildered by all that merfolk tales communicated about the world, and how we impact it and are impacted by it. It is due to this class that I have seen how humanity and the environment are so interconnected. Whether that be through history, language, societal expectations, and how people identify. 

I believe the moment that the class really was around week six during our reading of Melusine. I really started to understand exactly how people’s views on the environment shape our understanding of our world and how we tell stories. This insight also comes from our class practice in close reading, which indisputably helped in my understanding of the texts that we read. My close readings, especially from Melusine on, are what has helped me most in my learning of this class. There is an art to taking what is simply on a page and making observations and an understanding of it. 

Moreover, I appreciate that we were able to look beyond Western stories for learning about merfolk and the environment. As we have learned from this class, our tellings of history are flawed because we do not have perspectives beyond the ones we deemed were worth telling. Yet history is not just what is in the textbooks we receive in school, history is in art, architecture, and especially literature. So to be able to get a more rounded view of merpeople folktales and the environment of other peoples and cultures, is the opportunity to learn a history yet unheard by a majority. It is from this class that I have learned about what it means to read stories in critical and thoughtful ways. I have learned to look beyond the conventional perceptions of stories and question what the story is asking of us.   

Final Thoughts

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At the start of this class, my knowledge of mermaids was very limited since it mainly consisted of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and H20: Just Add Water. Within the first week of class, I learned that mermaids have a rich and complex history that has been circulated for centuries. Literature such as Melusine, The Deep, and many others showed me that natural environments are as alive and vivid as humans, removing the passivity of nature and anthropomorphic ideology that was taught to me in previous classes. This helped me open my eyes to see that not only do humans hold history, but that nature itself is an archive of history that allows us to learn so much about a society when we look at its environment and the stories they tell about it. Looking at literature and stories about mermaids as a way to learn about the environment helps us connect to nature, since they are able to exist as a mediator between humans and nature as a result of their hybridity. These beings become more than just a mythical creature and transform into a representation of the problems that affect humans and the environment. 

Using mermaid literature from a multitude of different cultures also helped engage the idea that there are voices and histories that have been silenced since they don’t line up with a traditional Western idea of history. Looking at these other tales then gives marginalized communities a chance to be heard and recognized, since their history is often deemed as “folklore.” In turn, we are taught to look at the environment as more than just a backdrop and see that it is a place full of life worth conserving and learning from. Rather than simply learning from history books, we can look to nature as a way to discover more about ourselves and events from the past. Whether it’s the Ocean or a forest, this class has shown the importance of connecting to the environment and being grounded in nature as a form of learning. 

Besides highlighting how awesome mermaids are, the course has ultimately taught me that humans cannot and should not see themselves as separate from the environment around them. We exist in the context of our surroundings, and our actions have a direct impact on our environment. Subsequently, we must look at nature as being part of our lives since it’s something that we interact with daily. Seeing nature as a separate entity only serves to further destroy it since it is only viewed as a resource and not as a place full of history.

Final Blog

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I honestly didn’t know what to expect going into this class. I knew it was an environmental literature class, but after finding out we focus on that through the lens of mermaids I was even more excited. Before finding out we had a theme of mermaids, I thought this class would just be based on writing about nature and talk of climate change but I ended up getting so much more out of it! I really enjoyed this class and I think that’s mostly because of how much I learned through our discussions. Every text we read showed me a new way of thinking about the environment, human responsibility, history, and power. Even when I didn’t fully understand a reading at first, our conversations helped me see it differently. 

If I had to name my biggest takeaway from this class, it would be that humans and nature are NOT separate. This idea sounds simple at first, but it completely changes how you see the world. So many of the texts we read pushed back against the idea that humans exist over here and “nature” exists over there. Instead, they kept showing how tangled together everything actually is and how our choices, economies, stories, histories, and the land itself are all connected as one.

Before this class, I think I unconsciously saw nature as something you go into, visit, protect, or escape to. Now I see it as something I am already inside of all the time. What we eat, what we buy, where we live, how we travel, and even what we value all shape the environment in real ways. At the same time, the environment shapes us and our health, culture, fears, and futures. There is no clean line between the two.

That’s why this idea is so important. If we believe humans and nature are separate, it becomes easier to exploit land, ignore environmental damage, and treat environmental issues as optional or distant. But once you realize we’re part of the same system, environmental harm is no longer something happening “out there.” It’s something happening to us, too. That shift makes responsibility feel personal . 

This class taught me that environmental stories aren’t just about trees, oceans, or animals, they’re about people, power, memories and connection. I’m leaving this class with a new perspective and I now know how important it is for us as a society to change our cultures to protect the earth in which we depend on to survive.

Mermaids and the Enviorment: A Reflection

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In my first introduction to this class, I was skeptical in regards to how a “mythical” creature such as a mermaid could teach students about the environment. I quickly realized I had underestimated their teachings. Mermaids have shown me how much of an effect humans have on the environment when we ignore its warnings. The Ocean itself – so vast and limitless – contains resources that have sustained human beings since the creation of our kind. Our selfish habits have had negative impacts with not only the Ocean, but also climate, land, and other organisms. Using mermaids as a lens for retrospective thinking, we can see how our choices affect others’ homes. Our actions shape our future. What will become of us if we do not limit our exploitation of Earth’s resources?

Mermaids not only allow us to view the environment in a different way, but they also have shown me how humans form relationships with their environment and people. Mermaids are connected with the water in a way modern humans have forgotten. We first evolved through water, we traveled by water, we are water. It is the mermaids who reminded me and I’m sure many others of our unique history as a people, filled with unique cultures and identities, connected by Ocean. Mermaids represent the unknown, what is yet to be discovered. Their thirst for knowledge and journey, to a world they have never known, is a direct representation of humans seeking out what they cannot possess. Why should we as modern humans claim ownership of an Ocean, when mermaids do not claim ownership of unknown land? 

Mermaids have given me such a strong reflection on human exploitation and the boundaries created by others meant to be restrictive. Why must we abandon our Ocean history for a “superior” form of knowledge? Why do we focus on what we can gain, rather than give respect to what has been provided? How can we, as modern humans, reshape our beliefs and language to allow Ocean back into our everyday lives? What other mermaid history and knowledge is out there, waiting to be taught to modern humans?