Mad Gardens
Compassion and Education: An
Environmental Journal of Literature, Art
and Culture for Smith College
Northampton, MA
May, 2010
by Rebecca Benson and Veronica Kratman
An Environmental Journal of Literature, Art and Culture
1
Abstract
In the last few years environmental issues have finally come to be seen as
problems that address all aspects of society. From the air we breathe, to the water we
drink, food we eat and places we go every decision we make has consequences in the
environment and our environment effects those decisions. The idea for creating an
interdisciplinary environmental journal stemmed out of this knowledge and from my
academic career at Smith College. This paper will show the process Veronica Kratman
and I took in creating Mad Gardens an interdisciplinary environmental literature, arts and
culture journal and the finished product of the magazine. We felt that there is a need for a
publication at Smith, which looks at environmental issues from a unique and liberal arts
perspective in order to address the statement above. We wanted to keep the magazine
online, which proved very difficult at times but was an important part of the process. We
went about creating the magazine by seeking submissions, editing, compiling, formatting
and publishing. The result of the project is a beautiful online environmental magazine
highlighting the ways in which liberal arts students from many disciplines interact with
their environment. We immediately saw a growing interest in reading and submitting to
the magazine and we hope the results will bring about a permanent organization for Mad
Gardens on campus.
Introduction
We are now at a crucial point in history where people must understand their
intrinsic relationship to our world. The students participating in the Environmental
Science and Policy seminar realized that one of our failures as scientists and activists in
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2
society is communication. People come from so many different directions, families,
communities, and financial backgrounds yet we all need to understand our environment
and what happens with in it. The task though, of explaining biodiversity, conservation,
global warming etc… is not an easy one. We have seen that being presented with dire
fear enhancing facts, neutral data, or demands does not always work in communicating
and starting a global and inclusive conversation. David Orr in his book Earth in Mind
presents the reader with ideas on what the communication surrounding environmental
topics needs to turn into: “If saving species and environments is our aim, we will need a
broader conception of science and a more inclusive rationality that joins empirical
knowledge with the same emotions that make us love and sometimes fight.” 1
Smith College currently provides the student body with an Environmental
Science & Policy Newsletter and a literary magazine, Labrys. The two have no
administrative connection, and ultimately reach very different audiences. During our
class discussions in the EVS Seminar we repeat many times the urgent need for an
informed and caring public. In thinking about our class discussion, Orr’s comments, and
our own attitudes toward Environmental Studies we decided to take on a project that
speaks to the public, specifically our peers at Smith and in the Northampton Community.
We created an online journal for Smith about arts, culture and the environment, by that
we mean, everything in the journal will be related to the environment and communicating
about environmental issues – they just may be in essays, poems, or photographs not excel
worksheets. We see this as a place where science and art (humanities) can come together
in an interdisciplinary fashion– one of the core values of Smith – in a tangible way. Orr
1
Orr, David. Earth in Mind. Washington DC: First Island Press. 2004. 31.
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also states, “It [problem solving] requires institutional flexibility and creativity, which in
turn presuppose a commitment to make knowledge count for the long-term health of local
communities and people. It requires overcoming the outmoded idea that learning occurs
exclusively in classrooms, laboratories, and libraries.” 2 This magazine gives students a
new medium in which to express concern and care for the environment. It is a way to
teach each other what we know and love about the world around us in more expanded
ways than we are used to.
Methods
Timeline
We created a timeline, which was essential because publishing is all about deadlines. We
did not want current events to pass over and we wanted to have a final issue before the
end of the school year in May.
1. Research other journals that create a space for curiosity and care for the
environment
2. Figure out exactly what materials and literature we are looking to share in our
journal, and the message to communicate.
3. Seek submissions from the Smith community to build our first issue. (Due April
14-16).
4. Find the template and program we will use to create the online journal.
5. Build the journal (April 16-May 7)
2
Ibid 98.
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6. Have it ready for the public by the time this project is due.
Medium
In order to create this magazine we began by talking about ideas for exactly what we
wanted to establish. Veronica and I decided from the start that the journal should be
online. We wanted this for many reasons, because it would be easily accessible, because
it would be readily available and in order to save paper from printing. We wanted to
make a statement that this magazine would be online, because we believe that online, and
video media are the direction in which environmental journalism should be heading.
Submissions
We then made a plan for the type of submissions we wanted to include. We decided that
since this was our first publication we would accept almost any type of submission
related to the environment; this included stories, personal essays, class essays, poetry, art
(photographed), photographs, reviews and pieces in all different languages.
Solicitation
We then created a flier to post around campus and town to seek submissions. The flier
called for: neuroscientists, linguists, artists, writers, comedians and dancers (Appendix 1).
We also sent out an email (Appendix 2) to each one of our classes, our house presidents,
a few other house presidents, and to Joanne Benkley of the Environmental Science and
Policy department who kindly sent it out to all the students on her e-mail list. Lastly we
made announcement in classes and at house meetings requesting submissions. I was also
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able to speak with some of my colleagues from the summer I work at E: The
Environmental Magazine, this helped garner ideas on what kind of writing we were
looking for and how to get the word out about our magazine through marketing.
Creating Journal Online
The most important part of our project was actually putting the journal together so it
would be accessible to everyone before the end of the year. We planned to pick an easy to
use online publisher to create a real magazine online not just a blog or a newsletter. This
proved to be one of the hardest parts of the project, yet also the most valuable and will be
discussed in greater detail in the discussion section of this paper.
Editing and Design
After we compiled the submissions we had to edit the writing, fix the sizes of pictures,
and find a way to make everything fit together in a cohesive fashion.
Publishing and Promoting
We wanted to “go live” with the magazine online before the semester was over and
succeeded in doing so. We sent emails out again to all classes to present our finished
product. We also handed out small business-like cards with the website so people could
find it easily.
Results
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The result of our project is most clear in viewing Mad Gardens itself (Appendix
3). Mad Gardens is a beautiful 19 page environmentally focused arts, literature and
culture magazine. The effect was immediate as we saw a response when we first unveiled
our work at our presentation. Audience members only had advice on how to make Mad
Gardens more accessible to the Smith community and advice on seeking submissions.
Those who had submitted were extremely excited to have been a part of it, and were glad
to have a place to showcase their work. Submitters seeing their work next to another
related piece of work were surprised at the connections. For example between
photographs and chemistry papers, they saw the ability to communicate about the
environment through different mediums.
From the start we had some questions concerning the different types of majors
who submit to Mad Gardens. We wondered if it would lean to far in the humanities
direction or the hard science direction. Surprisingly we ended up with an equal number
of submissions across the board, with the linking factor being that many submitters have
a minor in Environmental Science and Policy. This can be seen clearly in Figure 1.
In addition we had questions about the types of submissions we would receive.
Submissions mainly came in the form of, photographs, essays and one poem yet all the
essays deal with very different topics, some are academic, some personal and one is a
book review. Many of the photographs create short photographic essays, while some only
depict one moment or place. The submissions were compiled and arranged by Veronica
and I , we hope to maintain a variety and mixture of submissions while keeping a
cohesive undercurrent of environmentalism. The different submissions can be seen in
Figure 2.
An Environmental Journal of Literature, Art and Culture
Figure 1. Showing the different majors of
submitters who contributed to Mad Gardens.
Submission Types
Photographs
Short Essays
Poem
Figure 2. Showing the different
mediums of submissions we received.
Discussion
Veronica and I are so pleased with how Mad Gardens turned out. We envisioned
an online space where everyone at Smith could communicate about the environment in
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An Environmental Journal of Literature, Art and Culture
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whatever way they felt comfortable and might encourage someone else to think in a new
and different way. From the beginning I was nervous that explaining our idea to others
would be challenging, but I was proved wrong. Everyone who we talked to at Smith
about Mad Gardens understood and appreciated our idea. We could see this in viewing
what people sent in as submissions for Mad Gardens and in speaking with people who
had looked at the magazine when it was finished. We feel that we picked the right format,
the right medium and the right concept for expressing our joint vision and understanding
of environmental journalism.
Although we are extremely happy with Mad Gardens we definitely faced some
difficult challenges in creating the magazine. Our most difficult challenge was
publishing. We were adamant about keeping Mad Gardens online but still having it in a
magazine type format and not set up as a blog. We choose to use issuu.com because in
looking through the other magazines published through the site we saw the quality we
were hoping for and expecting in publishing our work. At first this proved to be very
difficult and required much more knowledge of html and code writing than either
Veronica or I are experienced in. We then tried out another website called openzine.com.
I was unable to attach this as an appendix because we did not publish it and therefore
only if the member logs in, is it visible. We were able to show this format during our
presentation as an example, but we realized we were not exactly happy with how it
looked, as it was not what we had intended. So we turned back to issuu.com. We
struggled for some time with figuring out the html language and loading our document on
to issuu. Eventually we figured out it that it was a matter of reducing the size of many of
our pictures so we spent time tinkering with the sizes of finals. Overall we ended up
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spending a great many more hours than planned on editing, designing and putting the
piece online. In general though we realize this web-design process takes time and we
hope to learn different web-design programs to help us make an even better looking Mad
Gardens.
Veronica and I are very devoted to this project. I will be graduating this year but
Veronica has one more year at Smith where she will continue to work on Mad Gardens
and help turn it into an official organization on campus. I will be continuing work on
Mad Gardens after I graduate. I plan to take an Adobe Photoshop and web-design class
this summer so I can become more familiar with online publishing. We hope to have
another issue out in September.
We would like to include more mediums in future issues of Mad Gardens
including but certainly not limited to:
1. Interviews with students, faculties and important figures in the field.
2. Video clips.
3. A conversation section: This would mean asking about three people
(professors/student etc…) from different disciplines to come together and discuss
a current environmental issue of our time.
4. Personal statements.
5. Film and book reviews.
We want to involve faculty more and hopefully get the journal into the hands of
CEEDS and Professor Guswa. Eventually we hope this journal will become something
that all departments know about and encourage their students to contribute to. We believe
this journal can be a place for people to do more than share thoughts about the
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environment or specific things they are doing in the field of environmental studies (ES&P
newsletter) and more than (poetry and essays about anything, including topics that don’t
concern the environment) and rather a place where one can become engaged and
informed in environmental issues through different medias. We want our journal to reach
the student body as a whole, as a place where there is enjoyment from reading about
environmental news, and from this enjoyment we hope to inspire students to become
more environmentally active within their own lives by realizing different ways to
improve, interact and communicate with sustainable issues.
We recommend for anyone who like to become involved in Mad Gardens to
email us at evs300art@gmail.com . For any future students hoping to do a project
involving web publishing, make sure to do careful research and practice web design. For
anyone who would like to focus on a project that deals with environment and the arts,
there is no better time than now to use all tools of communication to stimulate an
engaging conversation surrounding environmental issues.
Appendix 1
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Environmentalist:
Artist?
Writer?
Comedian?
Dancer?
Neuroscientist?
Linguist?
Submit your work to:
Mad
Gardens
The new Smith College online journal of art, culture and
environment
Send submissions to: evs300art@gmail.com
An Environmental Journal of Literature, Art and Culture
Appendix 2
12
th
Submit by April 14 for appearance in the spring issue!
“If saving species and environments is our aim, we will need a
broader conception of science and a more inclusive rationality
that joins empirical knowledge with the same emotions that
make us love and sometimes fight.” – David Orr from his book,
Earth in Mind
Dear Smithies,
As part of our Environmental Seminar we are creating an online
Environmental, Arts and Culture journal for Smith College. Our hope is
that it will come to be a publication, which expresses views and ideas
of the environment through many different lenses. We need your help
in getting started. We are sending out this call for submissions in order
to have our first completed issue by the end of the school year.
Submissions may include, but are not limited to:
Poems
Short Essays or Stories
Excerpts from class papers
Photos
Art than can be photographed
All photograph submissions should be set at 300 dpi.
All pieces should be relating to our common goal of educating about
conservation, preservation, and inspiration relating to the natural
environment.
Please get your submissions in as soon as possible with a fixed
submission date of Wednesday, April 14th.
Also, If anyone would like to learn more about the journal or become
more involved in anyway please let us know, we are hoping to create a
Club for the journal and have it continue at Smith for years to come.
Thank you!
Rebecca Benson ‘10 and Veronica Kratman ‘11
An Environmental Journal of Literature, Art and Culture
Appendix 3
http://issuu.com/evsart/docs/madgardens
Please visit us online!!
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