Slow Digest: A World of Gifts, Not Commodities

This week’s edition of Slow Digest was written by Katie Waddell, C21 Managing Director, and researched by C21 Graduate Fellow Carson Pittman.

The valley
edge by edge
bare field by field
I walked through it through you

rain by rain
cold by cold
root absence
and the purposeful cold

Eye opened
slow
but what is slow

– Jean Valentine, “The Valley” 

In 2024, seven picnic tables emblazoned with seven poems were installed in seven national parks. The project, entitled “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” was a collaboration between the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the Poetry Society of America. The poems, including Jean Valentine’s, “The Valley,” were selected by Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. “You Are Here” is both a poetry anthology and a site-specific art project. Limón chose each poem for its resonance with a specific landscape: “The Valley” for Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, for example, June Jordan’s “Ecology,” about a marsh hawk, for Everglades National Park, and a poem about a mountain that appears to float as an ode Mount Rainier.

At the outset of the project Limón remarked, “Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature—of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”

Urgency is a funny thing in the 2020s. It’s quick and slippery. To attend to an urgent need now is to try to catch an eel with bare hands. And with the recent reductions in force across the federal government at the behest of the current administration, it’s unclear whether poetry, parks, or public infrastructure will continue to be supported as a public good at all.

America’s National Park Service (NPS) was established on August 25, 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act into law, creating a federal bureau within the Department of Interior. It was the beginning of something new: a unified system, 35 national parks and monuments brought together under one agency. Before this, America’s protected lands existed in a kind of limbo—scattered, vulnerable. The Organic Act gave the NPS a mission: to conserve natural and historic objects while ensuring that people could experience them without diminishing them for the future. Over a century later, the NPS manages more than 400 sites across 84 million acres in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories. It employs over 20,000 people, all working to safeguard the country’s natural and cultural heritage. (National Park Service).

Cuts to NPS and other federal agencies won’t just mean fewer picnic tables with poetry. The picture painted by a recent Sierra Club-produced article depicts overflowing toilets and missing hikers. An uptick in animal attacks, permanent closures, and vanishing tourism dollars could follow, to say nothing of the devastation to thousands of workers with specialized skills who can’t easily slot into a job in the private sector (per DOGE’s wishes).

But let’s renounce, for a moment, this American habit of framing success or failure in business terms and adopt a more poetic sensibility. What do we lose when lose access to national parks? According to the poems selected for “You Are Here,” we lose…

…the “black shambling bear ruffling its wild back” (Clifton),

“a powerful shuffling of feathers” (Jordan),

“what the trees do…whenever we’re not looking (Oliver)

And “this Earth whispering to our feet” (Alarcón).

The sense of impending loss has perhaps been most elegantly articulated by those with the most to lose. When Brian Gibbs, an NPS Education Park Ranger with the National Park Service, was terminated on February 14th, 2025, he expressed his grief in a social media post that was subsequently shared over 230,000 times:  

A month has passed since the federal government downsized the NPS. At the time of this writing, a different agency is currently facing the executive woodchipper—one loss soon eclipsed by yet another. It’s hard to keep up. The calls to action are so numerous, and so urgent, it can feel overwhelming (which is, by the way, a well-documented feature, not a bug). Yes, you should call and write your representatives. Yes, you should petition and protest. But, in the spirit of slow knowing, I’m going to advocate for one additional approach: put into practice the thing you are fighting to keep.

If you want to save our national parks, go to the national parks. Or any park. If you want poetry to be supported at any level, go to readings, buy first editions, and, above all, take time to read poetry. If you already do this, amazing, keep going. If you don’t, but want to, now is the time. The surest way to avoid burnout and buoy yourself for the long fight ahead is to continuously and deeply enjoy the thing you are fighting for. There are so many reasons for this. Joy fosters resilience (democracy is an endurance sport). Immediacy—fresh memories of the thing you cherish—clarify a sense of purpose and hasten resolve. Also, think of the agencies at risk right now—what do they support? Subsidized access to education, books, arts and culture, nature, and recreation, among other things. Their existence frames your access to uncommodified enjoyment of life as a right. They offer alternatives to the endless cycles of production and consumption upon which our economy (and fetishization of capitalist ideology) depends. They remind us, to echo Ben Gibbs’ sentiment, that we live in a world of gifts, not commodities; that gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, and not power, money, or fear.

C21 has some events coming up that offer, as gifts, opportunities for reading, writing, and attending to the natural world. All free and open to the public. We hope you’ll join us.

What Winter Did to Us: A Nature & Poetry Walk 

• Wednesday, April 3, 3:30-5:00 PM
• Meets at Curtin Hall, 1st Floor Lobby

Join Sociocultural Programming and the Center for 21^st Century Studies for a nature and poetry walk celebrating the work of Ada Limón, 24^th Poet Laureate of the United States. 

Spring is coming to Milwaukee. So is Ada Limón. Prepare for both with a patient, plodding ramble through Downer Woods, featuring reflective writing exercises, group poetry readings, and acts of radical attention. The walk will commence at 3:30 sharp at Curtin Hall‘s 1st floor lobby and will end with a fire circle outside of Merill Hall. Bring a pen, warm clothes, sturdy shoes, and a willingness to be here, with poetry in the natural world. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Slow Growing in the Time of Trees: Writing Workshop

• Thursday, April 17, 3:00-4:00 PM
• 939 Curtin Hall

Slow Growing in the Time of Trees* will engage in a generative writing workshop about art and the most generative of living things: fungi. Come with a writing implement and paper, or birch bark, or whatever material you want to use for composition (and perhaps decomposition).  

Workshop led by Katharine Beutner.

Space is limited. Registration is required.

* Slow Growing in the Time of Trees is a C21-sponsored Collaboratory formed to cultivate an interdisciplinary creative space that examines the long duration of tree-time in the face of human and non-human interventions. 

Space is limited. Prior registration is required.

Distinguished Lecture Series Presents 24th Poet Laureate of the United States: Ada Limón

• Tuesday, April 15, 7:00-9:00 PM
• UWM Student Union, Wisconsin Room

As a bonus, here’s an event offered by our friends at Student Involvement. Hear Ada Limón speak in person at UWM’s biannual Distinguished Lecture Series.

Ada Limón the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two children’s books: In Praise of Mystery, with illustrations by Peter Sís; and And, Too, The Fox, released in 2025.

In October of 2023 she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and she was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft that was launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025.

A ticket is required to attend this event. Free for UWM Students; $10 for non-UWM students.