The Existential Princess: A Fairy Tale

by Liam Heneghan

Once upon a time there was a princess who lived on a small blue-green world that orbited a medium sized but feisty sun. Now this particular princess came from a long line of primates that had evolved slowly on the equatorial band of her world.  She was fang-less and claw-less and relatively hairless, and alas several very formidable cats had discovered that her kind was remarkably tasty.

But the princess possessed a remarkable gift: she could imagine the future. After consulting with her scientists — who also shared this gift, for this was their unique possession — she learned that one day she must die just as the scientists too must surely die. Moreover, she learned that everything that lives must perish. She learned too that the feisty sun that shone so gaily in sky would steadily increase in luminosity and one day would engulf the small blue-green planet.

The princess placed her forehead — behind which was stored the peculiarly ample brain that characterized her people — in her hands and she wept. After a while her weeping turned to a quiet sobbing and the sobbing became a mild shuddering and eventually the shuddering came to an end. The princess looked up at last and saw a child pass by where she sat.  And knowing that this child too would die she spoke unto the child saying: “Once upon a time….”

Once upon a time there was a ferocious cat…
Once upon a time there were were three bears…
Once upon a time there was a woodcutter with a beautiful daughter…
Once upon a time there was a ogre who loved flowers
Once upon a time there was a princess….
Once upon a time…

Upcoming Talk: Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Embedded Environmental Curriculum in Classic Children’s Literature

From the National Science Teachers Association Website 

http://www.nsta.org/conferences/schedule2.aspx?id=2015chi&action=search&format=Featured%20Speaker

"Featured Presentation: Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Embedded Environmental Curriculum in Classic Children’s Literature

Friday, March 13 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

McCormick Place, W185 b/c

Join Liam for an extensive content analysis of classic children’s literature as he shows how collectively these stories contain a sophisticated and yet accessible short course on environmental themes. He will share examples from several favorite works and illustrate how teachers can use these books to promote environmental education, while deepening understandings of the ideal components of environmental literacy.

Presenter(s): Liam Heneghan (DePaul University: Chicago, IL)

Bio: Liam Heneghan is an ecosystem ecologist working at DePaul University, where he is a professor and chair of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University’s Institute for Nature and Culture. His research has included studies on the impact of acid rain on soil foodwebs in Europe, and inter-biome comparisons of decomposition and nutrient dynamics in forested ecosystems in North America and the tropics. 

Over the past decade, Liam and his students have been working on restoration issues in Midwestern ecosystems. He is co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness Science Team. Liam is also a graduate student in philosophy (MA 2013) and an occasional poet pondering Hopkins' "nature is never spent."

FORMAT: Featured Speaker
GRADE LEVEL: General
SUBJECT: Earth and Space Science
CONFERENCE STRAND: Natural Resources, Natural Partnerships"

Cold the night (a lyric)

Cold the night and cold the path
That once was green and bright,
Cold the ground you walked upon
With footfall gay and light.

Birds are trembling in the hedge
The otter crouches low
A hawk hunts in the darkened sky
A hare screams out below.

Cold the night and cold the path
That once was green and bright,
Cold the ground you walked upon
With footfall gay and light.

Last night I dreamed that you returned,
I held my breath to view
You walk upon the verdant path
My heavy heart renewed.

But cold the night and cold my love
That once was fair and bright,
Cold the ground you're buried in
Your footfall's gone from sight.

Liam Heneghan 2015 (lyric for an Irish Tune)

Why the Scientist Has No Home Library: Heidegger Predicts the Structure of our Contemporary University

At the height of his apparent incredulity over the transformation of the traditional scholar into “the research man”, best exemplified by the modern scientist, Heidegger notes that this person “no longer needs a library at home.”

This is not merely because the frenetic life of the research man who is “constantly on the move”, attending conferences, negotiating book deals in collaboration with publishing houses and so forth.  It is also because of the very nature of the modern scientific enterprise whose essence is research, the essence of which in turn consist of a knowing that “establishes itself in as a procedure.” Science moves ahead in institutions singularly committed to the implementation of the procedural busyness of contemporary science.  Thus the home library is dispensed with because research can find no home in a private domicile.

The university, where the researcher can find a home increasingly, will become, Heidegger predicts in his  Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) 1936-1938, “sheer business establishments” in which “the last vestiges of cultural decoration” (the humanities and arts, for example) are retained for “only as long as the must.”

[Martin Heidegger. The Age of the World Picture. [1938] William Lovitt (trans. & editor). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays]

"Biodiversity Conservation on a Largely Urban Planet: Is Anything Working?"

"Please save the date for the Autumn Quarter CSH College meeting and Dr. Liam Heneghan’s research presentation. As the recipient of the 2014 CSH Excellence in Research Award, Liam will give a talk with highlights from his significant contributions to his field.

THIS COMING Wednesday October 8 from3:15-5:15PM in McGowan South 108
Reception to follow from 5:15-6:15 in the McGowan South Atrium"

Let me know if you care to come along....

My talk has the title: "Biodiversity Conservation on a Largely Urban Planet: Is Anything Working?"

And the Liffey It Stank Like Hell

It says something about a city, I suppose, when there is heated debate over who first labeled it a dirty place. The phrase “dear dirty Dublin”, used as a badge of defiant honor in Ireland’s capital to this day, is often erroneously attributed to James Joyce. Joyce used the term in Dubliners (1914) a series of linked short stories about that city and its denizens. But the phase goes back at least to early nineteenth century and the literary circle surrounding Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) who remains best known for her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) which extols the virtues of wild Irish landscapes, and the wild, though naturally dignified, princess who lived there. Compared to the fresh wilderness of the Irish West, Dublin would have seemed dirty indeed.

The city into which I was born more than a century later was still a rough and tumble place. It was also heavily polluted. This was Dublin of the 1970s.

My earliest memories of the city center come from trips I took to my father’s office in Marlborough St, just north of the River Liffey which bisects the city. My father would take an eccentric route into the city, the “back ways” as he would call them, which though not getting us to the destination as promptly as he advertised, had the benefit of bringing us on a short tour of the city and its more unkempt quarters.

My father’s cars themselves were masterpieces of dereliction. Purchased when they were already in an advanced stage of decay, he would nurse them aggressively till their often fairly prompt demise. One car that he was especially proud of, a Volkswagen Type III fastback, which had its engine to the rear, developed transmission problems and its clutch failed. His repair consisted of a chord dangling over his shoulder and crossing the back seat into the engine. A tug at a precisely timed moment would shift the gears. A shoe, attached to the end of the chord and resting on my father’s shoulder, aided the convenient operation of this system. That car, like most the others in those less regulated times, was also a marvel of pollution generation, farting out clouds of blue-black exhaust which added to the billowy haze of leaded fumes issuing from the other disastrously maintained vehicles, all shuddering in and out of the city’s congested center at the beginning at end of each work day.

A route into the city that I especially liked took us west of the city center, and as we approached Christ Church Cathedral I would open the window to smell the roasting of the barley which emanated from the Guinness brewery in Liberties region of the city, down by the Liffey. Very promptly I would wind up the window again as we crossed over the bridge, since the reek of that river was legendarily bad.
The Irish playwright Brendan Behan wrote in his memoir Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), “Somebody once said that ‘Joyce has made of this river the Ganges of the literary world,’ but sometimes the smell of the Ganges of the literary world is not all that literary.”