Madison Jones

@ecorhetor.bsky.social

85 Followers 100 Following

Associate Professor, Writing/Natural Resources Science at URI; DWELL Lab Director, Senior Fellow at the Coastal Institute, and SciWrite Coordinator. Part time poet. Opinions those of my influencers. https://madisonpjones.com/

"Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by 'degenerate' images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he 'redevelops' by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology." --Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p 43.

Banner for the journal, displaying the words POROI: Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry.

Image of the poem, "Vernal Pool, West Kingston Town Dump"
Poem Text:
Up the hill from the Superfund site,
where remediated gravel folds into
remnants of colonial settlements,
themselves folded into a place far older
and more hallowed than we know,
where the mountain laurel gives way
to a soft patch of pines that diffuse the wind
and birdsong and the sound of not-so-far-
away machines, laying foundations
for a new age that will never arrive,
an ancient pair of tire tracks
became a mud pit, a murky ditch that floods
each spring, just off the worn roadway
to the old West Kingston Town Dump,
where amphibians and bugs find asylum
in the symmetry of night and day,
just as the temperature shifts and the rain
sets in, across uncounted seasons
of hum and egg and thaw, burgeoning
like tree rings each in turn:
spadefoot, peeper, pickerel,
green frog, tree frog, wood frog, bullfrog,
hatch alongside nymphs
of dragonfly and fairy shrimp—
all blossom in the refuge of this muddy rut,
and above them, a barred owl observes
with patience another fecund season,
drone of mosquito and cicada chorus,
water seeping below poisoned ground,
a song heard without listening.

A screenshot of a Newsweek article with the headline "Americans Told to Avoid Exercise in 6 States" with a map of the United States in green and six New England states in grey.

The book cover for Inventing Ecosystems, with a blue background and white text. The cover image shows a scientist working in a roped-off area in a field with a radiation zone sign in the foreground.