It started with a woman. In 1981, James Armstrong was a young man just out of college. He had just started his career at the Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo and was taking a night class to learn French. Another student, a pretty blonde, caught his eye and he asked her out to dinner. "Sure," Elizabeth said. But, “Can I bring my husband?”
That was the beginning of a 30-year friendly conversation that's still going between Armstrong and Kim Alan Chapman. Chapman’s wife detected commonalities in the two men, including their passionate love of Nature and interest in protecting it, that have carried through the decades in conversations and e-mail exchanges. They finally led to their new book Nature, Culture, and Two Friends Talking (North Star Press, May 2015).
The book is a collection of essays, poetry, stories, presentations, photography, and e-mail exchanges between Chapman, an ecologist who works on finding a balance between conservation and various development projects, and Armstrong, who's a poet and professor at Winona State University in Minnesota who often teaches about environmental issues in film and literature.
Although both have published individually, Chapman says, "At some point, we started writing things together.”
Armstrong adds, “What makes our conversation so perennially fascinating to the two of us is that Kim is a scientist who writes poetry and reads, and I am a poet and academic who likes to read science. He’s out there in the world actually trying to make a difference, while I’m more of a theoretical person. That’s a natural dialectic, I think, since I can come up with some pretty wild ideas, and Kim can rein me in a bit.”
The two don’t always agree. But they find enjoyment even in differing perspectives, bringing art and science together in balance. Favorite topics lead to conversations and writing about current ecological issues (what they refer to as the "nature-culture conflict"). They also write about their shared passion for preservation and understanding of the natural world so it can be passed on to future generations.
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