I once heard a professor of international relations say that one way to think about the difference between the culture of the United States and other cultures is the difference between "doing" (American: "So what do you do for a living?") and "being" (non-American: "I am the son of X"). In a talk last week at the University of Puget Sound, Swedish artist Ingalena Klenell reminded me of that idea. "This is a typical American way of telling you what landscape is," she said, clicking on a slide of a rushing waterfall painted by early Tacoman Abby Williams Hill. She clicked again. "This is a Swedish landscape." It was a horizontal painting of a completely placid lake; calm personified. It's certainly true that the most famous landscape painting school in American history—the Hudson River School—created drama queens of paintings.

The talk was in honor of the new exhibition by Klenell and American artist Beth Lipman, Glimmering Gone, created and now displayed at Tacoma's Museum of Glass. One-half of the show is Klenell's floor-to-ceiling forest, the other half is Lipman's discarded consumer objects, and all of it is made in white or clear glass.

I haven't been to see the show yet (the museum was closed the day of the talk), but the talk was full of little moments with big reverberations. It was interdisciplinary: In addition to Klenell and another artist, the panel included a biologist, a political scientist, a historian, and English and education professors. The subject they were given to consider was art and ecology, and each took a different approach.

Artist Elise Richman introduced ideas about power and vulnerability, citing Eva Hesse's fragile art, the attention to detail on an Islamic vase, and the premise that, in art, material is chaos that needs to be mastered. She cited the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell on the subject of landscape and denial, explaining that her own landscapes protrude from the wall rather than receding into illusion:

If a landscape, as we say, "draws us in" with its seductive beauty, this movement is inseparable from a retreat to a broader, safer perspective, an aestheticizing distance, a kind of resistance to whatever practical or moral claim the scene might make on us.

"Landscapes don't need us," biologist Peter Wimberger established. "It's not all about us."

He went on to say that, thanks to bacteria, if you took all the cells on your body, more of them aren't you than are you—and that a bacterium's relationship to your body is roughly the same proportion as your relationship with earth. He studies iceworms.

"It seems to me that we're in a moment when the fight between space and place is very acute," said Bill Kupinse of the English department. (Space: an area that's not yet become special enough to be designated a place.) Kupinse read Denise Levertov's poem "Settling," written shortly after she moved to Seattle, when her process of attaching to the place was just starting:

Now I am given
a taste of the grey foretold by all and sundry,
a grey both heavy and chill. I've boasted I would not care,
I'm London-born. And I won't. I'll dig in,
into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.
Grey is the price
of neighboring with eagles, of knowing
a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

What bedevils political scientist Rachel DeMotts is the way that landscape ideas can mask land realities. Take "peace parks," she said—areas in South Africa and Mozambique meant to protect wildlife and bring peace across borders, but instead oppressing locals for the sake of tourism. DeMotts is an in-between creature: a political ecologist. She works to complicate the assumptions and findings of both social and natural scientists.

Other subjects: Cougars displaced by housing developments in Cle Elum, the metro-naturalist reputations of Seattle and Tacoma, and French artist Yves Klein's claim that the sky was his finest work and that he hated birds for trying "to bore holes" in it. It all took place at the university with the logger for a mascot. Brain food on a school night.