EcoLit ESem

Money is really just an idea.  More and more, it is becoming conceptualized rather than a physical asset as electronic banking is coming into play.  So, what does it represent?  

Money represents power.  It represents your ability to gain assets, and it serves to show off these traits.  It can be inherited, power given down from generation to generation.  The same is true for the idea of survival of the fittest.  Animals and plants inherit the ability to survive, to feed themselves, to compete from their parents.  They show it off with mating rituals and the sheer act of flourishing.

Maybe we are not as different from other life forms as we make it out.  We just have the added advantage of better cognitive skills.  

Maybe, like we laugh at a cat staring predatorily into it's reflection in the mirror, other "higher" life forms are laughing at us for our the inability of our brains to see how the world really works.  If they came along, I think we would still like the right to live.

Today in class it occured to me: What is the main difference between thriving and surviving. Are we starting to thrive as a society and species? Is that necessarily a good thing?  Are all other species barely holding on because we have managed to wipe them out? Do we as a species really have a purpose in the biocentric model? All these questions were racing through my head during todays discussion and I was not really sure what to think about all of them. I would like to think that we can thrive in the environment without destroying itbut usually when something in nature becomes over-populated nature forces it to be cut down and back to size as to not let it get out of hand. The real question is can we as a species thrive and live in a biocentric circle where something dies in order to give back to nature. Is this possible?

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/24/war-on-men/

While getting lost on the world wide webs I stumbled upon this... hm....Hard to believe it was written by a woman.

So when I was revising the last paper, Anne suggested me to read this book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDuun, but I could not borrow the book from the library so I watched the DVD instead (both are available at Canaday.) For those who are interested in gender equity and feminism movement, this is definitely something worth watching. It is a touching documentary. A passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation - the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. It was painful to watch. A vivid picture of women in different parts of the world as victims of culture, tradition, poverty, religion and most importantly mankind. It communicates its points with heartbreaking stories of women who have gone through tremendous cruelty just because they are simply women. It captures the mesmerizing eyes of hopelessness of these women. But there are also the heroes and the heroines who are engaging in changes, the women who passionately fight for their own rights and others who dedicate their life to offer a helping hand to the oppressed women. I was struck to realize that, all the heroes and the heroines that are changing the world are actually ordinary people living an ordinary life just like me and many other people. I was mesmerized by the question “What can I do??” because the documentary is so touching and motivating…

1. A continue of former class discussion--what is the unspoken hunger?

I felt like I hadn't explained my points clearly enough in class. In my opinion, the unspoken hunger is a hunger for vitality (I didn't say this word in class because I forgot how to say it in English). When we eat the "green fleshy" vegetable, we are consuming not only its body, but also its "soul", its "life". Its bright green color and fleshy appearance are symbols for its vitality, and they are the important factors that make us "risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly".

2. "Life appeared fluid"

In "Water Songs", Terry Templest Williams wrote about the fluidity of life. The genes and life patterns of living organisms can be fluid, because they changes as the surrounding environment changes; The environment itself can be fluid, because it could be shaped by all organisms living in it together; Human activity can be fluid, because people could move from place to place, bringing other organisms with them and artificially isolate them with there original population by geographical barrier.

What does this fluid mean? I think it means a mutually changeable, reversible movement of material.

Today, as I’m travelling back to campus, I’m not writing from my sight-sit, but on a train. This has awarded me the opportunity to travel “ecologically”, as I’m being careful to observe the interactions of other passengers. I’m realizing that a train is, in fact, one of the most interesting places to study people; individuals are forced to situate themselves within close proximity and besides having the same destination in mind, I’m hard-pressed to find many commonalities between these people. There are clearly very different socioeconomic classes, and if we weren’t all going the same place on a monotonous eight hour trip, I doubt that many of us would have ever had a reason—or opportunity—to interact with one another. I just had a conversation with a boy who attends Loyola University, and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut. His disposition didn’t seem particularly friendly at first, but when I started talking to him, he was very engaged in our conversation (which was about midterms). Somehow, we ended up having a conversation about skiing, and he told me that he goes up to Okemo and Killington to snowboard—which is about ten minutes away from where I live in Vermont. If I hadn’t been on this train, I would have never met Michael, even though he visits my favorite mountain several times a year.

As I missed class Tuesday, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about Terry Tempest Williams book, an Unspoken Hunger (which I had signed by the author by the way!). Instead of boring you with black and white print, I thought I'd offer a more colorful deliniation of what I derived from the text. One of my close friends, Stephanie, is a talented photographer. In my opinion, what makes her photos more captivating than her fellow peers is the fact that she doesn't take photos professionally; on any given day, she'll walk onto Morgan Hill and take photos of the landscape, just because it, for one reaosn or another, moves her emotionally that day. She allows a transparent perspective of nature, her goal being to elicit emotion from the eye of the beholder. My admiration of Stephanie is much like that of William's of Georgia O'Keefe. Williams wrote that O'Keefe had the power to "transform desert landscapes into emotional ones, using color and form to startle the senses. Scale belonged to the landscape of the imagination. When asked by friends if these places really existed, O'Keefe responded with her usual cando 'I simply paint what I see'". (p. 20) Like O'Keefe, Stephanie "paints what she sees", and what she "paints" is what she feels--she just does it with a camera instead of a brush. These are some of her photos: 

I came back to my room and could still see the imprints of our bodies on the grass.  Though the traces were faint, we still left something behind.