Our readings this week have taken on a particular punch now, with Donald Trump's choosing Myron Ebell ("a climate contrarian," identified @ the United Nations climate talks last year as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future") to lead the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency:

Who is Yumi Fuller? Who is she to the people around her and herself? Yumi’s experience in the subtly racist Idaho as the sole Asian student forces her to take a look into the environment that has helped shape who she is. While Yumi is not solely defined by her childhood and the people in it, their influence and reactions to the differences between Yumi and the other townsfolk help to direct Yumi in discovering who she is. The environment around her, both the physical world and the emotional relationships, aids Yumi in part as she attempts to find her place. By experiencing the various events occurring around her, some of which are fueled by ignorance and others a desire for the exotic, the reader is able to understand the various influences the town had on Yumi.

        The novel “All Over Creation”, by Ruth Ozeki, is a celebration of the beauty that can be found in the natural world. The book opens with a passage describing the Earth in loving detail, from core to crust, and then asks the reader to imagine themselves as a seed. Ozeki is asking us to step away from our usual human viewpoint and empathize with plants. There’s a kind of purity and stillness in her opening words, that comes to an abrupt end when the plant you have just sprouted into is, “grrrrrip, weeded right out of there.

The world encompuses a variety of places that have a unique set of of features whether that is the way the seasons change or lack of change, variety of biological life, temperature, etc. As mankind writes its way through history, will they decide to disconcern themselves with the man made damage to their environment and lead themselves to an inevitable fate or chose to make a change to the damage.  This is what I saw as the purpose of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book, The Collapse of Civilization.  One of the main problems with the issue of climate change is no one knows how to fully handle the capacity of the environmental impact that is expected.

The world is changing, the environment is dying, and we, humans, are to blame. Maybe those are generalizations of global warming and the human effect but to some extent the contributions of industrialization and overpopulation have efficiently been disastrous to the environment.  In Rudy Ozeki’s fiction novel, All Over Creation, the story of a potato farm is transformed from a personal narrative to a large scale analysis of the ecological trauma that humans are causing. The intersection between natural and personal becomes the focus of the novel as it play with the interconnection between these two sphere through the lens of a contact zone.

People’s identities affect the environment as much as the environment affects people’s identities. If a person’s belief is to protect the environment then part of their identity is that they are an environmentalist. Likewise the environment can shape people’s identities because if they are given many resources they can either choose to use it respectfully or take advantage of it. Despite the interconnected ideas of the environment and people the relationship is largely not a mutual relationship from what I’ve seen. Starting from the colonists who arrived to the Americas, people have continued to take more resources from the environment than needed to sell for a profit.