A vivid experience:

On the last Thursday, the guards were especially thorough as we made our way through metal detectors and pat downs. They paused at one student and asked if she was wearing a bra.

"No," she answered uncomfortably.

"Can you put one on?"

"I don't have one."

"We have rules here. You all have been here before, right? …. Even though they [the inmates] are females, they are still predators."

Time Banking at Bryn Mawr: A Dream

"My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time." –Steve Jobs

Time. We all have it. Sixty seconds in a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Seven days in a week. Fifty-two weeks in a year. But what do we do with our time? We work, we eat, we sleep. And sometimes we have an hour here, an hour there that we have nothing to do. So what if you could use that unproductive time for something good? What if you could use that unproductive time as currency? That is what TimeBanking is.

            While the usual perception of the environment is that it is there to serve us, the reality is that the environment is much larger than we can conceive. In fact, the environment is so large that it encompasses the human race as a part of it, since everything is so interconnected there can’t possibly be distinct separations between humans and the environment.  In her novel, Ozeki argues through the contradictory statements of various characters and through her own contradictions that adaptability is key to surviving in coexistence with nature, and that we shouldn’t force nature to change according to our will. Rather, we should adapt to the changes that nature throws our way. Interesting claim

Self-Evaluation and Reflection

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” – Patanjali

Final reflection

I chose this class because I was attracted by the words “identity” and “story”. When I was in a train station full of people in Japan, I often thought about how each person goes through their lives and has happy times, sad times, exciting times, and difficult times. Those experiences are always tied to someone else, so people are entangled with each other. That is a really interesting aspect of human beings.

When glaciers are melting, permafrost is thawing by the second, droughts are becoming longer than before, and sea levels are rising rapidly, denying climate change becomes ridiculous. Blatant facts and overwhelming amounts of scientific evidence show that Earth is warming. Rather than debate whether or not our planet is experiencing a major temperature increase, we are at a definitive crux of history and need to move forward. At this place and time, we are in a race against time itself to determine if and how we can prevent ourselves and the Earth from destruction. In “Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence,” C.A. Chet Bowers argues that only by transitioning to an ecological form of intelligence can we address climate change.

thirteenth short posting, reflecting on the implications of your project: how might you carry this forward? With whom else might you share it? What else would you like to know-or-understand about your particular “enlarged contact zone”? Reflect also on what you learned from your peers: how did the range of presentations expand your sense of your contact zone?

I learned a lot over the course of my six week project. Goin in, I had vague impressions and hypotheses about implications of what I knew about the dining halls, but as I learned more I grew incredibly invested in the current systems at BMC, and what they might imply to people both within the college and outside looking in. 

Sasha Moiseyev-Foster

ESEM: Changing Our Stories

Professor J. Cohen

December 17, 2015

Ecological Intelligence: Balancing Self and Community

The current crisis regarding the changes we’ve wrought in our planet’s atmosphere will result in major shifts in our collective relationship with the environment. This is an inevitability; our world has been so drastically altered by our activities that over the course of the next couple centuries, our ways of life will have to change monumentally if we hope for them (and ourselves) to survive. We will have to shift to a new pattern of thought: ecological intelligence.

“Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.” -Henry Melvill, “Partaking in Other Men’s Sins”