Since I've been sick and had to miss some classes, I made a longer presentation with all my findings and comments in there. Hope you guys like it!

Nathália Santos

Jody Cohen

Paper #13

12/18/2014

Ontological Enlightenment

Elizabeth Kolbert in her book called The Six Extinction, shows how the next mass extinction is being speeded up by the human beings. During chapter six, she reports a series of tests that proved the Coral Reefs would disappear thanks to something called Ocean Acidification, provoked by chemistry reactions of greenhouse gases we emit and the water. That was the first time I realized that our actions have such a negative impact. Kolbert give me the information, but that did not stop me from maintaining some bad habits and did not made that one of my priorities. So how exactly could we educate people in a way that the environment stop being the Scenery and start being part of the main characters on the Play of Life.

Nathália Santos

Jody Cohen

Paper 10 – draft Paper 11

11/17/2014

Around my 3^rd grade back in a Brazilian elementary school, I heard my Sciences teacher explain on the board: “There are two kinds of goods. The renewables and the non-renewables. The water, the trees, even the air we breath is considered renewable. The gas, diamonds, gold, precious minerals, iron… Those are non-renewable.” I couldn’t stop thinking: What if we cut down every tree? Or what if we kill all the animals one by one like we’ve done to the other animals? The teacher wouldn’t go deeper in the topic, it didn’t matter how much I rephrased my words. “Just remember that, cheap stuff are renewable, expensive stuff are non-renewable. Now let’s move on.”

Nathália Santos

Jody Cohen

ESEM Changing Our Story: Shifting Identities, Altering Environments

11/09/2014

Hammocks Swing

After Mrs. Crawford’s lecture, I decided to come back to my Exploration place and try to see it through both my eyes and hers. The Hammocks make me feel relaxed and are the place where I do most of my thinking. As I walked back to there I decided to think on what brought me such a feeling of relaxation if compared to the other places in the Campus and I came across three factors: the movement, the trees and the ground I was stepping on.

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that language too lives under the skin.” (CLAIRE 12). As using some key words to talk about home, Eli Claire never defines the word itself, despite having devoted a whole chapter to the topic. Language is one of the reasons why I am writing this text. Eli Claire said he would never find home in the mountain I will never have “home” as my home. Lar is. Lar is the Portuguese word for home and derives from the Latin word lar. That means the guardians gods of the house and the family and also means fireplace, where the Romans families gathered to cook and warm up.

The first day of classes was a little intimidating, mainly after a year out of school and in a class focused mainly on Humanities, when all my life I’ve been from the Sciences area. As the time went by, I noticed that despite my lack of formal knowledge in Philosophy and Sociology, I could still contribute to a better class environment.

Sydney Huff

ESem Paper #7 (draft)

October 24, 2014

Yumi’s Past and Present

QUOTE 1: page 68 and 69

“Now I lay down on my little bed and stared up at my starry ceiling, listening to my children breathe. Lloyd had raised these heavens for me….I remember a deep celestial bliss, a sense of galactic stability, which pretty well lasted until my nebula spun out of his control and a dark star crossed my firmament, eclipsing him entirely.”

*Yumi was in her childhood bedroom, an environment that was molded by her past self.

Sydney Huff

October 11, 2014

ESem Paper #6

Altering Play Spaces

Boyang Su

ESEM#13

Professor: Jody Cohen

December 19, 2014

Our Choice

Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Six Extinction seems to be talking about different extinctions without much inner relationship. But in my opinion, the order of the extinction stories unveiled the whole process of how humans sensed their damage to the environment, finally bringing up a question at the end of the book: could human avoid extinction or are we doomed to become extinct? Analyzing the deeper relationship between human and extinction, is the relationship exclusive? Or is it interdependent? I tried to find our choice when faced with the question.