Web Paper or Special Event

            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

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.

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”

there are several moments in the prison engrained into my mind. these memories, while having come from just this semester, don’t feel fresh; the stagnancy that overwhelmed me upon walking into the lobby – and to the classroom and back – each thursday made sure that every moment felt like a vague memory even as i experienced it.

some of the moments were better than others. my initial reaction to the prompt of this paper – “begin with a 1-p. description of one important (vivid, definitive, symbolic?) experience that really stood out to you during our time there” – was to focus on a moment that was one of the more positive ones. the time spent with the incarcerated folks was not bad for me in and of itself, i don’t think, and so i thought i would represent that.

There is an electricity in the room- a vibrant hum carrying through the giggles and big smiles of the whole room. After each group reads their revisionary thoughts to the rest, there is raucous applause. Everything from big changes to small ones is exciting. All, though, geared towards saving Antigone’s life, sometimes at the cost of Ismene’s if necessary. She is the criminal, but hers is the loss honor most protests. My group is the only one to act out the altered scenes; our changes are an enormous amalgamation of four people’s revisions, and still no one dies.

*pre-apologies and warning: abstract

The Question within the Answer

George Steiner in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, has argued:

“any model of communication is at the same time a model of trans-lation... No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings.”

The Contact Zone of Translation

Ecological Contact Zones, or Contact Zones of Ecology

“Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context.”

-Paolo Freire, “The Importance of the Act of Reading”

Our reality contains an ever rising feeling of insurmountable death and terror. The recent bombings, including those in Paris, Beirut, and Mali, are just part of that. There are hundreds of mass shootings every year in the United States, and every day’s news brings stories of hate crimes in violence and exclusion.