Web Paper or Special Event

The End of Outside: Reconciling Connection

Aayzah Mirza 

Revision Paper 

December 18, 2015 

Somehow this will relate to our recent topics of discussion; somehow I will find the secret and screaming connective tissue which binds all of it. Isn't that at the very center of things in this course? Reconciling with the dreaded, complicated messiness of living connectedly. 

Thinking ecologically with economics

The true ecological intelligence

December 15^th, 2015

When we are babies we learn language by mimicking the sounds we hear our parents say. As children, we are caricatures of the environment that we are growing up in. If as humans, we learn and grow by mimicking our environment it can be argued that by learning about and experiencing other cultures we are able to diversify our understanding of the world.   Ecological Intelligence is about the world not just the environment, we must foster relationships between different cultures and environments in order to grow and diversify as a world community.

Humans are constantly learning.

Sometimes, it’s all too easy to shuffle the world into binary boxes: environment here, identity there, relationships here, individuality there, subjective ideas here, objective facts there. We separate the questions of the universe into our outside – the logical, fact-based, environmental – and our inside – the emotional, unconscious, and subjective. But this blind categorization fails as science begins to intersect with philosophy and the questions themselves start to collide. In a world where everything is connected and slippage is unavoidable, ecological intelligence and awareness is increasingly important.

People live within and affected by environment—both social and physical environment, and   people’s identities are gradually shaped by the environment. Although social and physical environment seem different from each other, and environment seems different from identity, Ozeki shows us that these are all closely intertwined.  Environments become inextricable from identity. Also, I find that Leguin deeply demonstrate how they affect each other by describing the behavior of people and environment in his science-fiction.

There exists an alternative lifestyle— an ideal form of being—which humans are currently struggling to understand: ecological intelligence. Within this lifestyle lies the key to overcoming self-destruction.