Web Paper or Special Event

Works Cited:

Brown, Wendy. "Chapter Five: Freedom's Silences." Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.

Jones, Gayl. Eva's Man. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Print.

Rose, Abby. "Finding My Voice through Silence: Meditations on Freewriting." Serendip Studio's One World. 18 Sept. 2015. Web.

The concept of “ecological intelligence” proposed by Bower from my perspective involves the idea that people standing on the sides of others to think about themselves. This conception is mostly inspired from the article Vaster than Empires, and More Slow by Ursula Leguin.  From this article, I find everyone has empathy, but the ecological intelligence decides whether we can think from others’ perspectives.  The depth of the empathy decides people’s ability to sense the mood from others and ecological intelligence decides the ability to find out the thoughts from others’ perspective.

I was walking to breakfast on a crisp autumn morning when I noticed that one of the two trees flanking Pembroke Arch had a name tag. Over time, I became more well-acquainted with Bryn Mawr’s campus, and I found name plates on quite a few of the trees I pass by on my way to class or elsewhere. On their name tags, their identities are represented in two different denominations: their common name, and their scientific name. They might be adequate for someone who is only interested in enjoying their daily walk through the college’s arboretum, but to a person observing the trees with a view to ecological intelligence, the limits of their names become apparent, and even problematic.

C.A Bowers says that the steps we need to take towards achieving and implementing ecological intelligence are three-fold: “the transition from thinking of intelligence as an attribute of the autonomous individual”, understanding “how language carries forward the misconceptions and values of earlier thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits”, and “how to revitalize the cultural commons.” Bowers expresses the need to achieve these goals through “educational reforms that foster ecological intelligence” (Bowers, 44). I think education is a strong field in which the transition towards ecological intelligence can be made, but I think there are also other areas of society in which these ideas can be implemented.

Ecological Intelligence: An Idea

A classroom full of students. A School bell. Ring. Ring. Ring. The anticipation for the fun to come. For the freedom from the classroom. Recess. The innocence of childhood. Monkey bars. Slides. Swings. Games. The joyful sounds of children playing, unaware about the ever-changing world around them. There voices echoing across the school yard. Tag you’re it. Miss Mary Mack, Mack Mack… Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

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

Latour tells us “there is no distant place anymore”, in a sense he is saying that those horrible environmental issues that threaten to diminish our planet can no longer be deemed as fiction, they are not the boogie monster, they are very real and very near. He is saying the possibility of the earth that Kolbert described in “The Sixth Extinction” is not fiction, but a premonition.

“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well, and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating "blah."  It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation if impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.”- Paulo Friere

The true ecological intelligence

December 6^th, 2015

Sasha Moiseyev-Foster

ESEM: Changing Our Story

Professor J.  Cohen

December 6, 2015

Wildness and Wilderness in Wild: From Lost to Found on the PCT