“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”--Aldo Leopold 

I support this idea because I think we, as human beings, are born to think in a relatively anthropocentric way, which means we usually care about something starting from caring about ourselves. This is instinctive because our feelings originated from every neuro, every impulse in our body and mind are those that affect our decisions at the first place. At the very beginning of human species, trees are cut to make shelters, and animals are consumed to provide energy for survival. That is--we started consuming "resources" for our basic needs, not wants. Then we desire more, and consume more--to satisfy our wants, our psychological need--possibly the feeling of being admired. As a result, people around the world would worship land, water, trees, flowers, etc.

Is this idea wrong? I don't think so--it actually means that we are ethical to everything we know, because everything in this world is related to us in someway. If we don't know or understand something, we would, of course, know how it could affect us, and therefore would not even notice it. If we cannot notice it, we are not in relation to it, how could we feel ethical in relation to it?

While reading Leopold's piece "The Land Ethic," I kept thinking back to a book, Emerald City (written by Matthew Klingle), that I read for my Environmental History class. In it, Klingle explores what he calls 'the ethic of place' which is basically the relationship that people have with a certain place. However, after reading "The Land Ethic," I realized that even though Emerald City is an environmental history of Seattle, most of the places that people have an ethic of place associated with are actually locations that were once sites of wild nature that have been "remodelled" (a word that Dr. Dalke seems to be really keen on :D) by humans or their actions. There are very few instances in which the places that Klingle talks about involve nature to a greater extent, so I began wondering whether the Native Americans in the state of Washington that Klingle mentions have an ethic of place or land ethic, as Hannah mentioned today in class that some people might because of their ancestral history's relation to nature. What I would say now, after today's discussion, that perhaps the Native Americans that inhabited the region that now is Seattle might have had a land ethic, but that their descendants nowadays have more of an ethic of place regarding the environment of Seattle (also known as the "green city" - see how Klingle plays with words in his book title while he subtly mocks the extent of nature conservation of America's sustainability hub?).

I haven’t read much about eroticism, but I know have two essays on the topic under my belt. The First is an essay by Audre Lorde entitled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, and the second is Williams’ essay “Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place”. In her essay Lorde defined the erotic in part as a deep feeling of satisfaction, not inherently sexual. One of the ways this manifests itself for her is the sharing of joy with another person. In Williams’ essay she wrote of a person’s joyous response to their echo. Her understanding of the echo extended past simply the sound that reverberates off of a surface. For her it was the land itself responding. An echo represented an interaction with the land. In her essay Lode doesn’t extend the meaning of the erotic to include the land. I think it’s interesting that both women arrived at the same place, a place of joy and satisfaction, by taking two very different paths. Did you understand the way Williams used the erotic in a similar, or different way than I did?

Money is really just an idea.  More and more, it is becoming conceptualized rather than a physical asset as electronic banking is coming into play.  So, what does it represent?  

Money represents power.  It represents your ability to gain assets, and it serves to show off these traits.  It can be inherited, power given down from generation to generation.  The same is true for the idea of survival of the fittest.  Animals and plants inherit the ability to survive, to feed themselves, to compete from their parents.  They show it off with mating rituals and the sheer act of flourishing.

Maybe we are not as different from other life forms as we make it out.  We just have the added advantage of better cognitive skills.  

Maybe, like we laugh at a cat staring predatorily into it's reflection in the mirror, other "higher" life forms are laughing at us for our the inability of our brains to see how the world really works.  If they came along, I think we would still like the right to live.

Today's talk got me thinking about The Lion King.  In that movie, Mufasa explains to his son Simba the Circle of Life.  They sing a song about it and there is a whole monologue about it, but really we, as young children, are paying more attention to the story and the flashy animation.  

This concept of energy flow is actually quite shocking to me.  Another living thing must die so that I can live.  I think that we, as humans, have made the consumption process less violent, so that we do not have to think about the death that has occured so we may have one meal.  When I see a piece of chicken, I see food, not the face of an animal that died to feed me.  

Maybe if we were confronted more often about this natural part of life we would expand our theories about who and what has rights.  Or maybe we would become more desensitized to violence.  Who knows?

Today in class it occured to me: What is the main difference between thriving and surviving. Are we starting to thrive as a society and species? Is that necessarily a good thing?  Are all other species barely holding on because we have managed to wipe them out? Do we as a species really have a purpose in the biocentric model? All these questions were racing through my head during todays discussion and I was not really sure what to think about all of them. I would like to think that we can thrive in the environment without destroying itbut usually when something in nature becomes over-populated nature forces it to be cut down and back to size as to not let it get out of hand. The real question is can we as a species thrive and live in a biocentric circle where something dies in order to give back to nature. Is this possible?

Since I won't be in class this Thursday I am posting what I would (or let's be serious) would NOT have contributed to class. Anne asked me to post about what I would say in class and I don't know why I'm so nervous writing this. I think it's a combination of things that we've been discussing in class: silence, inaccessibility, language, taking risks. I just read the Kalamara's reading and I don't know if I fully understood it. There were parts of it that I would like to discuss because I felt like I could relate to it, but I'm nervous to discuss it here because I don't have the opportunity to hear other people in our class talk about it first so I can decide whether or not I actually got the point of the reading. It seemed fairly accessible to me until it brought up eastern religions and then I got confused. I don't get the feeling that this article was supposed to be as dificult to read compared to the other inaccessible readings we read together in class but I started to lose my understanding of the reading towards the end. Because I finished reading the article in a confused state, I am hesitant to explain how I understood it. What if I read it all wrong?! Perhaps this is a situation in which I realize that the little inaccessible parts of some of the readings we are assigned lead to me not contributing in class. I don't want to complain about it - I just choose to shut up.

After all discussions held passionately in class about the potential racism reflected in books and movies, I think our discussions has gone way too far. The Hunger Games might not be the perfect example for us to examine the racist ideologies but due to its popularity among the teens, we take it as an entering point. As Alice pointed out that what we had got from the book was far beyond the book's orignial intentions and I think we should not put that much effort on the content, per se. 

Our discussion today reminded me of a story I listened to on NPR last week about the multiple perceptions of Jesus. It is really very interesting. This is the link:   

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/19/165473220/color-of-christ-a-story-of-race-and-religion-in-america

http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1532