Bowers and Alaimo

I would, first, like to discuss the meaning of "ecological intelligence" with the rest of the class, because though I have my own ideas about what the term might mean, I want to hear what everyone else's interpretations were so that I can develop my own and understand it better. Then, I want to talk about colonization in the linguistic sense, and how this impacts the natural world. It was very interesting to me that Bowers said that Western thinkers did not consider environmental limits when they were drafting the contemporary meanings of words that we still employ today in our language. Something I've been thinking about more and more, based on the recent readings we've been doing, is the idea that language is inadequate when it comes to expressing ourselves and conveying meanings. I have been thinking of words, and languages as elaborations of words, as excitations in a field that we can only access in cross-sections. When Bowers recommends that we "recover the ancient Greek understanding of learning the cultural patterns of moral reciprocity essential to community," is she suggesting that we end the practice of seeing ourselves outside of the natural world and as a part of it? And furthermore, the natural world as a part of ourselves? Is there really an "other" in any sense of the word? Reading Alaimo made me question this in particular. If all bodies are porous and permeable, then there really is only one "thing" and that "oneness" seems to be lost in our language because language is fixated on the membranes that separate us all. How do we remedy this to be more conscious of our "ecological dimension of our being?" I want to really focus on the idea that culture is inseparable from nature, which I think is the underlying point of Bowers and Alaimo's pieces. I have thought about the way the two interact with each other, but I have not thought of culture as a form of the environment or vice versa, and I'm not sure if that's even what it means to think ecologically.