Body vs Body

In class the question was posed: “What is the environment?” A lot of the responses alienated the natural world from human existence by saying in roughly: “I don't eat plants or salad so therefore I have no relation to the environment.” This breakdown of body vs body, we vs it, completely negates the existential threat if sustainable and practical cohabitation is not meet.  The class’s view of the natural world as anything other the human experience removes all responsibility for protection of the earth due to its severance of belonging. The premise being all thing created by human is void of origin when in fact all interactions we, as human have, involve the environment, ie the chair I am sitting on, the wood floor, etc. Its isolation of human caused questions to only mount and created a very different dialogue on global health. The understand the class had of the world I felt was offsetting, not because they were part of the archetypes from As The World Burns, no greedy capitalist exploiters or air headed hopefuls, but there a naive imaginary that a succulent might draw the only relationship we have with plants and the external world. In Stacy Alaimo’s piece “Porous bodies and Trans-Corporeality,” the notion of this interconnected world is brought to life under the scrupulous eye of a microscope as Alaimo explores the human body.

A misconception of the human body as isolated from its surroundings was a common sentiment of the class. That exposure to “plants” see as only through consumption. However, Alaimo writes that“ 90% of the cells that compose our bodies are not “ours” at all” and that we are in fact just a conglomeration of “microorganismos.” Undermining the common perspective of the class and nominally society as a whole, Alaimo explain “The claim that all bodies are porous is the claim that bodies are permeable.” This theory of porosity identifies an interconnection and the fluidity that all objects have in relation to one another.  Inherently parts of our existence as porous frightened some of the students in class because so much of the rhetoric around bacteria and microorganisms is negatively associated with dirty and nauseating images. Because of this, the reaction to our external world seemed far less inclusive than the article’s encompassing view of complete acceptance. The article understood the biological and scientific identity that our species inhabits but our class seemed to have a disconnect. A disconnect that forms again the theory of separation and in my opinion a harmful mindset towards the well being of the planet. The ability to claim a bystander status only leaves room for evasion of concrete action and any efforts in pursuing a comprehensive sustainability.

In line, Bruno Latour in his essay, “Agency at a Time of the Anthropocene” stating “in modernism, people are not equipped with the mental and emotional repertoire to deal with such a vast scale of events ( crossed a few of the nine “planetary boundaries”). Humans have done such a lovely job destroying the planet with no plan for an aftermath. While a whole genre of apocalyptic literature, film, and art, it's hard to imagine such an event outside of the fictional. The issues is that we, humans, “have a particular aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature’ and we deny, “the very fabric of our bodies and minds or what we are” (Latour). We, as humans, have the tendency to self segregate ourselves not only from the microorganisms and foreign objects but also in regards to humans outside of our experience. In a essay written by Daniel Casasanto Ph.D. of psychology, Casasanto states that in the human race:“There is astonishing diversity among human languages, cultures, and bodies,” but a connection made in class reminded me of the limitations the human race has put upon itself. The ways in which society breaks itself into specific communities based on physical appereance, class status, and cultures. Evidently the bodies as permeable and the mind as malleable and so I am obligated to use Latour's lens, subjectively. Ultimately, as the world burns, I am forced to think we will idly sit and watch.