Porous

We are educated to protect the environment and saving rare species. It seems like before we really understand what makes up nature, rules and knowledge have separated us from the nature.  “Ecological issues come to seem like issues that are only of interest to people who have a particular aesthetic taste…but these things don’t affect my real life where I have to make money to live.” (Alaimo, 6) Always acting like bystanders makes us no responsibility to the nature “beside” us. That is why Alaimo suggested the answer to where we are living should be “hominid ecologies” rather than “society.” I really like Alaimo’s opinion that “all bodies are porous”, since that explains the unity between human and nature and how they influence each other, either “enhancing or diminishing that bodies power of acting.” (4) The article did not mention the “food chain”, but I think it is a good example of illustrating what is “porous.” We think nature is always there while we only care about how to make a living by using natural resources. However, the toxic pollutant we produced may affect microbes in water, and then the fish eat the microbes and become toxic, and finally we eat fish. The toxic substance just passes through our body, like a “trans-corporeality”, makes human being affected by the toxic substance they produced by themselves. Then, can you still say we are living in a society that is separated from nature? “A society is another type of ecosystem” (7) and “nature is always as close as one’s own skin” (8). At least in order to increase people’s awareness as being a part in the nature from the very beginning, the educational system needs to be strengthened, before the next generation forms a same “intelligence” in a superiority way above nature.