Looking Back and Ahead

At the beginning of the semester, I knew that I was deeply interested in environmentalism, even though it didn’t seem to fit well with my other interests. I felt anxious about the general lack of interest the people around me seemed to have for environmental issues and I felt like environmentalism didn’t fit into my life as much more than a tangential interest. Before this semester, it sometimes seemed like there was nothing I could do to help the environment and I knew that there was no way to entirely avoid doing damage myself. My interest in environmentalism would be overshadowed by these feelings of helplessness and guilt and I would go through periods where I would try to ignore environmental issues altogether.

The things that I have read and discussed with my peers this semester have taught me that this emotional response (as well as a myriad of others) is perfectly normal. While this doesn’t make the emotions disappear, it reminds me that the people who make great contributions to environmentalism have likely overcome similar emotions. The next time that I feel overwhelmed by helplessness or guilt, I now have good reasons to muddle through the emotions, and not dismiss environmentalism to escape them. In fact, we read about specific examples of people that worked through debilitating emotions to bring groups of people to action. These experiences have also convinced me of the importance of collective action for affecting change.

Another, possibly more important, result of my studies this semester is a better understanding of how environmentalism coexists with the other interests in my life, mainly gained through the autonomy I have had writing this blog. Before, I could imagine the ways environmentalism related to things like computer science and feminism, but I never really studied the connections in any detail, so they still felt somewhat disjoint. Exploring environmentalism as an active part of my life instead of merely one of my many interests will also help me through the difficult emotions that caring about the environment can create. It has shaped the way that I looked at school this semester (like my feminist science studies class) as well as my future research goals as I go on to graduate school.

How I Choose Less Electricity

It’s been awhile since I talked about electricity, so you can re-read my first post here for a refresher on reasons to choose less electricity.

In an ideal world, everyone’s appliances would be the newer energy efficient models. This is a good way of saving a lot of electricity, but it isn’t feasible in many situations (including mine), so I won’t discuss that here. It is worth mentioning, nonetheless.

One of the best ways to use less electricity if you are not already paying attention to your power usage is to turn things off when you aren’t using them. This seems obvious and I do not say this to be condescending—it involves a lot more than turning off lights when you leave a room. This was something I thought I did a good job at, but once I started paying attention to my electricity usage, I noticed a few things that I was pretty careless about.

Whenever I finished using my computer, I was careful to put it to sleep and (usually) turn off the monitors, but I never bothered turning it off. Sometimes I don’t use my desktop for several days or weeks, let alone overnight, so this was a huge waste of electricity. Worse, I noticed that I had the habit of watching Netflix on television and pausing it for long periods of time to make dinner, do homework, have a conversation, etc.

Better than turning things off when you aren’t using them, you can choose to not use them in the first place. This is a much more difficult habit, I think, especially if you are trying to wean yourself off of things like air conditioning.

If you really want to minimize your electricity usage, you can also unplug appliances that use electricity when they aren’t turned on. For instance, televisions, video games, computers, and routers. Anything that doesn’t need to be on (refrigerators) and can go into standby mode or always has a light on is a good candidate. There is some debate about whether this really saves much electricity, but I figured that it wasn’t that big of an inconvenience for me to do either way.

Using electricity these ways was not difficult at all, but I still made a lot of mistakes. I often forgot to unplug my router when I went to sleep, or walked away from my computer and got distracted for several hours before remembering it was still on. I still absentmindedly pause Netflix to cook lunch or read the newspaper. But, even with all of my mistakes, I still succeeded most of the time.

I have not gotten my electricity bill yet, so I have no idea how much less electricity I used, if any. Either way, I am planning on continuing to choose to use less electricity. Unlike trying to minimize my water usage, this didn’t interfere with my life at all, so I see no reason not to continue.

More information about using less electricity can be found here.

My Transformation.

First, a (very) quick update. I’ve continued working with Green Apple Bikes and I even sat at a table in Bosco plaza on Wednesday to spread the word about GAB and recruit volunteers. Since the food coop idea is such a long-term thing, there is relatively little to report on in terms of updates. However, we’re in touch with the entrepeneurship program about working with them (and getting funding) to launch our idea. But this blog post is supposed to be about something else — my transformation.

So, here’s a quick summary of the semester in regards to significant events which comprise my transformation. First off, I’ve never been active in class discussion, and this class changed that. In fact, with the exception of a methods class last fall semester, this was the first class in which I had ever made ANY single piece of contribution to class discussion (yeah, I realize how crazy that is). The not-so-open-to-discussion format of many classes can partially account for this, but my lack of contributing was mainly due to the introverted nature that I spoke about in my first blog post. I’ve found that it makes all the difference. It’s the difference between watching knowledge being disbursed and playing a part in creating that knowledge. For me, there’s no going back.

Then, I made myself uncomfortable in other ways. I spoke to gas-station cashiers about climate change (lolz). I cried about climate change and used it as a way to deepen my understanding, and I was proud of it. I became vegetarian (which I’m still doing by the way) and I pushed myself by daring others to do the same (which I hope they’re still doing). Then, I reevaluated my own relationship to my assignments and tried to find something that I found more intrinsically fulfilling, something that I wouldn’t have to dress up with dazzling language. Something that I could continue with beyond this class. I reached out to Green Apple Bikes, and, more importantly, started pursing the idea of bringing organic and well-grown food to campus in the form of a food tent and an eventual food coop. It brought me to conquer my introverted nature with public speaking, and it forced me to change certain habits of thinking. For example, it forced me to reconsider this idea that I couldn’t do anything because of a lack of expertise. I thought that the people who DID THINGS, whether it be starting a club or starting a protest etc., somehow knew what they were doing or possessed a level of expertise that I simply did not have. I’ve found that something as simple as TRYING to do something beyond the level of the individual, when done with the spirit of confident wayfaring, is enough to start to gain this “expertise” and help construct the world you live in rather than be complacent as a passive bystander. I found that the community involvement which comes with trying to collectively change/construct our world can connect you to some cool people — people that share your passions and people that can have fun while also making a difference. These insights are simple but powerful; because of them, I plan on being involved in local environmental initiatives for the rest of my life; not for self-validation and not for an idealistic notion of saving the world, but for the simple reason that it is fun, it is social, it makes a difference, and it exercises a social imagination that is seldom used and always needed.

Aside from the “lived” dimension of my journey through this class, I found that its lessons in thinking helped me conceive of the anthropocene and myself in new ways. My understanding of creating change has trascended the level of the individual and is redirected towards technologies and assemblages. And I found that, in many ways, the problems facing the anthropocene are the problems I face within myself. “Loving your monsters” as a critique of modernism is something that I found intellectually and personally enlightening, as the patterns of thinking endemic to modernism — that of assuming that the reasons for past problems are knowable and fixable and if you try hard enough then some indefinite future will be free of consequences and risk — are firmly established within my own thought patterns. The concept of “wayfaring”, and the idea that one can think and act at the same time, is one of the most profound and personally-applicable concepts I have ever learned. In short, I found that the way to approach the anthropocene is also the way to approach the world and my own life.

Valuing Value Changes

Throughout my blog post I have tried to demonstrate that habit formation is a powerful way to change one’s life.  I want readers to understand that habits can transform one’s life in many ways.  But ultimately, I want to demonstrate that our individual behaviors and societal traditions are relative and can be manipulated.  This course further demonstrated to me the abundant ways in which our society’s institutions are not always designed or implemented based on practicality or even morality.  Tsing explains that hunting and gathering was a more practical and efficient method of acquiring food-yet humans became cereal farmers.  Our decision to produce cereals is contingent on something other than pragmatism.  Tsing argues that the transformation to domestication and agriculture derives from the rise of The State.  The acquisition of State territories was often acquired through force and sometimes through mutually beneficial relationships between populations and The State.  State control and regulation allowed for many of our social, economic, cultural and political institutions to take shape.  These institutions offer two things that society values: familiarity and authority.  Familiarity breeds affinity, not just among people, but among people for their institutions.  I am sure many readers doubt the degree to which society values authority.  Yet, major offenses are committed by entities of authority and very little commotion is made of resulting afflictions.  The State is a system of authority and so are financial institutions like Wall Street or political institutions like the International Monetary Fund.  Society favors institutions of order and control because life is unpredictable.  Yet, these institutions betray the public through crises like the American mortgage/banking crisis or the crippling loan repayment agreements across the developing world.  These offenses persist, yet society’s response continues to demonstrate our affection for our broken and failing institutions.

This course has discussed our most fundamental global crisis: The Anthropocene.  The human race has continued to fail our environment largely due to something Martinez-Alier explained as the “incommensurability of values.”  It’s taken a semester for me to understand the true crisis of the Anthropocene.  Despite my discussions about habit formation and individual transformation in pursuit of individual and collective change.  I have come to realize that what we value matters more to environmental change than anything else.  Nadar explains that what fellow scientists valued in green technology dictated what green technology was considered useful.  Martinez-Alier explained that commercial gold miners valued gold more than indigenous persons’ right to water, food and shelter and environmental destruction in Peru.  Throughout my blog posts I was convinced that that our society’s traditions, customs and cultural values are so influential that they undeniably influence who we are as individuals.  I assumed that if we could expand our individualistic thinking by habitually trying to do things like recycle or engage in a collective activities that we could change ourselves and ultimately change society.  I wanted to demonstrate that if our individual behavior is changeable that our value systems are also malleable.  Likewise, what our society values, inside and outside our institutions can be reassessed.  If we can change our individual habits, we should be able to change our institutions.  But we have to value changing our values.

I appreciated this course more than most of the courses I have taken at KSU.  Environmental issues are important to me so I am fairly knowledgeable about many of the issues we discussed in class such as climate change, biodiversity extinction, and deforestation and so on.  Our discussions about the Anthropos in relation to the environment was new territory for me.  Understanding what it means to be human in relation to our environment is a new kind of philosophy for me.  Understanding our presumptions of what is ‘nature’ or what is ‘the environment’ demonstrates how influential our value systems can be.  I was also unaware of the serious extent to which humans have fundamentally changed the earth’s geological processes.

My journey throughout my blog posts has brought me back full circle to where I started-individual choices matter.  But they matter in a much different way than I assumed.  The best choice we can make as individuals within the Anthropocene is to choose to engage in collective thinking and to be open to new value systems.  Throughout this course, I have come to understand that there are very few environmental issues that don’t require radical reorganization of our economic, social, political and cultural institutions.  I focused on recycling because it is an individual choice that many people don’t pursue largely because we make up excuses for ourselves.  Throughout my blog posts I have experienced wayfaring.  I started this blog believing that our society’s obsession with individualism was so influential it disheartened attention to collective systems.  I continue to believe that our fixation for individualism is supported by our institutions and our value systems.  I have noticed that many great environmental pioneers were individuals who garnered support.  John Muir or Mary Pipher’s work in Nebraska is a great example.  Pipher’s organization started with her passion and her pursuit of action generated support.  We live within our current value system, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only value system.  Through my blog, I hope I demonstrated that we can change a wide spectrum of our personal habits-including our individualistic mania.  We must choose to rethink our obsession with individualism and we must choose to be open to a new value system.   Make a habit of making choices that assist the collective.  Make a habit of embracing the philosophy of wayfaring.  Habitually, reimagining our value system is the best choice we can make for the Anthropocene.

 

 

 

The end of it all

In this journey I have learned a lot about myself and the environment and how those two relate. To be honest before coming in this class I wasn’t all that concerned with the environment. I hadn’t had the proper guidance to have the understanding of what we were actually doing to the world. After the first class I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I like talking about subjects that are taboo to some people. I feel that people today get way to offended from subjects we talk about. So that I why I chose this topic of hemp.

When I first started this project I really didn’t know where I wanted to go with this. There were so many avenues I could do but I wanted it to stand out from all the other conversations dealing with this. Everyone’s first notion is associating weed with hemp when it is not the case. In that I think we failed as a society for not putting the right information out there so that this so called taboo could transform and adapt so we could utilize its potential. I felt that I have made headway into making that a possible idea. There are few groups that do and hopefully I could partake in decisions of that nature.

From start to finish this class was honestly a great opportunity to understand our world and know what we are going towards with how we treat out world. Every assignment I felt I understood what I was doing better and better. Dr. Durbin from all of his rants to our readings really installed action towards what I want to do. I almost dropped the class before taking it because I was kind of intimidated by what we had to do because I didn’t know if what I was going to do would actually matter. In all honesty I think I made a difference in myself. Just from reading everyone else’s post and seeing how you guys felt just amped me up every week to do better.

https://www.votehemp.com/news/newsv4no8.html I found this to be a great website for understanding where others come from on this topic.

(This is one song I found that ultimately explains all that I have been discussing all year)

An educational music video about the many industrial uses and health benefits of the American Hemp plant. Featuring the song “Tree of Life” by Human of the band The Human Revolution.

http://www.thehumanrevolution.org/

Cannabis sativa “hemp” can benefit all of mankind.

It is #1 for: fiber, paper, food, oil, medicine and fuel.

Lyrics:

Tree of Life

Words and Music by Human of The Human Revolution

I want to tell all a little bit about a plant I know that can save the world.

It grows long and tall and has flowers that can make your mind swirl.

It’s a sacred plant with a fiber that is resistant to rain and mold.

Its the strongest plant fiber known to man, the best rope you’ll ever hold.

 

Now the pioneers covered up their wagon train with a canvas made of hemp

Washington and Jefferson grew it on their farms and said to make the most of it.

The first stars and stripes were made on hemp the first constitution too.

It’s used around the world for fuel fiber oil medicine and food.

If you press its seeds you wont have no need for any other oil,

You can make paints and inks or run your car, grow it back next season till fix the soil.

The most nutritious seed you can put in your mouth with Omega 6 and 3

We can feed the world with the tree of life and live sustainably.

Chorus:

If we cut down all the trees, then we wont have no air to breath,

Grow a field of hemp instead; you can make your paper, build your house from it. The Goddess plant growing wild and free, living the way we ought be, gone leave my children a better world than my ancestors left me.

The flowers of the female hemp plant make the best medicines on Earth,

Helps cancer and AIDS patients eat their food, helps those with depression overcome the blues,

Glaucoma, Epilepsy, Nausea, Insomnia, Stress, Neurosis, Psychosis, Pain PMS

All the studies have been done all the doctors agree, but the corporations cant make money off this plant you see, because its free, it grows from a seed, wild and free like we ought be.

The future is growing in our backyards.

Chorus:

In this modern day when we seem to lack spirituality,

This one plant can bring us back 10.000 years in history.

To the Shiva Parthians, The Jesus The Christ, to Buddha, The Pagans, The Goddess, The Light. To commune with all the animals, be one with all the trees, to realize the god I seek is inside me.

Yeah the futures in our hands, wave got to take care of the Earth.

Because the Earth is the mother that gives life birth.

And we can heal all our relations with a single green plant

And we can start right now.

 

3 Found Ojects

It took me a long time to select my “found objects.”  There are so many possibilities that represent a different aspect of the environment for me.  Our conception of the environment is saturated by our cultural values.  The way we understand the environment determines the way we behave towards the environment.  The found objects I selected demonstrate various perspectives of the statement above. In this inquiry, I want to demonstrate ways we devise an image or interpretation about the environment.  This interpretation of the environment is consistently invented for our advantage.  Benefitting ourselves from environmental exploitation further shapes our beliefs and value system concerning the “environment.”  The items I selected are the following:  Vaporized gasoline; a piece of sea glass and a mirror.

Vapor or Gas? 

My husband came home one evening and told me that he read a few articles and watched a few informative videos which suggested that cars can run on gas vapor.  Naturally, I was amazed by the potential of this invention, but I waited for him to list off the technical issues or exorbitant costs involved.  This is not the case.  In fact, there is a rich history behind vaporizing gasoline.

Vaporized gasoline is an invention that has been devised many times.  Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, many engineers and entrepreneurs developed various fuel saving technologies that utilized vaporized gasoline.  In different states at different times, inventors discovered and developed devices or systems that increased automobiles’ fuel efficiency dramatically.  Some specialists argue that gasoline has been vaporized as early as the 1920’s.  There have been several creators that designed systems they presented to automobile companies and attempts to paten the process of vaporizing gasoline.  Both the American and German militaries used vaporized gasoline to power their tanks.  Yet, the technology is not publically utilized and many misconceptions surround the technology.  Vaporizing gasoline offers many hopeful opportunities for the environment and public health.  Use of vaporized gasoline over gasoline improves the longevity of the engine dramatically.  Secondly, emissions from vaporized gasoline are not comparable to emissions from gasoline.  There are very minimal emissions from vaporized gasoline, which could dramatically change our air quality.  There has been a public outcry for more efficient and clean automobiles and so far all vehicles can use vapor.  Strangely, the public has been sold hybrid cars instead of vaporized gasoline.  Different vapor systems like the Tri-Fuel System or the Acetylene powered car or Flex Car have been developed.  Most hybrid cars offer between 30 to 60 miles per gallon while vaporized gasoline offers 100 plus miles per gallon.  This emission saving technology isn’t used.  Why the hell not? 

Laura Nader explained her experiences working with various scientists about energy issues.  Nadar argues that we have so much waste in our society that we could easily reduce without much change to our lifestyles.  I think vaporized gasoline is an example that falls within Nadar’s purview.  We limit what we think is possible based upon our value systems.  We live in a world, in an era where the environment is considered something to be consumed and profited.  I think many times we complicate solutions as Nadar describes.  We strive for consistent economic growth and vaporized gasoline wrecks the oil and natural gas industry.  There are arguments that vapor gasoline technology has been discouraged by our government.  But, we have seen economic growth chosen over environmental conservation time and time again.  Our choices are important and perhaps political authorities are making too many choices for all of us.  Nadar argues for straightforward solutions.  We need to inform policy makers that our values have changed and we value using available and efficient technologies like vapor gasoline.

Treasure or Trash?

The second found object that reminds me of a particular perspective of nature is a piece of sea glass.  Sea glass is sort of a trash to treasure item.  My husband and I collected sea glass from beaches throughout Puerto Rico.  I discovered that I liked making sea glass jewelry.  Each time I hold or wear sea glass it reminds me of responsibility… grave responsibility mixed with a desire to do my best not to participate in our trash culture.  As I mentioned previously, in this inquiry I want to demonstrate that we interpret or create an image of the environment that benefits us or provides us an advantage of some kind.  This way of thinking shapes our behavior, which further contributes to our value systems.  Human kind benefits from a disposable society.  We prefer to care less about what we throw away and more about what we buy.  We have busy lives that are filled with chores to improve our standard of living and our throwaway lifestyle provides needed convenience.  Convenience is helpful, but our trash culture is plaguing our oceans.  Sea glass represents so many different commodities and industries throughout our history.  When glass is tumbled throughout the ocean for a substantial amount of time (like years) it becomes very smooth and the colors become softer and cloudier looking.  Sea glass makes for a beautiful charm, but in many ways it represents our failure.  Humans’ trash tumbles through the ocean, in a way symbolizing how human systems have permeated natural systems.  Nature is no longer unadulterated.  Cronon explains that we often have false hope that we can evade our responsibility.  He argues that humans tend to believe their slates can be cleaned, persuading us to believe our illusions.  We assume that our oceans are vast, sacred and untouched spaces isolated from our polluted urban areas.  In reality, our oceans are trashed with sea glass and a million other products.  A piece of sea glass represents Cronon’s discussion in The Trouble with Wilderness.  We see sea glass on the beach and are thrilled to find a piece of ‘natural’ jewelry.  We are rationalizing our behavior and perpetuating the myth of “the wilderness.”  We understand sea glass as a treasure hunt on the beach because it allows us to make peace with our global trash dumps.

Emotions or Value Systems?

Many of our readings have discussed our emotional reactions to climate change and generalized environmental degradation.  Scholars like Piper and Norgaard argue that our feelings of despair often keep us from choosing action or considering change.  Articles like The Anthropocene explain the devastating and pervasive ways that human systems have fundamentally changed our natural systems.  So, the final found object I selected is a mirror.  Many of our readings have encouraged us to face our emotional response to climate change.  A mirror can symbolize embracing reality, or a true reflection.  In regards to this inquiry, I want this object to represent our willingness to observe our participation in climate change.  A mirror shows our true reflection, but we can distort the physical features of the mirror to produce a different reflection.  We can increase the size or shape of the mirror to produce a distorted reflection.  In the same way, we transform our values to insulate ourselves from our true reflection.  Cronon explains that how we understand ‘wilderness’ depends upon our cultural desires and expectations.  In turn, fulfilling these desires promotes the development of our value system.  Brugger explains in “Climates of Anxiety,” that our values are fluid and manipulated by our environment.  Brugger found that the rate of exposure to retreating glaciers influences one’s level of concern.  Living within proximity to the retreating glaciers heightened participants’ emotional response.  Glacier retreat stressed residents’ water supply, which conflicts with participants’ expectations.  Seeing the glaciers retreat mimics the symbolism of the mirror.  Witnessing the glaciers retreat is like looking in the mirror; we see the truth and it is emotionally shocking.  Our emotional reactions can change our value systems.  Unfortunately these symbolic mirrors aren’t always available in our backyard and we have to rethink our value system for ourselves.  A mirror represents a perspective that matters the most: how we as humans value our environment.  Nothing has changed the environment more fundamentally than humans’ value systems.  The way we value the environment dictates how we treat our environment.

What is “natural” and why?

This post explores 3 objects, the Mendenhall Glacier, Conveniently Natural meals, and Ginkgo trees, and how they relate to our understanding of nature, and what is “natural”.

Mendenhall Glacier

This is a picture of me and my fiance in Alaska. The extreme climate, sparse population, and popular stories like “Into the Wild” closely associate Alaska with wilderness. But what is “wilderness”, really?

William Cronon argues in “The Trouble with Wilderness” that wilderness, as we believe it, doesn’t now, and has never, existed anywhere. Many people believe that the wilderness is this untouched, uninhabited land, in need of preservation so that it may remain that way. This idea denies the existence of the people native to Alaska (as well as other places dubbed “wilderness”) as well as their, often forced, resettlement. Cronon points out that our pristine, empty wilderness is an illusion: we created it. Indeed, even this picture, taken in “remote Alaskan wilderness” is actually part of Tongass National Forest, an intensely regulated area designed to protect endangered plants and animals, and preserve the “natural” landscape. We look at this landscape and see trees, water, snow, ice, and conclude, “nature”, but if the “nature” is there because we ensure that it is, isn’t it just as much of a myth as the wilderness?

The glacier behind us is the Mendenhall Glacier. When you get closer to it, you can see that it is enormous, but it turns out that this enormous glacier is in retreat. Glacial retreat is accelerated by climate change, so it must be an unnatural process, right? As Mendenhall Glacier has retreated, ancient stumps and logs have been uncovered, revealing an ecosystem over 1,000 years old. So if we consider plants untouched and uninfluenced by modern technology and humans “natural”, this is about as natural as you can get. The Mendenhall Glacier and Tongass National Forest complicate our traditional understanding of what is classified as natural and why.

Conveniently Natural Meals

Conveniently Natural is a service that delivers “real food” to your door. You can purchase individual meals or buy meal packs that last a week. You can even subscribe to their service and get food every week. They offer discounts for meal plans and subscriptions, so it is obviously their intent that customers order a lot of meals, repeatedly.

In many ways, these meals are what people consider “natural” food. Their food is organic, made with no preservatives, free from antibiotics, hormones, artificial ingredients, and GMOs. Most of their recipes avoid added sugars or other excessive carbs.

Their meals look like this:

They come in plastic containers, and if you order a week’s worth of food you get several containers (10, to be exact). If you order for several weeks you get a lot of plastic containers. A lot of plastic containers. So, while the food is conveniently natural, this service consumes a lot of plastic; something most people would consider quite unnatural.

This is not to say that they are doing anything wrong. On the contrary, I think that this is a great service, and it says a lot about what is natural in our society. We still look at plastic and say, “that’s unnatural”, but it’s become such a ubiquitous part of our lives, whether we consider it natural or not, it is part of our environment now. This is especially apparent when a company so dedicated to serving healthy and natural food uses this much plastic.

Note: I should mention that all of these plastic containers are clearly marked for recycling. They are also marked reusable, dishwasher-safe, and microwave-safe. So, people that use this service can reuse the containers until they break, and then recycle them, making them significantly less harmful to the environment than some other food storage options.

Ginkgo Trees

Trees: natural, case closed. What a dumb example, McKenna. Yes. But what I actually want to talk about here is not the tree itself, but how it got here.

The Ginkgo tree is called a “living fossil” because it hasn’t changed much in millions of years—270 million years, in fact. Originally widespread across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the Ginkgo tree all but disappeared 3-7 million years ago, except from remote monasteries in China, where buddhist monks were cultivating them. Over time, they spread across Asia, Europe, and, eventually, to the Americas. Now, Ginkgo trees are fairly common. You have probably seen several of them. They are easily recognizable by their fan-shaped leaves, which look like this:

As a society, we often consider introducing plants to new environments an “unnatural” practice. We associate this behavior with “alien”, invasive species, ignoring the fact that many of the crops, animals, insects, etc. that we depend on are not native to the Americas, and were successfully integrated into the ecosystem. The Ginkgo tree further complicates this issue. Although introduced by humans to many ecosystems (unnatural), they originally populated regions across the planet (natural). And although millions of years passed before they were reintroduced to the ecosystems they originally inhabited (unnatural), they haven’t changed (natural), but the ecosystems have (unnatural), but they have integrated without complication (natural)… What if someone long ago identified this “foreign” species of tree as unnatural and rejected its integration into our environment? This tree is plentiful around the world now, what if it had remained the responsibility of a few monasteries to maintain the species? Would this “living fossil” still exist?

Our understanding of nature and what qualifies as “natural” is non-deterministic, and therefore problematic if we are using to evaluate our actions. We will have to critically reevaluate this concept as a measure of what is good, or right, for our environment if we want to truly be environmentally conscious. I think that we should adjust to include things that we traditionally consider “unnatural”, to better reflect what we actually find in our environment. This will allow us to take responsibility for the way we treat the “unnatural”, like indigenous populations, plastic containers, and non-native species.

 

The Trouble With Wilderness 

About the Mendenhall Glacier

About Conveniently Natural

More Information About Ginkgo Trees

This book has an interesting chapter about the problems with how we treat  alien species

Beer, Shells, and Matches

1. Runoff Red IPA Beer Bottle

The first object that I found was a Runoff Red IPA beer bottle from ODell Brewing Co. As the photo shows, the label of the beer shows streams flowing down from a horizon of snow-topped mountains, the description of the beer alludes to the weather of the Rockie’s, and Odell’s logo is printed on the image of a leaf. Obviously, the picture on the label of the beer alludes to the kind of “nature” that Cronon was talking about — one that is pristine and somehow devoid of human activity. The placement of this image on the label also shows how “nature” has been commoditized in more ways than one. Not only are places like the Rocky Mountains sold as a tourist destination, the romanticism of “nature” runs so deep that it is used to market other products. Cronon also talked about wilderness being seen as “masculine”, and beer’s masculine connotation makes it a good marketing decision on Odell’s part. Of course, analyzing this beer is a bit unsettling after learning about everything going on in Colorado (Odell is brewed in Fort Collins), and I can only think about the sick irony of the pristine “nature” being used to promote the beer whilst the less picturesque parts of the land and groundwater are being damaged by fracking.

2. Decorative Sea Shells

While I was at my parent’s house, I started noticing their decorations. In the bathroom, they have various sea shells and a few sand dollars arranged around the glass of a candle. We didn’t go on many vacations, but whenever we did we made sure to go to the beach and bring back a few sea shells. This made me think back to Cronon’s piece, and how he mentioned that some manifestations of “nature” are more spectacular and romanticized than others. There’s one more thing that’s more personal that’s worth mentioning here: the emotional resonance held within those vacations and the memories they created. Of course, I see now that the “nature” which was the theme of countless family vacations was, in many ways, a problematic invention or illusion. But nonetheless, I think that if everyone who went to the Rocky’s were to understand its historical precedents, and how it is an illusion of the American frontier, it wouldn’t make them any less emotionally connected to their “natural” vacation get-aways. This leads me to another point to that’s tied to the Cronon article: if we’re going to try to end this potentially harmful man/nature distinction, celebrating the nature in our backyards and reconnecting with local place may be more practical than trying to un-idealize “nature” as we know it.

3. Greenlight Matches
The last object that I happened upon was a box of matches on my coffee table. My eyes scanned past it, then went back for a closer look. The side of the box was covered in an image of leaves in the sunlight surrounding the trademarked text “Greenlight” while the subtext reads “Sourced from Responsible Forests”. From a consumer’s point of view I was very pleased, but as someone looking for our society’s views of nature I was very ambivalent. Though this probably fit into the category of “greenwashing”, I still felt better about buying the matches than I would otherwise. . . but should I feel this way, and what does this feeling say about how we think about nature? For one, it shows how nature is so blatantly used as a marketing tool (with a trademarked, graphically-designed “greenlight” logo), which, as Slavoj Zizek would say, functions to relieve the guilt of the consumer. I also found it a bit ironic that leaves from trees were the image the box showed, when the matches were made by cutting down trees. Apparently, the leaves weren’t supposed to reference leaves but rather the environmentally-friendly practice of using wood from responsibly managed forests. Leaves seem to function as nature’s stamp of approval here — invoking what we think of as nature to show that it’s an environmentally-friendly practice. After a moment of consideration, I realized that a similar logic is the root of the “green” movement in general. Environmentalism appeals to “nature” as we think about it through the “green” trend. Green marketing is used in contexts which post-environmentalists might consider more sustainable, but many times this sustainability has nothing to “nature” (e.g. the “green” that they appeal to) as we know it. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s important to realize how the green movement is not just a marketing gimmick, it’s also exploiting the idealized, false view of nature which Cronon talks about. The question is, is this good? If environmentalists can’t appeal to “nature”, in all of its fiction and beauty, then what should they appeal to? Though there are plenty of problems with greenwashing, I find it interesting because there is the potential for helping the world (that is, in the non-”nature” post-environmentalist way of going about it that Latour discusses) but by appealing to a very diluted form of “nature” as environmentalists know it.

Inquiry #2

1. Myself out at Konza prairie.

 

I choose to use this as my first picture because a lot of what we have talked about in class in the distinction between nature and us. I felt that his scene would depict that we exist in nature and we attribute certain things to help nature develop and also tear it down. Keeping in mind that we are two separate entities that do interact in some shape or form. I look out at this open range and look at the endless possibilities that we could achieve but we are so trapped by our own ignorance that instead of using a lot of resources we limit ourselves with what we can possible achieve.

 

In Cronans article he talks that we only can achieve certain qualifications in our world that we could consider wilderness. With how our world is moving now a days transferring into the Anthropocene we are going to look at other forms of land differently by distinguishing whether or not they are considered wilderness. In my opinion I feel that any place that habitats plant and animal life could be considered wilderness. The determination of wilderness is an endless change and over time it’s going to change on what is considered a wilderness.

 

2. Batteries

 

For my second picture I chose batteries that I found out in the Konza Prairie I chose this because I feel it in a sign of neglect for those that come to this part of nature and confuse it for a dump. I feel people today don’t have the appreciation for nature as there once was. Apart of that is the super advancement of technology where now today you don’t really even have to leave your house to get anything. Technology has taken a front seat to all which devalues nature to people in this time frame.

 

This relates to me with “loving your monsters” we created this drastic change in the world relating to technology. This has been a daily use in our lives for a couple of decades now and we have to live with what it has caused. As moving forward in the Anthropocene I feel that our monsters need to take a back seat to what is ultimately going to help out world and save us from a long binding despair of what our nature/wilderness could turn into. Time to defeat our monsters.

 

3. Green revolution flyer on campus

 

This was most interesting to me because I had seen so many of these flyers around town in my hometown that I saw that same one on campus. However the one that I saw was torn and beat up with stains all over it. Looking at this brought a picture to mind that I felt was adequate for what I was looking at. We as a society are so caught up in what is trending that, which is all we care about. I see someone walking along holding this flyer imaging what good they could do by changes they could make. Then realizing what work that would take and just tossing this aside like its yesterdays new. I know that this seems like a low point of view but just from what I’ve seen in the world from how people actually react to changes that would benefit they only want to be apart of the group and participate whenever it was convenient to them.

 

When learning how to die in the Anthropocene this is statement made about leaving marks on a world after you leave, and what marks you want those to be. When looking at our world I think there is a lot of talk about what they could do to leave behind a better world then what they had. Although the effort to take action is lower then the actual ideas created to do such things.

 

 

“What do you want your legacy to be”

Considering the Collective

A topic that my blog has discussed on occasion is the understanding that our society values individualism to the point that collectivism is considered an unusual alternative, or something unconventional.  Part of individualism is the idea that a person’s life and choices should improve their own interests.  An individual is considered to be a sovereign party and is the ultimate entity of moral concern.  This particular value system is the foundation of our American, Western culture.  The importance of individualism was evident in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Our fetish for individualism continues to be demonstrated again and again in national politics.  We consistently reward the individuals who have increased their wealth and improved their standing.  Our society rewards the individual so frequently that when policies that concern the collective or the general constituency’s progress it’s surprising.  The new national health insurance program in the United States could be understood an example of collectivism.  Collectivism is the idea that an individual’s choices are not supreme.  The society is the unit of moral concern, which generates limitations for fulfilling one’s personal interests.  I am currently doing research on southwest Kansas counties that hyper-extract from the Ogallala Aquifer.  There are several historic, demographic and economic reasons that small and large scale farmers choose to hyper-extract from this natural resource.  The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest underground water resources in the world that sustains major civic and industrial institutions.  This is a critical common pool resource.  Is this an example of benefiting our community or ourselves?  Yet, it would be an economic hardship for some of these populations to change their water use habits.

This blog has discussed the various uses of habits in our lives.  We have discussed how to develop and execute a productive habit.  Utilizing the habits we create can help us with the process of self-transformation.  Whether you are trying to change much or little about your life, we can all benefit from considering our habitual thoughts.  This idea of habitual thinking refers to what we repeatedly think about and also what we consistently do not think about.  We typically don’t think about things that make us too uncomfortable.  This can be problematic if it limits the opportunities that we have for individual transformation and subsequently a collective or societal transformation.  Recently I read “Love Your Monsters” by Latour and he explained that modern societies practice a precautionary principle.  Latour (and previous scholars) argue that there is a fair amount of risk in modern societies and we mitigate the consequences.  There are two ways of carrying out the precautionary principle: 1. To be responsible only if consequences are certain 2. To be responsible for any and all consequences.  I think this is an important principle to consider when we wrestle with idea of participating in a more collectively minded culture.  Who and what are we responsible for?  I think that many of us understand that many elements of our culture will have to change to live in an environmentally sustainable world.  Yet, we habitually choose not to think about these changes we need to make.  We apply the precautionary principle and attempt to mitigate our “emotional risks” seeking healthier, happier survival.  Or perhaps we find ourselves simply overwhelmed by the overabundance of social justice issues we cannot change and emotionally shut off.  No matter the reason behind our habitual not thinking, we have to do something.  So here’s my suggestion:  Let’s start by trying to habitually think about participating in a collective society.  It doesn’t matter how you think about “the collective,” just think about it.  Imagine the possibilities if you could design a society’s cultural values.  Allow yourself to wonder what it would be like to live in this collective culture and how you would feel about it.

Perhaps living in a collective means changing many of our cultural habits.  Our society has the habit of stereotyping nature to be considered something monolithic like the Rocky Mountains.  Nature is the pristine landscapes and the community roof top garden.  Latour encourages us to consider ourselves as a collective that are responsible for all consequences we have come to face.  We can’t be responsible for only our individual problems anymore, serious changes like climate change force us to think outside the box.  Or rather think beyond our individualized, ‘inside’ boxes… and think bigger and more… collectively, together.