Author: Emma Stein (Page 1 of 2)

The question that stuck with me from Dr. Paul Farber and Pedro Lasch’s discussion with our class is one that was brought up at the end of class: are there monuments we could make now that wouldn’t be destroyed by future generations? This question wasn’t discussed in much depth at all, though I wish it had been. My first response to the question was no, of course not. Our world is far from achieving the type of progress that could allow us to build a monument that would please future generations because the monument would be bound to be challenged by someonein the world. We would encounter so much trouble deciding what the monument would be, and this would limit our ability to truly imagine a monument that could be appreciated by future generations. At least in my perspective, our populations are becoming increasingly more progressive as time goes on, which is why I think the monument would need to be progressive to maintain appreciation in the future. Nonetheless, we have trouble envisioning our future progressiveness potential because we haven’t seen it yet, and it is not easy to imagine, as is anything in the future. What I, at least, hope the world will be one day is a type of progressive that is far, far from where we are now.

When I pondered the question on a deeper level, I concluded that I think there could be a monument that wouldn’t be destroyed by future generations. Monuments now are not loved by everyone, and I don’t think they are necessarily intended to be appreciated by everyone. In the past, they have certainly not been approved by everyone. Monuments are meant to express and acknowledge our history through the present; they combine the past, present, and future. Monuments are not necessarily intended to combine everything into one—they are intended to express a select aspect of our history that is now living with us. I think when I first considered the question, I imagined the monument encompassing the entirety of our complex current political and social situations. One monument cannot express this, though, and therefore I think we could create a monument that wouldn’t be destroyed by future generations.

Last week was by far my favorite class so far in the semester. I have been working on my Program II proposal for weeks about the importance of studying the future of agriculture and how it will, and currently does, depend on design thinking to become more sustainable and still supply large populations. When I sat down in class and got to watch Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective, a film that so brilliantly expresses everything I want to learn about and ways I can go about doing that, I was stimulated with passion. One of the parts that really struck me was when our complicated human relationship with nature was explained. Humans are a keystone species which means we are integral to our ecosystems, and yet we have an extremely flawed understanding of our relationship with nature. We view ourselves as separate from nature’s processes, which leads us to take advantage of the power we have from being the most cognitively advanced species by making the earth serve us instead of developing a give-and-take relationship and living withthe environment. Our current large-scale corporate agricultural practices illustrates this distinctly because we have created this system solely to serve humans. We use techniques that kill almost everything that is beneficial to the land and that other organisms rely on in order to grow food to feed our own mouths. Once we realize the land cannot offer what we need it to anymore (a consequence of our selfishness) we search for more land to farm and continue to destroy that area as well.

One of the reasons permaculture is so promising for our future is due to the principles the practice is rooted in. The fourth principle in permaculture practices is “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback.” This is arguably one of the most important principles because it reminds us that global warming is a human issue; We started it, we are perpetuating it, and we will be the reason the planet reaches its limit. The principle acknowledges that the current ways we are interacting with nature are “inappropriate,” and stresses the importance of human habitual change. We need to resist temptations to feel almighty and live in the most lavish luxury and let go of holding a know-it-all mentality to realize that what we are doing is hurting everything around us and ourselves. Permaculture, if listened to and adopted by farmers around the world, could truly make a difference in reducing food insecurity and slowing climate change, and it is a concept we need to continue exploring.

“INHABIT.” Accessed April 16, 2018. http://inhabitfilm.com/.

I was struck by one overlap between the two articles we read for class, “Grounds for Hope” by Rebecca Solnit and “The Limits of Utopia” by China Miéville. There are three quotes that are involved directly in this overlap, and they are below. The first quote is from “Grounds for Hope,” and the second two quotes are from “The Limits of Utopia.”

• “Dystopias infect official reports.”

• “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”

• “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power.”

The first quote expresses how society is lacking positive and truthful reports. Even our “official reports” are biased and tainted by media, film, and fiction, and this leads to the second quote. These biased reports leave readers with an false idea of hope: the idea that everything will be fine—global warming is not as pressing as it may seem, Donald Trump isn’t taking enormous strides backwards in the progress of equity for our country.

The people that write these “official reports” have the power to control what our communities hear and read. They can twist, dramatize, or deflate the news in order to illicit any desired response, and use this to sway politics and perceived truth. They thrive and are successful off of readers feeling comforted enough to keep reading the news, yet hopeless enough to not take action, which is where the third quote comes in. If action were taken, rebellions and protests would be sparked. These “opponents” balance a delicate definition of hope which they present to their readers, one that leads people to feel hope yet does not truly empower people with hope.

Is it better to act locally or globally? This is one question I have been churning around in my brain for the entire semester, but I have really been focused on it over the past week. Many of our guest speakers and conversations in class have involvedd discussing the importance of starting locally and making change by encouraging those in close vicinity to be environmentally conscious. Crystal Dreisbach told her story about how she began just writing letters to people and making that personal connection, and she said the best way to make change is to immediately influence those around you; Robin Kirk, as well, stressed the importance and necessity of starting locally in order to truly change anything. Today I was chatting with Jessie as we were making our slips of paper for the #AprilThreePlasticFree campaign and I was noting how I think this day could truly make a difference at Duke. I was, and am, confident that our day will encourage people to consider and think about their impact before picking up plastic utensils or straws, and was hopeful that this could translate into their daily activities and habits. Jessie, on the other hand, brought up Annie Leonard’s piece in Tools for Grassroots Activists: Best Practices for Success in the Environmental Movement, “Taking Our Work to the Next Level.” In this piece, Leonard notes that environmental activists have become too reserved and cautious, and instead, we need to demand what we know is needed and stop compromising. She notes that while living sustainably produces a good model to align our values and actions, it is not enough; we need to act to change the broader system by marching, voting and encouraging others to vote, and writing petitions. We (environmental activists) have the power to do this because we make up the majority, even though it often feels like we are fighting against everyone. When we start demanding what we know the Earth needs, we will start to see true change and environmental progress. This leaves me at a crossroads: is it better to act locally or globally? I still don’t know which is better, and I feel I will find the answer to be neither is better, but rather a combination is ideal. I think it is possible to achieve global affects through local actions. If we start and continue to talk and discuss environmental politics and solutions and make action that encourages one another, we can reach a broader, more global population.

Gallagher, Nora, et al. Tools for Grassroots Activists: Best Practices for Success in the Environmental Movement. Patagonia Books, 2016.

Unfortunately, I was absent for the Counter-Cartographies Collective event in class on Wednesday about the power of mapping due to my travels in Uganda. While I was away, though, I took some time to contemplate the power of maps, and found myself creating my own map related to what I experienced while I was away. While there, I found out that Rwanda does not allow plastic bags into their country, which I thought was incredibly interesting and an incredible act of activism and effort towards reducing plastic waste in the country. Something, I noted, that any of the states in the U.S. were far from implementing. I was surprised when I was in Uganda to read several placards at restaurants and hostels which reported about the business’ green intentions and environmental focuses. Considering environmental impact was the expectation for various companies and people while I was abroad in Africa, not the exception (which I feel is the opposite for the United States).

I was frustrated when thinking about how privileged the United States can be when we consider global warming and the fact that many of the harms of global warming will affect developing countries before it impacts developed countries like the U.S. Unfairly, developed countries are the places that are releasing the most greenhouse gases and truly spiraling the environment downwards. I was frustrated to see this firsthand during my travels.

When on the plane back from Uganda and while I was reading the articles about the power of mapping, I was imagining and mentally creating a map that would plot all the places that are truly making a conscious environmental decision to reduce their emissions and impact on the environment and how this matches up to a plotting of developing/developed countries. I read Counter-Cartographies’ statements about why they are mapping and I realized this map I imagined aligns particularly well with their intentions. When I mentioned my idea in class, Professor Gould played devil’s advocate and asked me what I meant by “progress” and how that can truly be measured in a map. I hadn’t considered how progress can be so subjective depending on both political affiliation and moral values in life. Then, in class on Friday we also discussed the fact that maps are, in many ways, universally accepted knowledge. When one looks at a map, they don’t at first question the validity of the map, which is one of the ways maps can be so powerful. Part of me was frustrated that my hypothetically created map had the flaw of being biased, and another part of me was inclined to create the map even more because I thought about how I could secretly expose people who don’t believe in global warming to my map and how it could possibly not be questioned but rather just accepted. I realized that while this isn’t necessarily fair, I wished this for a number of topics and theories which center around political disagreements. The readings and discussions from this week made me realize the potential for education and data collection through mapping, and made me excited to see this develop.

There is one specific tie between Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Robin Kirk’s talk with us last week that I have been thinking about over the weekend. Alinksy notes that human life is a constant climb upwards: one issue will lead to another, happiness resides within the pursuit itself, etc. Many of the points Kirk touched on during her fluid discussion with us relied on this concept of life being ongoing and always presenting something new. In her own life she acknowledged that although her job began as writing, which she loved, she was not satisfied with just writing about issues; she was frustrated, and she wanted more. So then she worked to find what the “more” consisted of for herself. She also mentioned that seeing damage isn’t enough, and the way to make people understand and how to motivate people is to show them the damage.

For me, this paints a very large scale picture of how to confront human rights and life issues, and it makes me feel as though the issues are too big to solve, as you will never truly solve issues because there will always be something more to address. Yet, I found it interesting that Kirk said the key to change was based in local action and by making the issues personal. This presents as a type of cognitive dissonance; for example, while many times I personally feel that the issue of climate change is too large to even tackle, I also need to remember that I can make some change locally through activism and conversations. I would have liked to ask Kirk if she feels that local change can be enough to really make a difference, or how much local activism is needed to truly influence an issue.

Alinsky, Saul D., Rules for Radicals: a Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage Books, 1989.

One of the most intriguing parts for me of Oil on Water by Helon Habila was the point that although the novel was fiction, it was rooted in fact and relatable occurrences. While dystopian novels I have read in the past have depicted a world destroyed by powerful industrial forces and ruined lands from climate change, I have never read a novel that felt as close to our threatening future reality as this novel did. The way Habila describes the effects of the oil companies through words of birds draped over branches and oil staining their wings and fish floating on the surface reminds me of times I was rowing on the Chicago River and seeing dead goats float past, mysterious furry something’s on the bank, and golf carts scraping my oars. The language in the novel balanced between frighteningly relatable and compellingly pessimistic. Habila also wrote of the livestock depletions, which has been something I have been talking a lot about recently in my daily life. I am working on my Program II proposal, and my intention is to analyze the future of agriculture given the pressing nature of our decreasing farming culture and a continuous population increase, and how to re-localize our food sources to avoid something that I imagine to look quite like the world that Habila describes.

In class, we discussed the intention behind making both Zag and Rufus journalists. We spoke about accessibility, neutrality of their characters, and how they are both removed and the most innocent of observers in many ways. I was pondering the fact that while journalists are all these things, they are also out to seek and report the truth of situations. This can always be skewed, and often is, in our daily lives with competing intentions of politics. I believe Habila’s intention by making the two main characters journalists was to reveal a rawness behind discovering the truth that many people are blind when they read the news or media reports. Journalists seek information and to uncover the truth, which is one of the most vulnerable and genuine jobs that exists. Yet, many see this job as deceitful and complicated. I think Habila wanted to challenge this perception of journalists through the characters.

Habila, H. (2010). Oil on Water New York, USA: W.W. Norton & Company.

I was absent for the discussion last Friday about Spider the Artist, by Nnedi Okorafor, which I feel is both a positive and negative thing. I feel upset about missing the discussion because I think I would have much more clarity about the meaning and dynamics of the piece, yet I’m glad I have time to process it on my own and create my own meaning of it over a longer period of time. While the story offers many alluring subjects, I found the most interesting one to be a bit more hidden. I found myself close reading a part of the first paragraph.

My husband used to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.

I was intrigued by the idea of the forest, and how it provided a type of shadow to hide the crude truth and reality of her life. Her house was hidden “practically in the forest,” masking her injuries and abuse under the trees. She notes that because of this forest, nobody ever saw or heard the damages caused by her husband. In many ways, it harmed her because it hid the reality of her life to the rest of her community. It also hid the reality of life to herself, as when she needed to leave, she escaped past the bushes and through the tall grass to the pipelines. The forest offers her a liberation from her husband, it is somewhere she can go to play her guitar, feel joy and sorrow, and truly acknowledge her own feelings. Her husband does not inquire about where she runs to until later in the story, when their relationship gets better. Only then does he wish to explore the forest which used to mask her injuries and discovers the truth of their relationship, the only reason she stayed around for as long as she did was because of the Zombie. The first paragraph of this story serves as almost an prologue to the story.

I was intrigued by Linda Hogan’s powerful method of intertwining the complicated dynamics of race, power, the environment, and culture in her novel Power. In one of my other classes, an Ethics class, we have spoken a lot about what it means for a population to be culturally devastated; we read a book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation about the Crow and the loss of their influential tribal Chief and how the implications of the buffalo going away resulted in a paradox for the future of the Crow culture. This book was on my mind a lot when reading Power, as Ama makes a decision in the name of her culture, and to save it, and Omishto works throughout the novel to discover what the Taiga culture means to her personally.

In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear explains that the Crow faced three choices with what to do with the Sun Dance when the Crow could no longer fight, when their culture began to be devastated. The first choice was to keep dancing, even with a lost meaning of why the Sun Dance is danced. The second was to invent a new meaning behind the dance. The third, was to give up the dance entirely. These three options are ones nobody would ideally pick; it is a loss in every situation. I considered these three choices when contemplating Ama’s decision to kill the panther. The panther has a similar cultural significance as the buffalo does to the Crow, although the animals are seen very differently in both cultures. Ama didn’t necessarily choose any of the three choices outlined by Lear when her culture was facing devastation, yet she made a bold choice to violate some of the deepest beliefs in Taiga culture. The closest option Ama’s actions reflect is the second one, as her effort was one to preemptively avoid cultural devastation and spark rejuvenation for the community and for Omishto. While she didn’t necessarily encourage a new meaning behind the panther, she re-inspired conversation about the Taiga culture. She lost her acceptance in the community as a result of this action, which I believe makes it somewhat more heroic and even more of an act of activism for the environment and for her culture.

Hogan, Linda. Power, W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.

Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2008.

There were a few lines from the movie Bidder 70 that stuck with me when reflecting on the activist Tim DeChristopher and his story. DeChristopher frustrated me as a character when I was watching the film, as at many times I felt as though he was a bit of a martyr. The beginning seemed irritatingly centered around him rather than the cause or the circumstance, which was probably the intention of the director. Still, something felt off about this presentation. Despite the few nuanced things that frustrated me through close inspection, the overall movie drove me to feel empowered and intrigued in environmental activism work. At the end of the movie, it is noted that while none of the business owners that participated in the unlawful auction were reprimanded, whereas, a “kid” (DeChristopher) was sent to prison for standing up for what he believed in. This line resonated with me greatly, and I felt anger towards our system and the way people with money and resources can escape the demands of the law. Even thinking of how much worse this would have been if DeChristopher was a person is even more frustrating. His action came from love, which is different than the action that came from industrial, monetary intentions which is just for personal and business gain. That is the most frustrating aspect for me; our society places more value on superficial and corrupt intentions and actions than it does actions that come from an honest and genuine intention. As questioned in the movie, since when did a desire and action for hope become a crime?

Another point stressed in the film is the fact that DeChristopher’s action was for the sake of humanity, not even for the planet or environment necessarily. Even those who don’t care about the environment and preserving it should pay attention and care because it’s important for our future generations. DeChristopher states this simply: it is not about the planet… it is about saving human lives. While I feel a little unsettled by this statement because I think we should act for the state of our planet because we are guests on this earth, I think that this is a tough statement that even the most adamant people against climate change should listen to. It’s for our children, for their children, and for all the children after them.