Bio week 6

I think the eight point deep ecology platform is a great ideological platform. I think it makes sense that it was written awhile ago when nothing of the sort had been said before. Right now, it feels like there are more people on board with these ideas, if not actually living them out in their day to day lives. If seems like a more practical list of things that people should or should not do would be more useful at this point. What companies to avoid buying from? What ways to live in cities and still foster a diversity of ecosystems? What ways to get communities involved in such efforts? etc etc. How to get the government on board? Is that possible? 
Ecosystems are strong because they can adapt as a whole. Ecosystems are made of so many parts that it is like a large group of people working together - if one struggles, it doesn't necessarily mean the whole group falls apart. The whole group might not work as well, but they adapt their new circumstances. Ecosystems are also fragile though because they are so easily affected by the world around them. In class we were reading that removing trees in western North America has cooling affects in Siberia. Ecosystems are very sensitive to the entire world around them, and when there are drastic changes to that world, it puts the ecosystem in a state where it needs to adapt far more than it should. We as humans can be incredibly strong, but we can also be so fragile. We can run marathons, sense danger, grow babies inside us, but one strong virus can knock us out for weeks on end. Both very strong and very fragile. 
The end goals of social ecology sound great. It sounds like a pretty Utopian society, certainly someplace I would want to live. I feel like we have a very long way to go to get there though, and sometimes I wonder with the state of the world as it is, is it even possible to have a society like that? 

Comments

  1. alexJune 27, 2017 at 12:33 PM

    Hello -- great post! I really appreciate reading this & like the connection between human strength & fragility compared to the environment. It's amazing what we can do & accomplish, and sometimes it's hard to have that fragility exposed to us.

    I also feel skeptical of whether we can live in a society which respects deep ecology! I'd love to live in such a place too, but I also feel like we are not as smart as we are hungry for more: material, power, wealth, etc. it seems like we would have to come to terms with this to move forward - but it's an uncomfortable thing to think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Emily KwongAugust 18, 2017 at 3:13 PM

    The way you described the changes to our ecosystems made me think.. Sure we can live without an appendix. Our bodies should be able to adjust without it. Oh, let's just take the tonsils out too and screw around with the liver with tons of alcohol. Oh wait.. it seems for some reason, my body's not working so well.. After some point, sure we can recover, but the more off balance we put it, the more complicated fixing the accumulated problems will get and the longer it'll take for us to fix it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bio - HIV and AIDS

I think in this case, the western medical understanding of HIV and AIDS seems much more sophisticated than the TCM view - mostly because it it a relatively new disease. I thought the article about the man who was cured of HIV was fascinating, and I'll be really interested to see what sort of research continues in that vein. I think the use of the PreP treatments is like most things with health care - it is up to the patient to look at their life and see if it makes sense for them. I absolutely think there shouldn't be a stigma against these treatments though. Just like with birth control, a persons body is their own and it is up to them to decide whats best for them. I hope that there can be research done to decrease the side effects and potential damage - I feel like that would make things a little bit more clear cut. TCM can absolutely strengthen the immune system. It works on putting the body back in balance or harmony. When the body is working better, all functions improve...
Read more

Physics week 8

I was trying to think about how Newton's laws applied to motion in my life - what forces keep me in motion and what forces keep me still. I realized that these laws apply to the self motivated motion of living creatures in a very different way. While often when I'm at rest I do want to remain at rest, there is an internal force that gets me up and moving. And there are certainly times when I'm out and about doing things, that it would take some about of internal motivation to get me to rest. You cannot measure this internal force though, or really even describe exactly what it is. The second law - "the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to it's mass," could also be applied in a way. How motivated, excited, or internally driven I am about something probably determines how fast I act on it. And if we think of mass as extra things I have weighing me down in my life, that would slow down the mo...
Read more

Physics week 6

It is interesting to think about if all vibrations are "good." What makes something good? Everything has a vibration, and in that sense, if we determine that something is good, its vibration is good. But we have all certainly felt what we perceive to be bad vibrations - walking into a room where there has just been an argument, hearing nails scratch on the chalkboard. These things are unpleasant, but are their vibrations bad? I think it's all subjective. When we were talking about resonance and objects being destroyed when their own natural resonance is externally amplified, it made me think of interpersonal clashes I've had. I'm a double Aries, which at times has certainly been a strong vibration to have. For most of my life, I've always clashed pretty hard with other fire types, especially other aries. During our conversation, I was thinking about how maybe this is because they are holding a certain vibration or resonance that is just too close to my own, c...
Read more