Environmental Ethics: Love Earth Now

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Love Earth Now - Discussion Questions

I'm not sure if we will discuss anything from the last few chapters of Love Earth Now, but I thought I'd post some discussion questions to contemplate. Also, I'm not sure if you guys can edit this post, but feel free to add your own discussion questions if you can/want to!

1) What do you think Cheryl meant when she said, "While I've seen plenty of jacarandas in my time, I'd never truly seen one before today"?
A) Have you ever experienced a similar situation?
B) What was your reaction?
C) Did this have an impact on the way you viewed that thing from then on?
D) Do you think that if more people stopped to appreciate the aspects of nature that are usually overlooked or viewed as mundane, it could have positive impact on the environment?

2) Do have any "eco-guilt"?
A) Do you take any actions to assuage your "eco-guilt"?
B) Do these actions have any negative impacts on your life?
C) Is there anything you do to balance this guilt and these negative impacts?

3) Do you agree with Cheryl, that "Earth loves us"?

4) Does the Earth "speak" to you? What does it say?

5) Do you think the methods Cheryl uses to cope would be effective for you? What would you put on your own list? Would you add or remove anything from Cheryl's list?

6) What do you think was the purpose of this book?
A) Did this book impact the way you view things?
B) Did you gain anything positive from reading this book?
C) Would you reccommend this book to others?

4 comments:

UnknownOctober 31, 2018 at 3:39 PM
I don't know if I would say that the Earth loves us as much as I would say that the Earth is forced to support us. I feel that for the Earth to love use we would have to have provided something to the Earth to make it better not just taken resources.
ReplyDelete
Replies
UnknownOctober 31, 2018 at 3:40 PM
The Author Cheryl has a website where she responds to comments people make about the book.
https://cherylleutjen.com/
ReplyDelete
Replies
UnknownOctober 31, 2018 at 3:44 PM
There is this cool article about book that fall under the similar scope of Love Earth Now. Seven Authors Share Books That Bring Them Closer to Nature.
https://www.bookish.com/articles/earth-day-books-nature-reads/
ReplyDelete
Replies
PhilOctober 31, 2018 at 7:06 PM
Good questions! Cheryl clearly is an empath of sorts, she feels spirit and personality all around... but does she really think the earth "loves" us? Or is she more like Spinoza, whose "intellectual love of God" is simply the understanding that our lives depend upon sustaining a healthy relation to the natural systems that spawned and support us? She wouldn't put it that way, of course, but I think she's smarter than she lets on. The big takeaway for me, from "Love Earth Now," is that we must care deeply for our "host, the world" (in George Santayana's phrase)... but we must also enjoy our lives, the very lives made possible by the integrity of our respectful relation to nature. If any of y'all come across any texts that express that message better than Cheryl does, please share with me (and future Environmental Ethics students).
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Love Earth Now - Discussion Questions

4 comments:

Peripatetics