Environmental Ethics: We Are Unprepared Midterm blog post

Monday, October 1, 2018

We Are Unprepared Midterm blog post

We Are Unprepared is a cautionary tale that is set in fictional Isole, Vermont. Ash and Pia are a married couple who move from urbanized Brooklyn to live a more simple, homestead life. After being there for three months there is news of an impeding superstorm. The narrative is set in Ash’s perspective. Pia, his wife, can be described as limitless, creative, organic, and beautiful. Ash is native to Vermont. He enjoys making furniture and eating organic, he is loyal and protective of Pia. August is their neighbor. He is a 7-year-old boy who is neglected by his parents and frequently plays in the woods. August sees Ash as a father figure and Ash wants to adopt him but Pia is not protective of him like Ash is. Ash meets Bev, a social worker who is hoping to find August a stable home after August goes missing for over a day. Ash tries to convince Pia to adopt August but she wants to conceive a child herself. Peg is another neighbor of Ash and August. She is an older woman who teaches at Lyndon State College. She is also an author, a botanist, and an activist. Ash describes her as accomplished, smart and well-traveled. As August and Ash meet for the first time in Peg’s home she discusses with Ash her beliefs that the government is not being honest about the intensity of the storms and believes it will be worse than the government warns. Pia wants to feel prepared so she joins a doomsday preparation group called The Preppers which is lead by Crow. He is an ex-military man who focuses on protection for his secluded group. He advocates energy conservation, water safety, food supply, and communication technology because he predicts the technological world will be destroyed. On the other hand there is John “Salty” Salting, a member of the Isole community who is part of an unofficial group of successful statesmen that work on good causes that aim to better the community as a whole. He calls a meeting for the townspeople to discuss preparations for the storm. Ash and Pia and Peg attend this meeting. There is a gun incident where a man named Roger commands his road is plowed first. Roger is denied the answer he desires so he commands the attention of the room by firing two bullets into the ceiling. Ash and Salty pin Roger down and get the gun away from him. Police are called and the meeting concludes early. Salty and Ash formally meet and Salty quietly invites Ash to join a subcommittee to address the issues The Storm will bring. When Pia learns of Salty’s invitation she is furious with Ash. Pia believes Salty’s subcommittee is like a shadow government and he does not want Ash to join them. This indicates a really big rift in their relationship.

In your life what do you feel protective of? Is there a place or a person that you would shield from the effects of climate change?
What would you do to prepare yourself for The Storm?

Quiz 1

Quiz
Pia joins the —
Isolé (French) means 1. friendly 2) Isolated 3)warning
There is an impending —

1 comment:

UnknownOctober 1, 2018 at 2:44 PM
Question 6) Do you think Pia is selfish for wanting to conceive a child on her own knowing August's family situation?

Yes, I do. I am of the opinion that people can reduce their impact on the planet by not having children. I believe people will not stop having children, but world-conscientious people can do a huge favor to the world by adopting the unwanted children. God knows there are so many who go unloved.
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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

Monday, October 1, 2018

We Are Unprepared Midterm blog post

1 comment:

Peripatetics