Environmental Ethics

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Avatar Part 1 and 2

Avatar Part 1:

On the lush alien world, called Pandora, lives the Na'vi tribe who appears to live a primitive lifestyle but are highly evolved through evolution and connection with Eywa (Nature God). The planet's environment is very dangerous and poisonous to the humans so they make it invasive to their own environment. The humans start to invade into different territories to find resources and spreading their plague (pollution) of humankind onto the land on Pandora. The Na’vi are hybrids, which are called Avatars, the point of this experiment is to connect with the natives, gain their trust, and drive the natives out for resources. The hybrids must link with their human brains with the Na’vi brains minds to allow for free movement on Pandora. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed former Marine, becomes mobile again through one such Avatar hybrid and falls in love with a Na'vi women (Zoe Saldana). As a bond with her grows, he is drawn closer to the Na’vi people becoming one of their own and fighting for the survival of Pandora’s species and the planet itself. The themes that are presented in the Cli-fi are Love, Resource Mining, Displacement of Indigenous Tribes, and Mankind's Greed/Dominance. This movie also resembles the ever lasted conflict between American and Iraq or European settlers to tribal people. The sky people are depicted as the U.S. military/European settlers. For once instances is the demanded resources the sky people are demanding or the dominating human race (white man) over the Na'vi people (Native Americans). The simple or contrast of lifestyle the Na’vi live kinds of like Native Americans. The Na’vi are also being forced by a more powerful force to fight against for land/resources.

Avatar Part 2:

Avatar 1 ends with an epic battle to a side who (survives) stays on Pandora: the sky people who are draining the planet for resources or the Na'vi who live a nomadic lifestyle only taking what they need. It is sided with the Na'vi because let alone they had several other tribes backing them up. Mother Nature kicks into high gear and helps defend it land with its animals and the natives as well. The sky people are sent away, back home, and the Na'vi suffer high causalities: losing land, animals, habits, and people alone to pick who thrives and survives. The Na'vi are now in the building process to rebuild their society and deal with constant issues of pollution, wildlife, other indigenous tribes, food rationing, and having no place to go. Losing "Hometree" they are now exposed to the world and must find a new place thrive for their tribe to continue on. Jake and Neytiri soon begin a family with three children being the heart of the story and siding their faith as a whole to find a new home. We'll be seeing other tribes of the Na'vi and involving a lot more conflict of issues living and thriving together. The themes are thriving pollution, Human vs. Nature, and Human vs. Environment

State of Fear
https://envirojpo.blogspot.com/2018/12/state-of-fear-final-report.html?showComment=1544346553281#c1823706363157048815
Interstellar
https://envirojpo.blogspot.com/2018/12/interstellar-final-blog-post.html?showComment=1544345780497#c6043599719413220638

1 comment:

PhilDecember 9, 2018 at 9:47 AM
And there are lessons for US to learn from this culture-clash, right? Lessons having to do with "connection" as a condition of HUMAN "thriving" etc.? But the great challenge for us is: how to reconcile evolved technology with the appealing harmonious simplicity of native wisdom? Can we do it? Can we survive our own "progress"?
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NOV 14 MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes. McK thru David Quammen... If you want to post an EARLY DRAFT of your final report BLOG POST (for use during your PRESENTATION and for constructive feedback), you need to SIGN UP to become an AUTHOR on our site. Scroll to near the bottom of this page to see blog post instructions, under "Final report blog post"... NOV 19 MacA Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation. McK thru Sandra Steingraber... NOV 21 MacA Part IV-Assessing the End of the World. McK Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan... NOV 26 MacA Part V-Taking Action. McK Paul Hawken, Rebecca Solnit...THANKSGIVING BREAK... DEC 3 Last class. Exam 2 (NOTE: Exam 2 is not a "final exam," it is the exam covering material since the first exam)... DEC 6 Final blogpost (final draft) due (post earlier for constructive feedback)... A NOTE ON OUR TEXTS. This is an ambitious reading schedule. Read what you can, prioritizing the texts in descending order: first-listed assignment for each class gets top priority, second gets 2d, and so on... Fall 2024: HONORS BUILDING 116, T/Th 4:20 pm

TEXTS Fall '24

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

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Avatar Part 1 and 2

1 comment:

Peripatetics