zach fauver, a powerful thought

“Too say that we are snatching food from our children’s’ mouths is to put it too gently; what we are snatching from them is the very possibility of feeding themselves.” This is a bold claim from Eisenberg’s text, The Ecology of Eden, but the punch packs some truth. We are taking from and abusing the earth in a manner that does not allow it to naturally cycle everything back at a healthy rate. Do we ever think about how much energy it takes to have a nice prepared meal on our plates? Or how much is wasted in our developed means of waste disposal? Its quotes like these from the far right extremist like Ann Coulter that makes me hesitant to admit that I am a republican, “its your planet, take it, rape it.” Has she not even used logic and considered the reproductions for the future generations? It is pure selfishness to support continued destruction of our planet and not take steps toward conservation. So next time you enjoy that meal at the dinner table, or flush your toilet, take a minute to think about the bigger picture and what the world might look like for the next generations.

Jackie Trono - Homo narrans?

A few weeks ago, Dr. Redick mentioned (and we briefly discussed) Walter Fischer’s work, “Narration As a Paradigm of Human Communication.” (Fischer’s work is available [in segments] on the WebCT site for our class.) Here, Fischer presents his argument for the primacy of the narrative paradigm over the rational-world paradigm. Each paradigm comes with its own presuppositions and implications about the nature of humans and their interpersonal interaction.

The rational-world paradigm presupposes five things, according to Fischer. They are: (1) humans are essentially rational beings, (2) discourse that features clear-cut inferential and implicative structures is standard, (3) the conduct of argument is situational, (4) rationality is determined by subject-matter, knowledge, and argumentative ability, and (5) the world is a set of logical puzzles that are solvable by analysis and reason. With these five presuppositions in mind, one can see that the rational-world paradigm suggests that argument is the means of being human; thus, being rational or learned means being competent in argument.

On the other hand, Fischer’s narrative paradigm presupposes that (1) humans are essentially storytellers, (2) “good reasons,” which vary in form among situations, genres, and media of communication, are standard, (3) the practice of good reasons is ruled multifariously by history, biography, culture, and character, among other forces, (4) rationality relies on the nature of persons as narrative beings, and (5) the world is a set of stories to be chosen to further the process of continual re-creation. Arising from these presuppositions is the concept that narrative rationality operates by identification rather than deliberation. According to Fischer, there are three reasons why narrative is more universal and efficacious than argument. They are: (1) narration comes closer to actual experience of the world, (2) narrative probability and fidelity are innate, not learned, and (3) narration works by suggestion and identification. As Fischer writes, “stories are enactments of the whole mind in concert with itself.”

I’m not sure with whom I side on the subject of the fundamental state of man. Fischer would have us view man as Homo narrans, man the storyteller. The wider world has us as Homo sapiens, man the wise. In a recent discussion with Dr. Teschner, he suggested that perhaps we are really Homo ludens, man the player. The shift in emphasis from Fischer to Teschner is that man either mediates his experience through language, through reflection, or that he simply acts. In the course of his essay on the narrative paradigm Fischer quotes Heidegger: “We are a conversation…conversation and its unity support our existence.” Do I agree with Heidegger? Here, I recall Dr. Redick’s reading of Helen Keller’s ascent to knowledge through language. Dr. Redick claimed in class that we cannot have differentiated knowledge without language, and I suppose I agree. Notably, however, all of us have had experiences we would refer to as ineffable. Yes, this is a word for the experience, but it really tells us nothing of the experience except that ineffability, our inability to articulate its contents, is its main feature linguistically. In many cases ineffable experiences are the most behaviorally altering in one’s repertoire. Considering Heidegger again, I’m still uncertain. I do think that there is more to the human experience than the constituents of his language would allow. Perhaps the ineffable experience is incommunicable, but I don’t think that its incommunicability in any way diminishes its efficacy.

What is more primary – man’s status as an active/productive creature or his status as a linguistically-mediated/narrative being? Is there a hard distinction between the two states? I find this topic enthralling and yet I feel no closer to a clear answer after countless hours of consideration. I suppose that’s one of the larger problems for humans in general. We have these experiences, we reflect on them, we mediate them with language, but the speed at which we process the experience never nears the speed at which we have new experiences that we must then reflect upon and mediate with language. To confound the problem further, the process often occurs in a random order, e.g. we reflect upon a previous experience, try to mediate it with language, and create new complex metaphysically problematic experiences. There is a mysterious interplay among these states of man, and I don’t know that I’ll ever feel satisfied as to its solution.

Katie Lamp- Food for thought

Yes, the title is very cliched, but I think it is appropriate because I have often stopped to think about food. You know, what we eat, when we eat, why we eat what we eat, and all of that. After yesterday's video on food and how it contributes to emotional occassions and connections, I thought about food even more. In recent years, one of the hot topics has been food, including a focus on dieting and just where the food we eat comes from. It's almost like people are obsessed with having the most natural foods, eating exactly the right proportions, and eating only the best foods available. For a long time, food hasn't just been about nutritional value and survival. Non-human animals eat for survival and they eat to make up the caloric expenditure of foraging. Humans eat at parties, restaurants, weddings, family celebrations and many other occassions. Yes, people have to eat in order to survive and nutrition is very important in maintaining a healthy body, but there are so many other reasons people eat. If people ate simply to survive, there wouldn't be a problem with obesity, there wouldn't be eating disorders, and there wouldnt be as many brands and varieties of food available as there are today. The are as many reasons people eat as things they can choose to eat, and this is what is interesting to me. When someone is planning a party, food is important. A wedding- once again, food is very important. The restaurant business has thrived because people associate food with social settings. Most people have a favorite food or foods, and maybe this is just because I'm in college, but I know that I myself and other people get very excited about good food and going out to eat at restaurants that we like. If eating was not a highly social event, the catering business wouldn't exist, and I really don't think food just wouldn't be as interesting anymore. Anthropomorphism aside, animals only have "favorite" foods based on biological needs, not based on what they had at their birthday or what their parents fed them growing up.
Something else I have considered is how the creation of grocery stores and restaurants has made us stop thinking about what's in our food and where our food comes from. We are told from a young age to not put things in our mouths that aren't food, but parents and caregivers rarely explain all of the ingredients in the food they do allow their children to put in their mouths. When I ate my yogurt this morning, I didn't even think about the process by which that yogurt was made and how it ended up in the container with a Yoplait label on it, but maybe I should have given that a second thought. When we get food at the dining hall or at a restaurant, we usually do not know how it was prepared or where the ingredients came from. Most processed foods have ingredients that the average person can't even pronounce. What does this say? In our fast-paced society, we haven't stopped to slow down and really examine what we're putting our bodies. While I know I'm not going to do this all the time, and I will continue to put processed foods in my body without looking at the ingredients because I trust health inspectors to make sure my food is okay, it's definitely something I wish everyone thought about more often.

Gordon Mallonee - Food and Community

Yesterday in class we watched a movie that showed the different ways people are brought together with food. As a society the act of eating can be very social or personal depending on how you go about it. Taking a girl out to dinner and paying for it is different than going out to dinner with a group of friends for someone birthday. In the movie one of the examples of how food is used to bring people together was the wedding where lots of friends and family came together for a special event and shared good food. A more personal example from the movie was when it talked about the Muslim tradition of Ramadan. During the month of Ramadan eating is only done before Sun-up and after Sundown. At the end of the month there is a big feast where family gets together and celebrates.

There is a very different community and tradition, that is in the developing stages, here at CNU. A group called the Urban Foragers is trying to impact the large amount of food that is wasted everyday. We do this by going to Grocery stores and instead of going inside to get our food we go around back and take a look in the dumpster. Everyday perfectly good food is thrown out and waisted. I have found Milk thats expiration date was weeks away. The only thing wrong with it was it had a dent in the container. So naturally its not good and must be thrown out. Noe where the community comes into play with the Urban Foragers is that we are planing to have a what we call a "group dive" where everyone goes to different locations and gets what they can and bring it to a place where it can be combined and a feast prepared. Then we will all enjoy a sit down dinner that did not coast us anything other than the time it took to gather the food that was on its way to the dump. This type of community is doing good for the world while at the same time keeping a little extra money in our pockets. :-P

However the reality of things is very sad. Think about how much food you wast everyday and the fact that there are still starving people all over the world. It is not right that America, as rich as we are, waste so much instead of trying to help others. So even you can make a differences, no matter how small you think it might be, it still helps.


Go Green or Die!

Katie Lamp- What makes a place sacred?

I find it interesting how something like a house, a building or a field can have special meaning attached to it simply because an important event occurred there or an important person was said to have lived or been there. Historical examples and Biblical examples extend further back into human existence, and places such as celebrities' or politicians' homes are considered superficially sacred by many people in today's society. With historical events, there are national parks and monuments devoted to buildings, statues and fields that are considered historically significant. Whether an important document was signed in a building or a battle took place on a field, suddenly four walls, a ceiling and a floor become an important place or a stretch of grassy field becomes a battlefield. When an elementary school class takes a field trip to a monument or a national park to learn about the historical things that happened there, the kids only associate the place with the event because of what they are told. If a child went to a field or saw a building without a teacher or other adult telling them something important happened there, they would simply see the field or the building, plain and simple. Some places with Biblical significance are considered especially sacred, and people will travel from miles around to pray at or simply see these places. When someone attaches religious or spiritual significance to a place, they see past the material aspects of the place, such as the structure of a statue or building, and see what it means to them. While more superficial, the homes of well-known and famous people in today's society are considered sacred on some level as well. Places that are frequented by celebrities or politicians, such as stores, clubs and restaurants, become well-known and get more business because of the well-known people who go to those places. The fact that people will go to a place just because a celebrity has been there shows that in today's society, people place value in the places that famous people have been or have lived. I think that while a place that has Biblical or historical significance has a deeper meaning than a place well-known because of a famous person, all of these places have something in common: they have become sacred in someone's mind because of the stories told about that place. The stories people tell make the places in those stories memorable, and this is how I think those places become sacred.

Sunset at the River

Today I went down to the James River to enjoy the sunset with a friend of mine. There were several observations that I found noteworthy. One was the mix of raw nature and the development of man’s hand. If you fix your eyes on one spot you could be under the illusion that you were in the middle of nowhere. All the eye can see is the rocks on the beach, the vast plain of water, and a beautifully colored sky with a sliver of the sun peeking above the horizon. Unfortunately, we are not in the middle of nowhere, a glance over my shoulder and there are cars driving along a busy road. A look down the beach will reveal one of the largest shipyards in the world. We counted nine contours of planes flying overhead. So while it was nice to imagine, even if only for a second, that it was just us and nature, the truth is we where in the midst of man’s development.
The second note worthy event was the bombardment of hundreds of seagulls. Several yards in front of us in the water a fish or something had died and the gulls were fighting for a piece of the meat. They where swarming and squawking all around us, I felt like I was in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. It was a crazy sensation being in the middle of their struggle to feed themselves and survive. Groups of about fifty birds would dive bomb all at once forcing the group of fifty already on the fish to move. I had never seen anything like it.

Kelly Moody- Do we now consider man unnatural?

I bought a bottle of this water, "Fiji Water" that is apparently supposed to be better than other water because of where it comes from. They advertise on the fact that the water 'has never been touched by man' until you open it yourself and take a drink. that makes me think: what value have we put on the human touch? Maybe we are even subconsciously aware of our effect on our world and that it is mostly a negative effect, therefore bottled water such as "Fiji Water" that has never been contaminated by man sells more than other water that could be filtered or manipulated by man by chemicals to get its purity. It goes to show that we still innately appreciate the value of an ecological system void of our involvement in it, void of our abuses on it because of our spiritual disconnectedness to it. Where the water comes from--is like an Eden, that we all can participate in by drinking the water. People buy it because it is somehow more special, more holy than water than has been touched by man. Maybe that is our spiritual connection to the ecosystem now--the holy and sacred is a place that hasn't been affected by man yet, we may not feel that connection with our immediate world because of the kind of culture we have created, because of the way we see the world now that has been shaped by man. So we get it shipped from a land far away, while we can still ignore the problems of our immediate world by indulging in something that we don't have to sacrifice for.

Also on the bottle: "Fiji's water aquifer is in a virgin ecosystem at the edge of a primitive rain forest, thousands of miles from the nearest industrialized continent..."

The terminology there is interesting, the emphasis in the advertisement is on the purity of the water because man is nowhere near it. The poison of humanity is not around so it gives people enough initiative to want to buy and drink it. (But i was also thinking here, how could this be possible? In order to even bottle this water at all there needed by be some kind of industry. though man doesn't directly touch the water..so they say..it still has to have the capability of mass production, and that means industry.)
We could all participate in the 'spiritual union with the untouched Eden that Fiji water comes from, but taste wise, can you really tell much of a difference between Fiji water and any other water? That's what makes it spiritual(though we'd like to blame it on consumer fads and popular culture, but all of that is fueled by our value of this world untouched by man), the fact that we would spend more money to buy a bottle of water "untouched by man until you drink it" versus Dasani or any other water that could cheaper, tastes the same, but doesn't come from the same place.
Also i thought this quote by Daniel Quinn was interesting:
"...Some heavy lines have grown up in recent decades around the concept of "natural." Natural foods are good foods, foods that come to us, as it were, directly from nature, without the addition of artificial colors or preservatives. This notion has been extended in all sorts of directions. Clothes made from "natural" fibers contribute to a more "natural" lifestyle. Shampoos made from "natural" ingredients are presumably better for your hair than shampoos made from ingredients synthesized in a laboratory. Thinking along these lines has produced, by a kind of sympathetic magic, the notion that everything man made is unnatural, and therefore unhealthy and quite possibly evil. If something comes to us from bees or sheep or flowers, it's natural and okay, but if it comes to us from humans it's unnatural and noxious. Humanity has gradually come to be perceived as ITSELF unnatural--as somehow no longer belonging to nature. When a beaver fells a tree, this is a "natural" event. When a man fells a tree, this is an unnatural event--perverted, unholy." (www.ishmael.org, from one of his speeches)