XYZ
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Service Learning Project
-Mark Wagner
Thursday, May 5, 2011
SLP: UNT Beyond Coal Campaign
using nature or living natural?
has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial
modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen
in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a ref-
uge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Tho-
reau once famously declared, "In Wildness is the preservation
of the World."' But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history,
the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that
stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the
creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human
history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endan-
gered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encoun-
tered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that
civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.
Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.
As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own
unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that
wilderness can be the solution to our culture's problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for
wilderness is itself no small part of the problem." (Cronan) Sorry for the long quote but such an example of the identity of wilderness is impossible to be left unspoken.
"Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation." (leopold land ethic) Leopold is an outspoken person that knows the dangers of how we function no more than you and I, but is unafraid to voice the lack of aid in the deceleration of the decomposition of what we deem natural. Leopold later goes on to present the idea that we need to live off what the land provides us not what we deem the land is indebted to give us. His ideas suggest that we should let the natural succession of wilderness take its path as we take ours and when our paths cross, we should live with the mindset not to conquer what we can not understand. "Thinking like a mountain" (Leopold)
With that said I looked for a service project that was not a common run of the mill task. I decided to show the community around me that the very things they use that are acquired from new resources can be acquired from the land without detriment. I with the aid of my roommate Bryson went to our churches property to be built on in the near future, that is currently wooded, to harvest it of its natural and dead but useful resources. Bryson and I spent a day gathering and chopping up lain trees to be turned into useful fire wood to be given to the community and the people of the church. It was a hard task but I convinced Bryson to do this with me without the aid of a chain or a powered saw. Bryson and I spent the day working hard but were able to realize the beautiful things the wilderness "next door" has to offer. This realization came about because while working Bryson and I made conversation about how wilderness is not a place of intangibility but the idea of letting natural things take its own order.
From this project I learned that thinking like a mountain is not a hard task but a necessary mindset. People will go on to live life but if we slow our degradation in any aspect it would make the world of a difference!
i have a written note by the assosiate pastor of the church describing my project and will bring it to school tom... if your not there i will bring it on thurs for the final
Feeding the Hungry: One PB&J At a Time
Keep Denton Beautiful
Serving the community that you live in is a great way to help out and contribute to cleaning up the world. Pollution takes over more and more of our globe every single day. For my 5 service hours I collected ten bags of garbage from places I drive by and see everyday in my attempt to "Keep Denton Beautiful". Picking up the trash from these areas made me feel good about being able to make the area that I live in more aesthetically pleasing, and clean. While I was picking up trash on littered streets, ditches and highways I kept in mind the idea of "environmental justice". If we were all to do service projects such as this more than once a year, or even just whenever we see any garbage on the ground, then we would be able to make a difference in the world. In my opinion, picking up littered trash is a form of social justice that I can actively participate in every day. To me, social justice is holding up my understood responsibilities towards others and my community, involving cleaning the area that I live in. In the "Environmental Justice and Social Ecology" reading, the author describes some harmful effects that pollution can have on our environment, societies, and even our bodies. The most predominant idea in this article that I kept in my head was that doing acts like cleaning are our responsibility to society and the earth. Any way that we can reduce our ecofootprint is a step for a better future.
In the "Environmental Justice" reading by Figueroa, he presents a question that I put a lot of thought into. "How are environmental benefits and burdens distributed across populations?" (pg. 1). While pondering this question I came up with a few realizations about how we operate and interact with the environment. I have realized that we all operate with a somewhat restorative justice approach as to how we look at things. This restorative justice approach that we take is one where we understand and realize our obligations to right the wrongs that we have done in the past. With this obligation we strive to achieve repairs and reconciliation for these wrongs and reassurance that we will have a better, more beautiful future. Also, tied into this restorative justice is another widely accepted approach, distributive justice. This idea that we as humans should feel the need to compensate for others overuse of resources, because we know that some are taking full advantage and using too many resources, we can do our part in saving the planet by compensating and using less to somewhat balance the scale. This is probably the most prominent approach that I take in my life. I always try to use the least amount of resources possible to make up for my human counterparts that over use them. As Americans, we produce and consume so much that we are almost forced to place our environmental burdens on other countries as well. We make our environmental burdens be distributed to other populations simply because of our over consumption. There are plenty of ways for burdens and benefits to be spread to affect everyone. We can widely distribute environmental benefits with environmental justice, restorative justice and distributive justice. It is amazing to me to realize that our "unharmful" practices can easily be spread to other populations. We can affect the global environment, both helping and hurting, with practices started here in the U.S.
I have come to further realize that we are not one world divided into many separate nations, each pertaining to itself. We are just one world as a whole, and what we do to better the earth can spread like wildfire across to the rest of the world. If we, as individuals, can carry out the Green Revolution then we can provide this help to other nations. Though I only picked up trash around the area that I live in, I have helped to reduce our ecofootprint and participated in restorative justice and distributive justice to better the world. I have definitely learned that it is not out of my way, or a hastle for me to pick up trash in my path or clean the environment around where I live. I also learned that it is completely wrong to take this wonderful world that we are given for granted. Cleaning the environment is a great way to show thanks to mother nature for supporting us and putting up with our filthy lifestyles.
-Allison Williams