Religion and Ecology 2022

 When reading chapter 27 of Ecology of Eden for my presentation a lot of questions and thoughts popped into my head. Within chapter 27 the author is taking a dive into cities and whether or not cities were good for the environment or whether they are natural? Eisenberg goes into a lot of different ideas on this topic but the one that stood out to me most was that without cities the human population would take over all wilderness that is left. He also gives the idea that cities offer things that humans were only able to find in wilderness. Some of these things were the feeling of being lost or the radical privacy that Adam and Eve felt in the garden. I presented on all of the ideas and thoughts that Eisenberg brought up within this chapter. I found a lot of the information that he was bringing forward to be very interesting and informative. I think the main question that came into my mind while reading this specific chapter was are cities a good thing? Based off the information give...

     When reading Can Wilderness Be Found on a Wilderness Trail? I could not help but compare the author's opinion on Thoreau to that of my classmate in English and Ecology classes. The author writes about Thoreau's opinions on the relationships between self and society with nature, and nature as a liminal space due to its inability to remain "natural" with mankind. The reading sums it up in saying " The journey on a “wilderness trail” happens only in name. Wilderness evades us, moving further to the West, just ahead of those who would go into it.". The piece goes further into liminality and what that means in terms of the West and our perfect version of nature, but I want to go back and talk about using Thoreau in a reference in this manner.     Many of my classmates familiar with Thoreau and Emerson's works have a negative opinion of the former, as he wrote about living carefree when essentially being funded and housed by Emerson, his mentor, living on...

 This chapter of Ecology of Eden really resonated with me. I personally have had a love and attraction to the English gardens. It could have been related to the copious amounts of English gardening shows I've watched. However, I would like to think that it was because English gardens resembled an odd taming of the wild. For me, I understand French gardens to be a sort of "dominance" over the wild in contrast to the "taming" of the wild in English gardens. From the way the French would manicure bushes and trees to how they controlled the landscape to focus on the bare, it shows a deeper connection to the way the French viewed or interacted with nature: something to be dominated.  On the other hand, the English see gardens as something to be tamed. They put borders and retaining walls to contain the wild, limiting its capabilities, but honoring it for what nature is - chaotic. In its own way, nature is chaotic, growing where it can. In English gardens, this is rep...

 Something in the presentations today got me thinking. If we say that certain things will survive, nature or humans or animals, I'm curious as to how Eisenberg is meaning survival. Throughout the history of the planet, there have been several mass extinctions where 99% of all life was destroyed. Some scientists argue that we are in another one right now, caused by humans. And yes, it is true that even after so much destruction, at least some life persevered to create the diversity of life we have today. This is one of the areas where religion/spirituality could be seen as interacting to shape the way that we understand our surroundings, our world. Is 1% survival enough for Eisenberg, so that we step back and allow our own actions to cause death 99% of life as we know it? Is this really survival? Eisenberg seems careful to avoid any distinct value placements on different kinds of life or survival, even going as far to almost alleviate burden from humans by elevating nature to an ...

In the 13th and 14th chapters of the Ecology of Eden, Eisenberg writes about the distinction between the two images he commonly uses. He makes this between the "mountains" and the "towers" where the mountains refer to nature and the towers refer to people. He is mainly concerned with the relationships between them, how humans should have a "pastoral nature" toward nature and be like "shepherds". In the next chapter, Eisenberg goes on to explain the middle landscape and how we wouldn't be able to all live there or we wouldn't be pastoral to nature. Another point was about arcadia and how it is simply a phase but we cannot exists there infinitely. It can be seen as a "golden age" and references classical elements such as the Greek god Pan and its links to music.  To answer the question given, "what is the midpoint between mountains and towers?", I believe that the midpoint isn't a location, but rather a mode of livin...

 In my environmental english course, we are reading a novel called 'Solar Storms'. In this novel, a young woman is returned to her ancestral home that she was taken from as a child to be put into the foster care system. Her home is within a Northern tribe that lives around and on a lake. While I have not finished the novel yet, it has important elements that are relevant to our class. The main character, Angel, is recovering from her own trauma while also discovering her past and parts of her own life. She is living in the wilderness and re-learning how to relate to the world around her, which proves to be a spiritual experience. She cares for the fish and the way that they are killed in order to give her life. Those around her, in her life, have different relationships with the land as well. Her great grandmother, Agnes, was once taking care of a bear that visiting white trappers were keeping caged. She ultimately killed the bear, out of mercy, and wore its pelt in the form of...

    On hearing my classmates' presentations last Thursday, I found several points of note and worth discussing. The differentiations between mountains and towers, and the idea of the pastoral or "Arcadia", and where we are now as a society; all of these make us question the kind of relationship we should be fostering with our environments. First off, The Ecology of Eden makes a point to discuss mountains, or "natural" wilderness, and towers that signify civilization. Eisenberg says that we as a species are seeking a midpoint between wilderness and civilization that will heal both aspects. The presentation furthered this by saying that people go to great lengths to find places and times where nature and culture are mixed in the right proportions, but everyone cannot lie in the middle as it loses its status as a pastoral (an area mixed with civilization and wilderness in the right proportions).      This leads us to the idea of Arcadia: a utopia and a "phase...

  I chose to do my blog post from class on October 18th. Will presented on chapter 26 from the Ecology of Eden and brought up some very interesting points and insights. In relation to jazz I found it interesting that Eisenberg related such subjects to a music genre. How unique! Jazz began as an oral tradition in Mississippi but quickly exploded with the emergence of the phonograph which I found extremely interesting. Certainly this explores how art forms such as jazz encourage technological innovation and transformation. Then an additional interesting differentiation Eisenberg pointed out is how recycling has always been a human innovation, but technology has innovated it further. Then Will explored the industrial ecology excerpt from the chapter which has a main theme of how the garden so to speak is a concept that is altered by humans. Additionally, the effects of machines have added additional pollutants to the garden. It seems as if the industrial society is indifferent to the ...

I  chose to do my blog post from today’s class on October 18th. Laura presented chapter 25 from the Ecology of Eden titled: the tree  of life. Laura provided a great explanation about the various themes and I want to highlight a few! This chapter explores a major theme: biotechnology, particularly in the farming realm. Prompting the questions: what are the issues & how we can find solutions? These types of questions seem to be a constant throughout Eisenberg’s analysis in the entirety of his book. A couple major ideas that stood out to me from the chapter include: monopolizing off of genetic defects and a ‘quick fix’ mindset of splicing genes. Overall, I certainly think this second aspect will not be beneficial in the long run and it will result in a back and forth between the virus and the scientist. Laura called what I  just explained a metaphor: the ping pong game. Then the next excerpt titled: adapted to a twig, explores genetic diversity and how it is necessary f...

    Evan Eisenberg's The Ecology of Eden was the subject of me and my classmate's presentation projects, and I could not help but notice a theme that started in Chapter 1 and carried forwards. The presence of "allied species", or species that provided us a certain benefit, and the non-allied species that came alongside and were detrimental to us in some fashion.      I started by explaining how in my chapters, Eisenberg presented the way humans live alongside each other as a sort of giant human body. In our bodies, mites live in our eyelashes, gut bacteria thrives in our digestive tracts, and certain bacteria in saliva break down food. We exist as a habitat for many other species that benefit off of us, and that provide benefit for us. Alongside these, however, the gut bacteria can grow out of control due to certain illnesses or medication, making us sick. Staph, which naturally lives on our skin, can cause lesions and infections, and worsen illnesses such as pn...

Hailey Green 9/25/2022     In reading  The Ecology of Eden  I was reminded much of my own upbringing in religion and my relationship with the world around me. I was taught that the world and all of us were God's perfect creation, built in harmony to care for one another. It was never imprinted upon our spongey minds that perhaps we were also meant to maintain this gift. We had a responsibility but it was painted as a machine to serve our needs. Sure, we were encouraged to care for the earth, but never in the church's wildest dreams was man, made in God's images, to be an antagonist in this story.     The garden of Eden had Adam and Eve caring for the creatures there, responsible for naming them and providing what little help man could provide to an organism built solely to survive and procreate. Knowing this now, watching Dawn commercials picturing baby ducks covered in oil, documentaries featuring dying reefs and turtles strangling in the depths of the oce...

In class today, Dr. Redick explained how he reflects upon eating as the sacrifice of the life of the being to provide nutrition for himself. In this way, he honors and respects the nature of the being (be it plant or animal) so as to enter into a liminal space with the eaten. At first thought, this seemed a bit silly to me. How am I supposed to honor something that cannot reason nor recognize the honor given to it? Yet, as I thought about it more, I realized that this was more than paying tribute to a fish. It was about being thankful and understanding that all living things have a reason to exist, demanding that they be respected in such a manner. To reiterate, things, particularly that which we consume, do not come from nothing. Someone has spent time growing and caring for that plant or animal so that you, the consumer, can gain energy and use it for good. If we become lazy in our respects, who's to say that we soon won't recognize the larger things that humans do for one an...

 The Cloister and the Plow The most important thing about this chapter that stuck out to me was how gardens were viewed by monks. Eisenberg mentions that gardens were arranged so that they would prefigure heaven. To monks, they served the purpose of setting ideals and were viewed as important as scribes. Most shockingly, they viewed gardens as a way to inwardly look toward areas that resembled heaven rather than outward methods that pushed toward temptations such as pride. I had never seen gardens as a way to resemble heaven or any "God-like" location. Now that I think of it, man's first dwelling place, according to the Judeo-Christian belief, was in the Garden of Eden. Humans, however, didn't obey the rules said by God and so they were punished and forced to leave because of their disobedience. Across the world in Asia, the common belief among Japanese was that they should have beautiful gardens, because those with beautiful gardens would merit the visit of a Shinto ...

In class, we spoke about the "walled garden" as something man cannot enter into so that man can be protected from nature and nature from man. This makes me reflect upon why we view ourselves as detached or set apart from nature? I think that the walled garden should be viewed more as a metaphor greater than just "nature" and "man". I would argue that it should be viewed as the distinction between "chaos" and "ordered". Chaos here, I should note, is something good as well as the "ordered". Chaos is represented as nature, kept within the walls to grow and be chaotic as is a characteristic of nature, for this is how it grows best. In a similar way, the "ordered" humans seek perfected order but cannot find this in nature, so they seek to control it. However, the chaotic works best as what it is, chaos just as the ordered works best as it is, ordered. Hence this is why the two must be separated. This wall is to keep both ...

  A specific myth I chose to explore to fully determine its ecological implications through course terms, concepts, and how it orients is the Big Bang Theory. I am not actually referring to the great television show in this analysis, but rather the concept or myth surrounding the theme. The Big Bang Theory is a theory that a big bang is what sparked the beginning of the universe's time. This myth suggests that the universe was created from a single point in the universe, but many researchers from the Nature Scientific Journal believe that, “there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium.” Most cosmologists insist that this myth simply makes no sense.  An additional research finding to support this theory is from a few astrophysicists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. These researchers worked to release their findings behind the big bang theory. They honed in to a ...

  Now we can delve into the foundations of how a myth is created and that of course starts with language. As language works we start off with the creative and empirical use of language as it is derived. Language acts as the basis of communication. Language has this creative aspect to it whereas descriptive definitions hone in on the overarching context in which the word comes about. To be able to fully analyze the intersectionality present between ecology and religion, the cosmic web can act as a model of exploration. The cosmic web acts as a model for how multidimensional and dynamic the terms within the web truly are. There are a lot of different words in this web that help us understand how we relate to the world. The cosmic web is categorized of the following resonators and I have added some relating definitions/terms:  Soma: greek term for body with many connotations, Pyros: fire, energy, change, movement, act of will, Chronos: time, moon cycles, ocean cycles, segmentatio...

The overarching main theme that is explored in my exploratory essay is that myth can be translated or understood as truth. A part of our prompt and study in this course expands on this notion fully by stating, “what flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of the innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley” (C.S Lewis). I believe the overarching belief that Lewis is attempting to portray is that we live in a natural world that is framed by the stories we tell. Myths can be categorized as a type of construct of imagination that is projected on the environment in the ways in which we tell stories and as a way society or living beings explain how things come to be which is very interesting. Myths are a very explored and informative topic. Specifically, ori...

In the Ecology of Eden, Eisenberg's overarching portrayal through chapter four titled: "the new pangea" is about how  extinction is a main reason for the de-flourishing of ecological services and ecosystems. An interesting statistical quote that supports this by Eisenberg states, " invaders now make up ⅕ to ⅓ of all north american plant species, & their share of territory is even greater.”  This quote refers to how in more ways than one invasive species depends on man for a free ride. Some invasive species are tough enough to invade a healthy ecosystem, others can only flourish in ecosystems that are weakened in some way. Now I can answer my initial prompted question per the title... what is pangea? At the beginning of a period known as the entity (referring to pangea) it encompassed nearly all the planet's dry land and began the slow breaking up into continents. Within pangea there were barriers of topography, climate, and sheer distance. However, in the man...

For my presentation today I presented my findings and overall analysis on chapters 3 and from the Ecology of Eden book by Evan Eisenberg. I n my own personal opinion I would say this book is an overall exploration of humankind's place in nature, both the real and the imagined. The Ecology of Eden can act as a balancing act so to speak and in order for an individual to to stand in relation to wilderness, the individual must stand in a right relation to civilization first. I decided to incorporate the cosmic web metaphor into my discussion since we have discussed in the past few weeks and it depicts that humans have a complex relationship with ecosystems. This relationship can be examined of course from many different viewpoints as seen on this web. It is important to acknowledge that this relationship has taken much time to evolve. Dr. Redick used the phrase, “cultural elaboration” to explain this complexity I just mentioned of the relationship between humans & their correspondi...