SinghNS201
Human Touch on the Environment
For this assignment, I painted the elements water, Earth, wind, and fire onto my hand, with slight variations. There is a tree, an ocean, and fire, but above the fire is smoke and smog to represent the baleful impact humans have had on the environment. In the movie "Home," the narrator discusses how humans have "disrupted the balance of life." What I found most interesting was the role of agriculture, and its inherent duality: agriculture is a phenomenon less than 10,000 years old, and while it resulted in many boons (cities, surpluses, and civilizations), continued modernization led to the maladies of toxic pesticides and increased CO2 emissions, and the deadly reliance on oil. From the textbook, I found the following quite powerful: "People commonly use the term environment in the first, most narrow sense- to mean a nonhuman or 'natural' world apart from human society. This usage is unfortunate, because it masks the important fact that people exist within the environment and are a part of nature" (2). This was moving to me and relates to my submission because we are organic beings, and with our gifts of conscience and sentience, we have an obligation to nurture the Earth because the Earth nurtures us. Instead, we have digressed far away from the natural evolutionary progression nature intended for us, which has led to much destruction. One example of this destruction from "Home" is how excessive mining has exhausted the Earth's reserves.
Something particularly alarming I learned in relation to the consequences of modern agriculture is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A dead zone is a low oxygen area in a body of water. The center of US "agribusiness" is the midwest, understandably, but it turns out that waste being dumped into the Mississippi river from agricultural processes flows into the Gulf. According to the SF Chronicle, this dead zone is the size of New Jersey. Chemical fertilizers are the number one human cause of dead zones. The Agronomy Journal claims that about half of all crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use - this is obviously beneficial economically, so this relates to the "duality" I mentioned earlier. Where do you draw the line between a compelling state interest (the economy) and a moral obligation to our planet and ultimately public health? I went to the website of Monsato, the company largely responsible for most crop chemicals and pesticides in this country, and their "pledge" is to "consider [their] actions and their impact broadly, and to lead responsibly." They also claim to translate their core "values into actions," but unfortunately, any multi-billion dollar company's core "value" is their profit maximization. I hope for more accountability on the practices of businesses in agriculture.
Human Touch on the Environment
For this assignment, I painted the elements water, Earth, wind, and fire onto my hand, with slight variations. There is a tree, an ocean, and fire, but above the fire is smoke and smog to represent the baleful impact humans have had on the environment. In the movie "Home," the narrator discusses how humans have "disrupted the balance of life." What I found most interesting was the role of agriculture, and its inherent duality: agriculture is a phenomenon less than 10,000 years old, and while it resulted in many boons (cities, surpluses, and civilizations), continued modernization led to the maladies of toxic pesticides and increased CO2 emissions, and the deadly reliance on oil. From the textbook, I found the following quite powerful: "People commonly use the term environment in the first, most narrow sense- to mean a nonhuman or 'natural' world apart from human society. This usage is unfortunate, because it masks the important fact that people exist within the environment and are a part of nature" (2). This was moving to me and relates to my submission because we are organic beings, and with our gifts of conscience and sentience, we have an obligation to nurture the Earth because the Earth nurtures us. Instead, we have digressed far away from the natural evolutionary progression nature intended for us, which has led to much destruction. One example of this destruction from "Home" is how excessive mining has exhausted the Earth's reserves.
Something particularly alarming I learned in relation to the consequences of modern agriculture is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A dead zone is a low oxygen area in a body of water. The center of US "agribusiness" is the midwest, understandably, but it turns out that waste being dumped into the Mississippi river from agricultural processes flows into the Gulf. According to the SF Chronicle, this dead zone is the size of New Jersey. Chemical fertilizers are the number one human cause of dead zones. The Agronomy Journal claims that about half of all crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use - this is obviously beneficial economically, so this relates to the "duality" I mentioned earlier. Where do you draw the line between a compelling state interest (the economy) and a moral obligation to our planet and ultimately public health? I went to the website of Monsato, the company largely responsible for most crop chemicals and pesticides in this country, and their "pledge" is to "consider [their] actions and their impact broadly, and to lead responsibly." They also claim to translate their core "values into actions," but unfortunately, any multi-billion dollar company's core "value" is their profit maximization. I hope for more accountability on the practices of businesses in agriculture.