Author Archives: jessa22

Final Reflection of This Journey!

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What I learned during the quarter is more of the details of the Anthropocene and the aspects of death as a big concept to politics, society, and the future. I have learned more about the idea of death and realized how society utilizes death and immorality as a personal gain and a political gain. For example, the food and the laws on death and immortality projects. The one that I learned the most is how the concept of ecology and the earth is dying due to the innovations of humans. How everything we do has a feedback loop of systems. And the hardest lesson from this class that I learned is to accept our death and the earth is dying. Beforehand, I always thought death and the end of everything shrugged off negative things as “oh, we are changing for the better.” But that whole concept was not the truth, and I faced it. Besides cultural differences or religious differences, we are dying, and the earth is dying. As for the project itself, I learned that having your trauma can overshadow the more considerable collective trauma but adversely affects individuals. Therefore, many conflicts within our personal lives can intertwine with more significant aspects with people like climate change or covid.

What I gave in my action projects was my experience with trauma and relating it to collective trauma and the aspects of factors that can connect to a collective trauma like racial injustice and personal hardships related to trauma. As for the class, I will be honest and say that I wish I gave frank discussions, but the topic of death in this class hits home to me because I lost someone this year, so in a way, it was terrible timing. But I tried my best to participate in the zoom chat discussions on my thoughts and experiences. 

How does this whole experience relate to ecology, death, and the Anthropocene? The class helped me connect with my death and others, the realization of the immortality project discussions. Those discussions made my peace with death instead of fearing the concept and the afterlife due to religious constraints.

I can take away from this class because I accepted Anthropocene and death. It was a challenging course for me with the readings and the discussion, but I realize this was a great class to learn from and change perspectives.

CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE

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I never really thought of contemplative practices before I signed up for this class. I have never done it before. But here I am, learning new things even if it’s out of my comfort zone. My life before this class was fast-paced. Even with covid hits, my life was fast-paced, and I never really took the time to use contemplative practices to clear my mind or have a different perspective. Being a first-generation kind made me not slow down in my life to think because I am always expected to get a degree, a job, and a family. I could never stop and think about my feelings or my reflection on life, which affects my mental health. I kept moving on and ignored those thoughts until I took this class. This class made me more aware of my inner work and got to know my inner work. The practices every morning during class time, when we close our eyes and the professor would give us the prompts to think about. I appreciate how I can breathe and think about what’s around me.

 

One practice that resonates with me is the one contemplative practice about the first time I did it in class. I am translucent on the contemplative practice’s subject, but I remember Death and what the matter of Death means to me. The way I experimented with my thoughts on Death as a personal subject was a gateway for me to understand the Anthropocene in this class and how Death should not be a taboo subject. It’s a part of life. The class and the practices made me realize that Death is part of our cycle. It shouldn’t be taboo or to avoid it. My family always talks about immorality projects, or they seem to want a legacy of wealth and prosperity. Our lives are so in tune within the system that we can never stop thinking and realizing our faults as people and our environment on this planet. I believe that’s why many people within my situation and my social status are struggling with it so that they could never stop and think. They keep surviving until Death or the end of the world hits them. To conclude, those contemplative practices do help see what’s ahead of you.

 

Religious and Food a Defense Mechanism

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The Anthropocene seems a massive mess for people to comprehend due to the issue of how significant the problem is. If I were to talk about the Anthropocene my family would not believe me because it is too big an issue even to understand. Due to dealing with the concept of death. As the beliefs of my family and others think of death as a taboo or never talked about unless it is a tragedy or not the end (Catholicism). The self-esteem terror management theory applies to my family and others to think about their morality. Religion that I learned as a kid was not worrying about death, being afraid of my mortality. The theory explains that cultural views and religious views can help us manage the trauma of death. Like my family and I, we believe in our truths to comfort our boundaries with death. My family, especially my mother, has the same self-esteem as death. However, you can never take it away from her with religion. The book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life said religion could protect your views and esteem on death and the unknown. This is understandable, but they do have drawbacks to explaining objective evidence of the Anthropocene and how the earth is dying.

 

I like the self-esteem terror management theory because it makes sense why people ignore the death problems. However, in the bigger picture, I realized how we use it often to do regular tasks like what I found out we get our food. Mostly our meat. In Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat. Pachirat explains how workers do not kill cows. However, one person does, which is interesting to preserve that trauma from the other workers. The situation reminds me of my situation when clinging to morality choices to preserve my death trauma. And in a larger sense like with the relationship between food, the earth, and humans. We all have ways to preserve ourselves when it comes to death. Moreover, the relationship with food is like that because our food is alive also. Nevertheless, we have ways to think about what we can do to preserve or defend that truth. The way we see ourselves in religion and food can still work with the Anthropocene because what we do as individuals makes up the bigger picture, just like food or religion.