Category Archives: First Thoughts

Final Reflection of This Journey!

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
1

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.

Being a Human in the Anthropocene: First Thoughts by Lindsay Lucenko

Posted on by
Reply

As we have begun to delve deeper into the course material, I find myself feeling comforted. I do not find comfort in the discussion of inevitable mortality, nor do I find it in the discussion of the ecological damage caused by human industry. In fact, I find comfort in knowing that being a human in the Anthropocene is a rare and opportune experience, and one that I get to explore and discuss with a group of my peers. To be a human in the Anthropocene is to exist in a time when our actions as humans matter more than they ever have before.

The course material thus far has made me re-examine the relationship that exists between humans and the earth. I had not previously comprehended that the human impact on the earth is so great that it created a new geological epoch known as The Anthropocene, the age of the humans. After reading The Ecomodernist Manifesto, a piece that describes the potential impacts of the Anthropocene, I was left feeling alarmed. While I am distressed by the grave ecological impacts of human industrialization, I am still left with hope for our ecological future. The Ecomodernist Manifesto states that there can be a “good, or even great, Anthropocene”. This will only be possible if we as humans are able to “convinc(e) our fellow citizens that these places, and the creatures that occupy them, are worth protecting,”. This may be difficult given that humans often use an individualistic approach to examine situations. However, I believe that analyzing ecology through the lens of the Anthropocene allows humans to see just how large our collective impact can be. This lens shows that if we collectively choose to shift our priorities, our impact as humans in the Anthropocene can be a positive one.

A large part of my excitement for this course comes from the contemplative practices we have been participating in. Pausing and appreciating what it feels like to be a human in the Anthropocene is calming in a class that is often filled with heavy topics. I find myself now feeling empowered rather than frightened to be a citizen standing in the threshold of The Anthropocene. We hold the power to make the Anthropocene a good one. An era that can benefit us as humans and help to heal the beautiful green earth we get to call home. 

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvgG-pxlobk

Works Cited

“An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” An ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO, http://www.ecomodernism.org/. 

arlindbosh. “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 Apr. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvgG-pxlobk. 

https://slate.com/technology/2016/02/some-say-climate-change-marks-the-anthropocene-a-new-geological-age-theyre-wrong.html. Accessed 23 Oct. 2021. 

 

Death as a Force to Unify Humanity: First Thoughts

Posted on by
Reply

As a late addition to this class, I was completely unsure about the content that was to be covered but was excited about the interdisciplinary approach to learning. I’ve always found it frustrating when some classes seem to operate in vacuums as I am unable to place them into a greater global context. Regarding political interactions as an open system solves this issue; Donella Meadows’s article claims “when individual subsystems each have a different goal [they can] produce extremely unnatural and problematic behavior”. This created a concrete image in my head which allowed me to look at political and social issues from a novel perspective. Specifically, the claim that “paying attention to the inner workings of systems” would help further understand current issues resonated with me greatly. Modern news outlets and mainstream content seem to be rather pessimistic and hopeless in regards to any social advancements. Understanding this rich history of our society, cultural norms and previous configurations of the system would provide me with a starting point to materialize change.

I already feel as though this class has reframed some of my questioning as well as the ways in which I am filtering in new information. As humans, we know that we are all bound to die. I truly believe that this realization has cursed us instead of uniting us. Instead of working together to increase our quality of life as a species, we seem to be regarding each other as competition. As Rupert Read insists: “this civilization could collapse utterly and terminally, as a result of climatic instability […] food shortages, nuclear war, or financial collapse leading to mass civil breakdown”. Since those who bear the greatest burden of climate change are not the ones contributing most towards it, it is easy for developed nations to adopt the “out of sight, out of mind” view. The common experience of death should have unified us as a human race but has created a value system on life.

In this era of the Anthropocene, the irreversible impact that humans have on the world is indisputable. As an individual living in a time where every political decision may lead to further damage, it is essential to accept the current state of our world but still maintain optimism in terms of the change we can make through mass education and collaboration.

References:

Bradshaw, S., Richards, Jenny, Kyriacou, Sotira, Gabbay, Alex, Ostby, Magne, Cassini, Stefano, . . . Flaxmoor Productions, production company, copyright holder. (2016). Anthropocene. Oley, Pennsylvania]: [Distributed by] Bullfrog Films.

Ibe, Khalil. “Summary of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.” Medium, Medium, 2 May 2019, https://medium.com/@opuhasanopu/summary-of-thinking-in-systems-by-donella-meadows-b54aec0f40f8.

Google Image Result for Https://C.tenor.com/szzil3ny__caaaac/Life-Death.gif, https://images.app.goo.gl/XHj8dWSwA7gStSbq5. 

“This Civilisation Is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire – and What Lies beyond: The Simplicity Collective.” The Simplicity Collective | A Community of People Exploring a Life That Is Materially Simple, Inwardly Rich., 14 June 2019, http://simplicitycollective.com/this-civilisation-is-finished-conversations-on-the-end-of-empire-and-what-lies-beyond. 

Thinking in Systems: Sam Barbezat’s Experience of Getting Started

Posted on by
Reply

As I begin to engage in the course material, I am feeling relieved. Although the concepts we are exploring weigh heavy in nearly every aspect of my life, it is so often a lonely or subconscious task to carry them! Addressing the ties between politics and ecology (especially through the lens of death) feels like an opportunity to tend to personal and conceptual isolation. In the interest of forming deeper connections, I am looking forward to examining what it means to be human in the Anthropocene together.

I’ve also encountered a fair amount of sadness already in engaging in the class materials. When looking at the ecological impact of human industry, I am distressed not only because of the death and destruction itself, but also because I am deeply invested in its continuation. As a member of an ecological system I may be horrified, but as an individual I am thrilled to have access to Costco hotdogs and Amazon two-day shipping. Thanks to the Ibe piece we read, I can think of this internal conflict as a sort of “policy resistance” – I’m encountering subsystems within me which are in conflict! I’m hopeful to explore this notion more as we progress through the class. Do other people feel this way? Can this conflict serve as the basis for the kind of “creative tension” we read about in the Schley piece?

I am also excited to be guided through contemplative practices as part of our course material. While watching the film Anthropocene, I was struck by the potency of the astronauts’ photograph of Earth from space – how collectively affected people seemed to be by this unique chance to look inward from outside of their normal perspective. Observing Earth from above, we’re invited to reflect: Which systems, at what scale, do we think about? (How) can they fit together? It is exciting to think of meditation as a similar form of exploration, in which I’m able to examine my own interrelated subsystems with new perspective.

Image source: NASA,  Apollo 8 Earthrise

 

Works Cited

Ibe, Khalil. “Summary of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.” Medium, Medium, 2 May 2019, https://medium.com/@opuhasanopu/summary-of-thinking-in-systems-by-donella-meadows-b54aec0f40f8.

Schley, Sara. “Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work.” The Systems Thinker, 14 Mar. 2018, https://thesystemsthinker.com/sustainability-the-inner-and-outer-work/.

Reflections on Death and the Anthropocene

Posted on by
Reply

I took this class because I’m majoring in political science and have a fondness for nature, as I live in my rural home on Vashon Island. With the understanding that this was an environmental/political class wrapped into one, hence the title “Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene,” I knew at the very least that it would be an interesting course. Early on in the course, it was interesting to learn about a study that explores the ramifications of people’s fear of death. In it, judges who were surveyed about their mortality issued higher bonds to prostitutes than those who were not given the survey. The surveyors concluded that the judges, when reminded of death, were more likely to retreat into what they felt was culturally correct. In terms of my own views of death, I don’t really fear death, but this study got me thinking: I think I used to be afraid of death. As a 16-year-old sophomore in high school, I was worried that I didn’t yet know what I wanted to be when I grow up and I suspect that I was unconsciously afraid of death in the same way the judges were. I had felt the need to “fit in” to society in some meaningful way, unconsciously trying to avoid thinking about death.

In political terms, I want this class to help me get the word out of the many environmental disasters we are facing, accepting them, acknowledging them, and taking action. This class can also help me understand these issues, for sometimes, my political ambitions make me forget about other environmental issues of the Anthropocene besides just the climate crisis.

Overall, even with all the doom and gloom that we have been reading and discussing in class and all the forecasts on climate change and pollution, I don’t feel sad or depressed. Maybe I’m in denial or blindly optimistic, I don’t know. Maybe I just have more faith in humanity than your average person. I know the word hope has been overused a lot, but I believe in the sincere passion exhibited by our youth. I feel that with the right political pressure and with enough organized protests, we can change the world for the better, environmentally and socially.

First Thoughts: On Individuality and Immortality (by Hannah Sullivan)

Posted on by
1

In “The Insect Apocalypse is Here,” the concept of an “Eremocine” stood out to me because I think it accurately reflects the way human social and economic activity have led to many species of wildlife becoming endangered or going extinct, and biodiversity has been significantly reduced. Furthermore, I believe that loneliness not only characterizes the current biological scene, but human interpersonal relationships as well. In many countries—namely the United States but also other countries which have historically held the most influence at the international diplomatic table or which have caused great environmental impact, such as the United Kingdom—the dominant worldview is individualistic. People are encouraged to work for their own personal gain rather than contribute in ways that benefit their whole community, and they are deprived of opportunities to connect with their community. I think that part of the reason why a small percentage of humans are responsible for huge environmental damage is this individualistic mentality, which urges people to do anything for personal profit and prevents them from feeling any responsibility for the wellbeing of others around them or for future generations.

The Keeney reading was interesting to me because it affirmed the beliefs I already had and it made me broaden my perspective to a more systemic level. As best as I can remember, I have never wanted to be immortal, at the very least because I think it would get boring. However, Keeney’s article prompted me to think more about why everyone being immortal would be harmful in many ways. I appreciated the perspective that aging is a natural and necessary process. I think that even though it is uncomfortable, it is important to grapple with and accept the fact that we all age and we all will die, so that we can do our best to have a positive impact in our short time here. I believe that accepting that nothing is infinite—our lives, our civilizations, the Earth’s natural resources—will lead us to create more opportunities for meaningful interpersonal connections and will help us construct more sustainable systems which produce less waste.

Jarvis, Brooke. “The Insect Apocalypse is Here.” The New York Times Magazine, 27 November 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html.

Keeney, Jonathon. “To Beat Death and Become Immortals, We First Must Defeat Entropy.” 22 December 2015, https://www.inverse.com/article/8867-to-beat-death-and-become-immortals-we-first-must-defeat-entropy.

Parsons, Leif. The New York Times: Opinionator, 18 Aug 2012, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/deluded-individualism/.

On Love and Decomposition: Mahika’s First Thoughts

Posted on by
Reply

“Changes” by Big Thief

My roommate recently mentioned that when she introduces me to people, she leads with my name and the fact that I want to decompose in the woods. This apparently essential part of my personality has become a running joke, but it came from a very genuine place – about a year ago, in the depths of quarantine and going a bit stir-crazy in a small apartment, I had a crisis about what I wanted to do with my life. Unsatisfied with my economics major and disillusioned by my classes, I despaired that I would only be happy if I was surrounded by earth.

Thus, this class. I am particularly drawn to the relationship between things – between humans and the natural world of which we are inextricably a part and on which we depend, between global-capitalist economic systems and the consumerist culture we have developed, between the vibrancy of life and the inevitability of death that gives it meaning. All this, combined with the facts that I am easily moved to tears and love the feeling of dirt under my fingernails, leads me to ecology and death and the anthropocene.

I was raised to be quite blasé about death, my parents sending my brothers and I to an atheist camp for our middle school summers. (Think church camp, but trade psalms for the scientific method.) Then, I came to college, had long conversations with my Quaker roommate, and realized I was drawn to the natural circle of life. As we discuss resilient systems, I remember the life cycles of forests, and how fallen trees become nurse logs for new growth. If I think about that for too long, I’ll cry.

I am taking this class because I am drawn to these conversations about what gives life meaning. Two quotes come to mind: In a Classics course I took here at UW, we looked at ancient graffiti on the walls of Pompeii which described love as “eternal fame, to be sung throughout the whole world forever/ so even when I am given to the final flames, I’ll live.” And from a character on the TV show The Good Place: “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people.” Our relationships with each other and with the world can, I believe, give us a clue as to how we approach death and how we live our lives.

First Thoughts By: McKenna Eggers

Posted on by
Reply

     When I first signed up for this course I was a little nervous as to what it would entail. “The Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene” is a fairly daunting title compared to my other classes. However, once class began and we delved into our discussions I realized that I made the correct decision for what class to take. Coming from an Episcopal background, I had a pretty cut-and-dry view of what death might look like and how to approach it: once someone dies they are gone from this earth. My understanding of death was limited to viewing it as an end and a beginning, nothing more nothing less. It wasn’t until my Aunt gifted me my first deck of tarot cards that my view of death shifted. In the tarot world, the death card is regarded as a positive card symbolizing transformation. After delving more into the realm of tarot, and encountering my first significant experience with death I have come to realize that while there is no one way of thinking about death it is definitely something that should be thought about. 

     My hope for this class is to be able to expand my thinking around death with people who are as intrigued and comfortable with it as I am. As shown in the image below, death looks very different to every person and I hope to gain insight into the different ways people my age approach the concept of death/transformation especially in regards to political ecology and the anthropocene. 

      I admit that while I am an environmental studies major, my relationship with death has been deeply personal and I have largely failed to think about death on a larger scale. I am interested in expanding my thinking to consider how death plays into human systems and impacts modern politics. I think this class is very important and develops on ideas that we as students need to consider about how we regard death as the future world leaders. I am excited to continue to develop my relationship with death and tie my personal experiences in with the dynamics of politics and the anthropocene.