Author Archives: grotem

Fear Within our Anthropocence and How We Can Over Come It

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My biggest takeaway about the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene is that people are ruled by fear. Political leaders, religious leaders, everyday people, and everyone in between has some amount of fear in their lives. Fear of our death, fear of failure, fand ear of how our world is being run.

This poem by Shakespeare speaks of fear:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50428/song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun-

Fear does not have to be a negative influence. Letting fear control you allows for it to have power over you. But, acknowledging this fear creates a new opportunity. An opportunity for love, desire, hope, and a life full of adventure.

The Worm at the Core states “Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast” (Solomon) and I agree. Why not take our life for everything it has to offer. Living in the depths of despair does nothing for for anyone. This class has shown me that yes, our world is dark, has several demoralizing issues, and needs some fixing-but the beautiful thing is that we have the power to change this. We can be the light in our own world.

My action project was built around WashPirg’s Save the Orca Campaign with the goal of breaching the Lower Snake River Dam to allow more salmon to be available for the Orca’s to feed on. This is a passion project, and as I reference in my paper all passion projects are a way of coping with death anxiety. Passion projects to me are a positive way of working through personal death anxiety on some level. Being a part of something greater than oneself is an incredible feeling, and to me gives the feeling of hope.

Hope is stronger than fear, but when paired together can create opportunities to better our world

Shakespeare’s poem talks about how we will all come to rest as dust eventually (Shakespeare), and The Worm at the Core talks about how we are no more valuable to this Earth than a lizard or a potato from a biological perspective (Solomon), so then what is the point of being riddled with anxiety. This ay be a blindly optimistic point of view, but with how things are currently going… What do we have to lose by giving our best effort to enact change?

Contemplating the Contemplative Practice

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Contemplative practices, meditation, or nap time mid class-or is it all three? Each class we take the time to look inward and are guided through a meditation that reflects our course content in some form. Honestly, this form of meditation is not for me.

The contemplative practices in our class are heavy, often broaching the subject of social racism, white supremacy, and even our own death-all topics that to me take more time than the allotted fifteen minutes in class to reflect and meditate on. I don’t usually partake, but I always respect my classmates and sit quietly to not distract from their experiences. In my mind, meditation is supposed to be calming, centering, a time of peace in a busy day to help get my mind and body back on track. Taking the time to meditate about the heavy issues of our world is difficult, a task that should not be taken lightly or with brevity.

https://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree

When I googled “contemplative practice” this was the first thing that came up, the tree of contemplative practice. This image gave me a greater insight to what a contemplative practice truly is. It is more than meditation, is about action and intention. This is something I can appreciate as I begin to understand it more.

With all this said, one contemplative practice that stuck with me more than some of the others was when we were guided to take the feeling of white supremacy and racism and to feel the weight in our right hand as our left hand felt the weight-or lack of weight-of freedom. Once we distinguished those two feelings, we were asked to squish them together as we folded our hands and to think about how our hands felt. The weight of freedom ad racism all mashed together and what it did to our hands, mind, and body. I don’t know why this stuck with me, maybe it was because it caught me off guard-maybe it was because I focuses on the emotions linked to these two topics a little more than I usually do. Most likely, it is because I get to experience freedom in my everyday life. I am white, I can speak my mind, I can wear what I choose, I have freewill-all of these freedoms I take for granted and I feel as if this practice reminded me of how lucky I am.

To New Beginnings…

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After the first full week of class, I am ready for more. Death in the Anthropocene, what is that and why is there a college class on it? From what I have gathered in our three sessions together thus far is that this class is a space for our minds to grapple with the issues of our systems (world, Earth, and noosphere), our mortality, the current political climate, and how to factor in sustainability into all the above-mentioned spaces. First things first, I needed a concrete definition of Anthropocene, which is as follows: “the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and environment” (Oxford Languages). The Anthropocene is where we are in time and space, easy enough. How do our lives fit into the Anthropocene? Well, we are a part of the noosphere which is the human side of the geospheres living system. The noosphere is something I had never heard of before, but after learning about it I understand how necessary it is to our Earth system. The humans are their own entity on this Earth, our systems work with and against the Earth system, but are also independent of the Earth system and require our own category. When I googled noosphere just to see what pops up, a satirical blog popped up with this image.

https://planetpailly.com/2017/08/11/sciency-words-noosphere/

I found this to be funny and a little too real. Jokes aside, the blog had some interesting thoughts on the noosphere, more predominantly that they were not ready to claim humankind as the Earth’s brain-and I have to agree with them (J.S. Pailly). We are not the system that run’s the Earth, we are currently just the system causing mechanical issues for the system running the Earth. With all this in mind, all of the Earth systems- atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere- they are all interdependent. All the system can be individual and do their own process, but they also work with the other systems to create something beautiful: our home. After this first week of class and the weekend to digest my thoughts, I have come to the conclusion that this class will teach me the intricacies of the noosphere and how it fits into the Earth system as well as how we as the noosphere can make our sphere a healthier sphere for the Earth system.