A Greater Intelligence Revealed in Dwellings
Linda Hogan writes in her preface to Dwellings that "there is a terrestrial intelligence that lies beyond our human knowing and grasping." This is the main point that is constantly reiterated throughout the book, and this is the point that makes the book so important.
The trouble with the earth today is that humans have become too smart; so smart that they question everything they once took for granted, and being unable to explain it, discount it as unreal. Science, the very thing that has catapulted us into our present state of 'greatness,' is also the human evil that has isolated us from everything we knew. The 'knowing' that Hogan speaks of is not a scientific knowing, not something that can be hypothesized and proven in a lab. It is rather the feeling you get when you see a dead horse, or a great bird of prey swooping down to catch some small, scurrying animal. Here is the difference between contrivance and reality. Humans live in an almost completely contrived world, making it too easy for congressmen to vote on the government sale of a parcel of land inhabiting wild animals, or for park rangers to cave in and assassinate wolves in Yellowstone to 'control' the population when it's really a question of the innocent animals, ignorant of human boundaries, over-stepping the borders of Yellowstone and entering 'private' ranches.
Consider the day of an average human. It awakes in a 'home', completely isolated from its environment, bathes in a fake pond or simulated rain using chemicals to strip away its natural oils, eats packaged food seldom resembling anything found in nature, gets i...
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...the need to approach and touch it. It reminds me of an alien abduction, the aliens approaching a human they captured and killed and lay down on a table with caution and awe. They slowly reach out their long E.T. fingers trying to make a connection with the thing-to make sure it's real and solid. Imagine a wolf in the wild approaching a dead bear with awe, carefully extending its tongue and licking it in wonder. The wolf would just accept the bear, maybe even eat it as a means of survival. We have forgotten, and now a few of us feel that emptiness and recognize the over-powering urge to fill it with nature, our nature, the nature that we have fought for centuries and now have conquered. But as Hogan argues, in defeating nature, we have defeated ourselves, so the wounds of nature are our wounds, and our "self hate" won't allow us to mend them.
Adding to this idea that nature and all of its ugliness and abnormalities is still in fact nature, Quammen goes on further by addressing the human attitude towards nature’s intricacies. By this, Quammen refers to the human attitude towards nature as a whole based solely upon his/her opinion of one organism. As textual evidence for this idea, the example of the spider can be used again. Most people associate the black widow as being venomous and deadly, and so they unfairly associate the same characteristics with harmless beneficial house and garden spiders as well. This attitude toward the spiders can also be applied to nature as a whole. Since humans posses this attitude towards nature, a lot of nature’s beauty is often overlooked.
“Various animals build shelters but only humans built homes. (Pg. 1)” The word home evokes so many emotions and mental image of past and future. At the end of the day there is no greater comfort then going home. Yet in our daily hustle and bustle and hectic schedule we seldom take time to appreciate the most age old technology that keep us safe and provide comfort. From the basic shelter and cave dwelling of the earliest humans to the modern concrete jungle of the present, humans have move past the simple shelter. Technology has allowed us to build modern homes in various shapes and sizes but this technology follows thousands of years of footstep. The author did not just catalog different structures and domicile of human history but told a story of what these structure means to us. Moore starts off on a dig site searching for archaic structures. Moore explains how humans just don’t build shelter like most animals, human homes signifies social status, comfort, shelter and creativity. Moore uses the famous multimillion dollar house of Aaron Spelling in Hollywood as an example of how extravagant our humble dwelling can be. Human homes are different shapes and sizes and often build with different material and standard based on geographical location. I believe A Prehistory of Homes is a book about the history of technology because it is written about one of the most essential invention of human evolution. Human went from caves to build our own shelter. It allowed us to be mobile and become a foraging creature. The author addresses the most commonly shared interest and provides knowledge, history and relation to past and future of our homes.
In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan challenges his readers to examine their food and question themselves about the things they consume. Have we ever considered where our food comes from or stopped to think about the process that goes into the food that we purchase to eat every day? Do we know whether our meat and vegetables picked out were raised in our local farms or transported from another country? Michael pollen addresses the reality of what really goes beyond the food we intake and how our lives are affected. He does not just compel us to question the food we consume, but also the food our “food” consumes.
...ghout the novella is that even though we are humans and not animals, if we continue to repress each and every aspect of our own primitive needs and instincts, we will completely lose them. We will not be able to function in any world except the one we live in, making us extremely and very dangerously vulnerable. We need to, instead, embrace these instincts as our ancestors did to help them survive in their own unique, yet brutal environments. We can never revert fully back to Primitivity as Buck did, that would cause absolute chaos. We do however, need to utilize certain aspects of these natures, the ones that can help us survive, give us special intuition, and allow us to come closer to ourselves and understand what it means to be a truly free and independent human being in a world that is entirely too dependent on altering everything that humans need to embrace.
...d man-environment interactions. . Informally published manuscript, Students' Store, University of California at Los Angeles, Angeles CA, .
This reaction originates from a preconception, a fear caused by the human nature to prejudge based on past experience. This prejudice is indeed the source of the pain and torment in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. If a "monster" exists in the novel, it is this aspect of human nature. Works Cited Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
In conclusion , Flannery O'Connor's story focuses on the internal conflict between spirit and matter (Hendricks): “The world has become polarized between spirit and matter, or grace and nature...human values have become polarized as well” (O'Connor qtd. in Hendricks).
To perceive, to understand of nature and its interconnections, in contemporary symbolic thinking, is impossible. Denying our illusions, or our experiences, results in the rejection society’s interpretations, ultimately denouncing our symbolic thinking. We define reality as interconnections between nature, using abstractions based on perceptions to explain “natural processes, rather than structure” as “probability patterns [represent] movement in human perception” (Capra). Abstractions, however, become susceptible to our biased perspectives, to our experiences, illusions and hallucinations. According to Capra, to understand the “cosmetic dance of destruction and creation,” to recognize relations as the essence of life, or as “self-organization, self-renewing, self-maintaining, we need a more comprehensive scientific framework that “incorporates ecological thinking, [rather] than contingent thinking” (Capra). Our biased perceptions of reality contradicts our scientific frameworks, our symbolic thinking, creating a flawed perception that constitutes an illusion of ecological supremacy, representing society’s disconnect with nature. Because our debilitating disorientation, our illusionary thinking and our perception, frames the foundations and dimensions of our interpretations of reality,
...2 new cells. Cancer cells are dividing more often than normal cells. That makes them more likely to be killed by the chemotherapy. Treatments are working to cure cancer. You are twice as likely to survive cancer today compared to 40 years ago.
For many years the public has fought with the idea that a mentally ill person should not be held accountable for criminal crimes (Allnutt, S., Samuels, A., & O'Driscoll, C. 2007). In states Montana, Idaho, and Utah, does not consent for the defendant to plea an insanity defense. The defendants must be capable to stand trial, but they do have the right to present evidence of a mental disease as evidence that they did not have the required intent ("A Crime Of Insanity - Insanity On Trial | FRONTLINE | PBS", n.d.). The state of Georgia uses a reformed style of the M'Naghten Rule ("The Insanity Defense Among the States - FindLaw", n.d.). Daniel M’Naghten was an Eng...
Inside us all there is a deep dark fear this is what grabs us by the thresh hold of life. It controls the most important aspects of our lives. This is found within the deepest and darkest chasms of our souls. The very creature that wreaks havoc in our minds we cage and never confront we lock this beast away to afraid to overcome it. If the beast is not confronted it begins to contort and change who we are as a person and how we interact with others. Even the very decisions we make as a person to affect those around us and are loved ones to also suffer the consequences of our actions. Such as the crucible and how each person was warped into their own monster by greed.
"HIV Among African American Gay and Bisexual Men." Center for Disease Control and Prevention. N.p.. Web. 1 Apr 2014. .
Although human race is at the top of food chain and they are considered to be powerful than other species, they are also vulnerable to the harmful effects of environment, climate, society,… which lead to acute distress experiences such as hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, the pain of disease or accident or attack, and sexual tension.
Like Harriet in There’s A Hair In My Dirt, Larson depicts man in his egotistical essence as he struts through nature thinking he knows it all. When in actuality we have just begun. As a “higher” species, in the sense that we are capable able of verbal communication and intellectual thought, we dominate those species that cannot: the entire diverse world. Striving for this perfection, we have affected the environment and its organisms in many ways, whether beneficial or harmful. Considering ourselves as “higher” beings we tend to ignore the vastness of the world around us; We are blind to the biodiversity of all life and how very small and insignificant we truly are. Because of this we misunderstand and make superficial judgments about life. Therefore, mocking those who do understand what we ignore and neglect.
The child labor was create back in eighteen century. It was a situation where young Children at age fourteen to sixteen was able to work in the United States and United Kingdom. During this period of time children were forced to work in factories. Some children as young as five were force to work to help their family, but at same time it was limited in some states where they considered to be illegal and people think it was violation of human right.