Class Session V>What’s Your Story? (continued)
I. Quiz on Decision Making
II. Ishmael Review/Discussion
a. Are we captive to a civilization
system that compels us to keep on destroying the world in order to live? What
do you think?
b. Does our
culture tell us a story? If so, what is that story? Synopsis of story from
Ishmael>All of creation is for humans, and if the world was made for humans,
it belongs to us and we can do what we please with it. As rulers of the world,
we have to conquer it and this puts us at odds with the world and casts mankind
as the enemy of the world. We regard the world as a human life support system,
a sort of machine designed to sustain human life, but we are screwing it up
because we’re human and, being human, we have some fatal flaw that makes us
stupid and destructive and greedy and shortsighted. Humans were born to turn
the world into a paradise, but being flawed, paradise is being spoiled by
stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness. Things came to be this
way because the world was made for man, but it’s not our fault that things are
messed up, it’s the god’s fault.
Do you
agree or disagree that this is our story?
c. Are
we living in such a way so as to enact this story?
d. Do we
have to conquer and devastate the world in order to have indoor plumbing and
air conditioning and automobiles?
e. What
is the “peace-keeping law” and what does it promote?
You may
compete but you may not wage war. The law promotes biological diversity.
f. Here
is the text from a speech given in 1854 attributed to the Native American Chief
Seattle, Patriarch of the Duwamish and Suquamish
Indians, when responding to a
"How can
you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If
we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of water, how can you
buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. We are part of the
earth and it is part of us. So, when the Great Chief in
For what
is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a
great loneliness of spirit.
For
whatever happens to the beast, soon happens to man...All things are connected.
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of
their grandfathers. This we know: the earth does not belong to man - man
belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one
family. One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover - our God
is the same God"
What do
you think of this speech? Do you agree or disagree?
g. Is
Ishmael correct when he describes Taker “holy work” in the following way? The
more competitors humans destroy, the more competitors
humans can bring into the world. And that makes it just about the holiest work
there is.
h. Let’s
do a quick summary of Ishmael’s interpretation of Genesis.
1. The
Semites were the authors of our creation story.
2. The
Semites were goat and sheep herders, also known as pastoral nomads.
3. All
along the border between the Chalcolithic and Semitic
cultures, the Chalcolithic agriculturalists, our
Taker ancestors, were killing off the Semitic pastoralists, Leavers, so that
more land could be put under cultivation. This has happened continuously
throughout history for the past 10,000 years and continues even today.
4.
Through the story of Cain and Abel, the Semites were telling their children
“God is on our side. He loves us herders but hates those murderous tillers of
the soil from the north”. In “tribal” warfare, do tribes believe that god is on
their side?
5. What does the narrator say the gods did when they found out that the people
from the north had stole some of their fruit? The gods
said “Okay you wretched people, that’s it for you.
We’re not taking care of you anymore. You’re out. We banish you from the
garden. From now on, instead of living on our bounty, you can wrest your food
from the ground by the sweat of your brow.
6. According to Ishmael, what was one of the clearest indications that the
creation story was not authored by Taker ancestors? The fact that agriculture
is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse. It
was inconceivable to the Semites that anyone would prefer to live by the sweat
of his brow and so they asked themselves “What did the Takers do to deserve
such punishment?”
7. Did
the Semites view themselves as descendants of Adam in a biological sense,
according to Ishmael? No, the word Adam in Hebrew means “humankind”.
8. What
then, did the fall of man represent? The fall of man divided the race of man
into two - into bad guys and good guys, into tillers of the soil and herders,
the former bent on murdering the latter.
9. What
does the word Eve mean in Hebrew? Life, not woman.
10. So
what was Adam (a.k.a. human beings) tempted by? Life, or specifically “more”
life or lives, to human growth without limit, which represents death to the
Leavers, who always had to maintain a population and gender balance. So when Adam
accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without
limit and so the person who offered him that fruit is named “Life” or “Eve”.
How do
you feel about Ishmael’s interpretation of the Genesis story?
i.
What is the meaning of the world, divine intentions and the destiny of man
according to the Leaver story? The world is a garden, the god’s garden, and
there are two trees, one for the god’s and one for us. The god’s tree is the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the tree for humans is the tree of
life. But we can only stay in garden if we keep our hand’s
off of the god’s tree.
j. What
is the fundamental difference between the Taker and Leaver stories?
k. On
Page 251, Ishmael likens Taker culture to a prison and that, in a prison, there
must be an industry to keep the inmates busy and to take their minds off of the
boredom and futility of their lives. What does Ishmael say is our prison
industry is?
l. What do people
need? Not just stopping things, not
just less of things. People need something positive to work for. People need
more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They
need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of
themselves that inspires them.
III. Power of Stories & Legacy/Discuss Exercise and
Collect
IV. Decision Making Review
Power of decisions> create
your life>because all things are interconnected>decisions affect all the
world’s systems>environmental science is most concerned with decisions that
affect public health and the environment> 3 three kinds of environmental
decisions
1. decisions
of a reproductive nature (how many kids to have);
2. decisions
of a consumptive nature (what and how much stuff to consume), and;
3. technology
(the tools, techniques, and processes that provide the goods and services we
need and want.
Factors that affect decisions
include expert opinion, research results, peer pressure, intuition, common
sense, cost-effectiveness, laws and regulations, and compromise as well as
historical inertia. As an example of the importance of inertia, check out the
following history of Valentines Day……..
The holiday originated in
The early church patriarchs, determined
to put an end to this eight hundred year old practice, sought a “lover’s hero”
to replace the deity Lupercus. They settled upon
Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.
Around 270 A.D., the emperor Claudius issued an edict forbidding marriage (no
kidding) because married men made poor soldiers as they were loath to leave
their families to go to war. Valentine, bishop of Interamna,
invited young lovers to come to him in secret where he would marry them,
against Cladius’ edict. Eventually word got out and
Valentine was imprisoned. Claudius was impressed with Valentine’s dignity and
conviction and attempted to convert him to the Roman gods. Valentine refused to
renounce Christianity and instead made a counter offer to convert Claudius,
which was not taken so well. Valentine was clubbed, stoned…..and beheaded.
Ouch!
Once the church got into the act,
to celebrate the holiday and wean the Romans from their holiday, they kept the
box idea as well as the slips of paper (the original hanging chads) but instead of the names of young men and women, the
paper contained the names of saints. Young men and women were expected to
emulate the lives of the saint whose name they had drawn. However, human nature
being what it is, and we are all humans, the young Roman men instituted the
custom of offering women they admired and wished to court handwritten greetings
of affection. Hence Valentines cards were born and the rest is Hallmark
history.
P.S. So where did Cupid come
from? Cupid is associated with Valentines day because
in Roman mythology he is the son of Venus, (if you will), goddess of love and
beauty.
Source: “The Extraordinary
Origins of Everyday Things”, Charles Panati
So you see, the past has enormous
influence on what happens each day, whether we realize it or not. Also, we
humans tend to make decisions based on feelings, but rationalize decisions
based on facts. As a means of improving decision making that impacts the
environment, cost-benefit analysis is a formal decision making technique for
comparing the cost versus the benefits of a particular decision.
Go Over Lighting Spreadsheet
So, you see that even though we
started with a decision that seemed intuitively correct, buying compact
fluorescents is WAY, WAY cheaper and significantly better for the environment.
So, why does anyone buy incandescent bulbs anymore? Good question, but we need
to remember that human behavior is HUGELY affected by inertia. Because decision
making can be fairly complex and, with so many decisions to make, most people
would choose to continue to do what they’re familiar with rather then change
their behavior.
Decisions usually consist of both
quantitative and qualitative (or non-quantitative) variables. The real benefit
with doing a structured cost benefit analysis is that it lets you compare the
quantitative variables first and then any difference in quantitative variables
with non-qualitative variables.
Go Over Relocation Spreadsheet
In this class, we are going to
develop structured decision analyses for decisions that impact the environment.
Hopefully, these analyses will help you with both your environmental and
non-environmental decisions.
V. Internet Search Strategies
There is a HUGE
amount of information on the Internet available for just about every kind of
decision you might make. Many of you may already have considerable experience
surfing the Web. For those of you that don’t the following section may be of
use. A number of search engines are used to find information on the Internet. These
include:
Dogpile> http://www.dogpile.com/ Google> http://www.google.com Yahoo> http://search.yahoo.com/
Teoma> http://www.teoma.com/ Search> http://www.search.com/
Metasearch engines are programs that search
a variety of search engines simultaneously, each using it’s
own logic or format. Popular metasearch engines
include:
Vivisimo> http://vivisimo.com/ Meta Crawler> http://www.metacrawler.com/ Surfwax> http://www.surfwax.com/
Copernic> http://www.copernic.com/index.html 7Metasearch.com> http://7metasearch.com/
Search Thingy> http://www.searchthingy.com/search.asp Starting Page> http://www.startingpage.com/html/search.html