Princess Mononoke Environmentalism

I have grown up with a mindset common to most of humanity, that the world is our property to rule and therefore we must conquer and control it by any means. With this mindset I and most of humanity view the earth as a tool for our satisfaction and a stepping stone to our self-defined greatness. Having read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, I have begun to challenge this belief as he explains this mindset through the concept of Mother Culture. Quinn describes a world of Takers and Leavers. Takers are people who mold the world around them for their own benefit, and Leavers are those who live in harmony with the environment, as part of the ecosystem. For the Takers, Mother Culture maintains a lifestyle that is proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.

Have you ever thought about how your actions or opinions affected the environment around you? We’re constantly unaware of what we do that impacts the environment’s condition. One author named Wendell Berry blames the public in his article regarding the way society and the industry has treated the environment and its natural resources. This raises concerns whether we should be putting more importance on the economy or the land that we live in for the sake of our future survival. While I agree with most of Berry’s points and perspectives I slightly disagree with a few of his opinions, but nonetheless he brings up a great matter in today’s modern society.

The “Rise of ecology” was a very interesting and mind refreshing documentary film depicting the 10 different disasters that have devastated our planet. This documentary was a good teachable moment for us to take the necessary measure to ensure the safety of the citizens and the planet. The film also emphasized that we should minimize the amount to pollution that we release in to our atmosphere. We see that its always the people who suffer at the hands of major corporations who are just hungry for profits. The film mentions that these major corporations take the consequences of catastrophic events lightly. They do everything they can to increase the profits even at the expense of their own workers. The movie “Pandora” which I recently watched shares a lot of similarities to the documentary film “Rise of ecology” in a way that took me by a surprise. The movie tells a story of how human error came to cause the malfunction of a nuclear power plant causing the nation to go in to panic mode. The movie starts in an interesting way, a flashback where the main character and his friends were just children making assumptions of what the new mysterious development in their town was all about. Some of the kids responded by saying that the nuclear reactor plant was a rice cooker, another a robot and finally the little girl responded by saying that her teacher told her that “it was a box and that if it was open they would all be in trouble”.

Mckibben once again articulates his repetitive view that, “it’s a moral question, finally, if you think we owe any debt to the future.” (748). In many circumstances it is believed that if it had been done to us, we would dislike the generation that did it, just as how we will one day be disliked. The solution given in the essay on how to handle these environmental issues is to start a moral campaign. In other words, “… turn it into a political issue, just as bus boycotts began to make public the issue of race, forcing the system to respond. “ (748). As a part of the overall populist causing these issues, Mckibben understands that the hardest part about starting this moral campaign is identifying a villain to overcome. Briefly

While environmental questions are frequently channeled through practical and economic prisms, it is also appropriate to consider our econolgy as a function of morality. The ethical dilemmas which contribute to our policies and our behaviors regarding the use of fossil fuels and our attention to global climate change are frequently overshadowed by more immediate concerns of survival or mere comfort.

Silent Spring was written and published sixty five years ago. Over time, good works of literature begin to lose their relevance, but great works transcend time. Although Rachel Carson takes a more extreme view than I do, her expose still manages to maintain relevance because she uses universal themes that appeal to the audience’s morality despite the obvious cultural changes that take place over the span of fifty years. Through the use of several rhetorical devices and argumentative methods Silent Spring successfully inspires the audience to not just have a greater awareness, but actually take action and bring about change. First and foremost , to understand Rachel Carson’s perspective, context is crucial.

An additional technique used by authors to motivate readers to treat the environment well is using fictional works to get their message across. A well-known example of this is The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. When you read this story as a kid, you may not realize that the story intentionally mirrors our world today, but eventually you realize that it isn’t just about truffalump trees being cut down; it’s about real ones: pine trees and oaks and sycamores, to name a few. The humming fish mentioned in the story may not exist in real life, but we are harming actual fish by polluting our rivers with dangerous

The purpose of this piece is to draw awareness to the many contradictions relating environmental justice movements and to create a society more conscious of decisions by considering consequences.

In the introduction of Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston’s book , Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, the authors explain the basic concepts of ethics: more specifically environmental ethics, and how they apply to everyday life. The main concepts discussed include moral agents, moral patients, anthropocentrism, weak or broad anthropocentrism, indirectly morally considerable, and directly morally considerable. These concepts are the foundations to the environmental ethics that Light and Rolston wrote about; however, in regards to the short story written by J. Lanham titled: “Hope and Feathers: A crisis in birder identification,” the two terms most predominately relating to the text are moral patients and moral agents. Lanham, in this text, describes the epitome of what it means to be a good moral agent, as interpreted by Light and Rolston, where others failed.

One of the statements in the movie that was shown on September 12 at the Lawrence Public Library, “This Changes Everything,” that really resounded with me was, “We are its [Earth’s] machine. We are its masters.” Throughout the movie different locations were described, from the oil in Canada that was destroying the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, Yellowstone River in Montana, New York City, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, France, India, and China. It was interesting to link the different issues in those places to class. Each place had a similar environment issue, but each had problems that made their battle in preserving their environment unique.

Environmental justice is a topic that plagues societies around the world, and has an impact on the opportunities available to admire the breathtaking world that is around us. Environmental injustice, in this case, is the lack of the equality and participation that is presented in communities. More likely than not, there is an absence

I came across this book in my sophomore year where it was an assigned reading in professor Ranco’s class on the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States. Before taking this call I had no idea what environmental justice or injustice was. I was motivated and inspired by my particular thesis topic out of a desire to more fully understand some of the complex motivators for pro-environmental behavior. This book set a framework from which I went of to devolve a more complete understanding. From the Ground Up presents the history of the development of the environmental justice movement by way of retelling the stories of communities and activists who have worked to reshape environmental law and policy in both their communities and the nation

In the writing of this paper the author uses Ecocriticism as the main theory and the movie Wall-E (2008) by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton as the object of analysis. The story follows a robot named Wall-E, who is designedto clean up an abandoned, waste-covered Earth far in the future. The author feel interested and challenged to analyze further the learning about the growing issue of Ecocriticism because of disharmony of nature with other elements in nature itself.

DesJardins, J. R. (2013). Environmental ethics: An introduction to environmental philosophy (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Ethics is the study of what is right and wrong in human conduct. Environmental ethics studies the effects of human’s moral relationships on the environment and everything within it (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008). The ethical principles that govern those relations determine human duties, obligations, and responsibilities with regard to the Earth’s natural environment and all of the animals and plants that inhabit it (Taylor, 1989). The purpose of this paper is to reveal environmental issues that are threatening the existence of life on Earth, and discus our social obligations to refrain from further damaging our environment, health and life for future generations. I will discus the need for appropriate actions and the ethical