Who's a writer?

A writer is anyone that is able to physically write or type and convey their ideas to someone else using written language. I am a writer, everyone in this class is a writer. What have we been doing in this class for the entire semester? Writing. What else could that possibly make us? It doesn't matter why we write, what we write about or who we write for, the fact is that we are writing.

Where's your food from?

"Food miles" I think is probably the most interesting idea in this article. The scary thing about it is that it is completely right. Every time that we buy something from far away we exert so many of our resources for something that can be grown a couple of towns over on a farm. Even inside of the U.S. it is very possible for us to get all of our foods from farms out east on Long Island, but most of us choose to buy them from companies which grow their products on farms in the Midwest. All this does is add more fuel costs to the actual product. Last year in my environmental science class we watched a video which spoke about this sort of thing. One of the examples used was the $200 hamburg from McDonalds. What the scientist in the video had proposed was that in order to truly balance out our ecological footprint, we should have to pay for all of the costs associated with making that one product. What he realized was that if we did McDonald's hamburger would roughly cost around $200 each. When John Elkington says that “We are in an era of creative destruction” (292) he is telling that everyone now had new ideas all of a sudden. Since people have gotten on the idea of "going green" every corporation, just as Tesco in the article, is now advertising itself as being more green than the next one. It's just a creative way to advertise themselves. What I first thought of when I read this and the three steps about fixing your home to be more green, was the clip from the Simpsons' movie where they are trapped inside of the giant dome and all of a sudden "Dome Depot" comes on tv with new products to use to clean the dome. People will try and make money off of everything and this is the prefect example. Now that we are facing the issue of global warming, everyone is trying to capitalize off our our destruction and be creative with it. We are now trapped in the dome.
Do I feel personally responsible for Global Warming? Yes, I can honestly say that I do. Every time that I go to a gas station to fill up my car I just watch the numbers go up on that little LED sign that tells me how fast I and everyone else is slowly killing the planet.....oops I meant to say filling up our gas tanks, but I guess it's just the same. Watching as I fill up my car I realize that we are trapped. There is no way out of the CO2 fix that we are in. Were all like druggies in a sense because we just keep wanting more, creating more of a problem for ourselves, knowing that we NEED to stop yet somehow cannot. We're all hooked on CO2. Everyone is responsible for global warming in some form or another. We all consumer more than we need o which leads to an exhaustion of our resources in production and an increase in the burning of fossil fuels which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, and the biggest problem which we all do everyday, is drive. Almost everyone drives everyday of their lives. I drive everyday back and forth to school, sometimes to work and then also sometimes just to get food off campus during the day or just any other simple errand that I do. It's impossible for me to get everywhere I need to without a car and of course he only way to power a car is with fossil fuels. Granted companies are coming up with ways to give us new electric cars, but in today's economy most people are not going to go out and just replace all of their present fossil fuel burning, global warming causing cars with new electric ones. Just because companies have ways to reduce our emissions, doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to fix everything.

What really exists?

“Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” This question asked by Joshua Roebke is probably one of the most complicated questions known to man. It is also highly philosophical. The idea that things do not exist without us has the possibly to shake the foundations o every piece of standing knowledge that we have. Quantum Mechanics is the subject which has the possibility to answer this question however. An Irish Clergyman by the name of George Berekely has his own take on it. From what I read about Quantum Mechanics in this article it would seem evident that he does agree with this subject. He was an idealist and believed heavily in the idea that things only existed if and when they passed through our senses, meaning if we were able to perceive them or not. Quantum Mechanics attempts to prove this idea correct because in order for it to exist we must prove that objects do not previously exist unless we perceive them. The ideas of Quantum Mechanics are derived from Berkeley's work and for the most part confuses me because it takes what George Berkeley had theorized and develops into far greater detail.
One strength that I find in Roebke's theory is the idea that every electron when affected will have an effect on another electron no matter how far away. This idea can be taken as a ripple effect. Think of throwing a rock into a pond and when it splashes it makes ripples in the water. These ripples do not stop, they just continue to get smaller and smaller until we can no longer see them. My guess is that eventually all of the water in the pond will be effected because atoms and electrons are constantly in motion and by affecting one we could inadvertently affect them all.

The Writing Center

My entire experience at the writing center lasted for about 10 minutes. I walked in sat down, turned on my computer (that probably took up most of the time I spent there) and then I showed the helper what I had already written down. I had a few notes about the sonnet that I was thinking of writing about already scribbled down on my computer. He read my notes, agreed with what I had to say, told me I was good with what I had and if I needed anymore help once I started writing it then I could come back. Then I left. There is not much for me to say about our conversation because whatever we said was really short and he didnt have much advice for me at all.
I did not change anything from the time that I went to the writing center to when I sat down to write my essay because they honestly did not give me any advice at all. Since I also went to the writing center with no essay completed or even started I could not have changed anything in my actual writing based on my writing center experience.

It's the American way

The article assigned to us was "Faustian Economics" by Wendell Berry and it was one in which he criticized just about every aspect of American life. The point of this article though was to convey to us how little we are actually doing to help our ever growing climate problem, and the useless steps that we take to "fix" it. Overall I felt that the author just doesnt like America or our way of life at all for the most part. He claims that we view our way of life as "indestructible", the idea that we are able to consume anything and everything that we want at the expense of the world.
Berry's ultimate solution for this is that we must abolish this standard that we as Americans have if we want to actually fic the climate problem. All of the "biofuels" (Berry 2) which he feels only benefits the manufacturer, is not a legitimate way to solve global warming. We must get rid of our greed and wastefulness because through all of this we continue to burn more and more fossil fuels everyday. If we were to all cut back then this would have a real impact. Driving around hybrid cars is not the ultimate solution for all of this.
Along with these thoughts, Berry also touches upon a philosophical aspect into what we do. According to him it seems that everything we do in our ways to fix our problems, mainly climate, is rooted in our way to consume constantly and also in our high standard of living. The biofuel example is one such because it shows that we still look to produce ways to fix our problems but they will com at a cot and in the end someone or another will profit from it all. Is the American way too greedy? He writes about the ideas that we only look for high costing solutions which involve advanced technology and machinery, while his views are that we must stop consuming and wasting on such a grand scale. This would have a greater impact on the fight against global warming. One other example which believes me to take this as a philosophical account is that he touches upon how we classify ourselves, "animals" the idea that we are limitless in everything that we do proves us not to be animals but "limitless animals" as Berry puts it. He uses the eample of how the God of Exodus does not choose to classify or define himself because by giving a definition this implies that we have limits. He merely says that "I am that I am" meaning that he simply is and is limitless. (Berry 2)

What's waste look like?

Faustian economics is an article that over describes waste, the author parallels countless examples most of which made no sense to me. For me waste, as Berry wants us to see it as, is like buying two of a specific item just for the sake of throwing one away. Like when you were young and sitting at the dinner table with your parents telling you not to leave until all of your food was gone and then feeding it to the dog under the table when no one was looking. Like taking you whole plate and dumping it in the garbage. It's when our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, we order so much food and then eat less than half of it all. Going to the supermarket when you're hungry and buying every possible thing imaginable and then a few weeks later you find that snack you bought and it goes right into the garbage,unopened and all because you know no ones ever going to eat it. This is how I think Berry describes waste in his article. We just want and want, but how much do we really need?

Making Language

The two poems "The Problem of Describing Trees" by Robert Haas and "Hubris at Zunzal" by Rodney Jones both metaphorically describe the complexity behind language and how it is created. "Hubris at Zunza"l is one which describes a man floaring out in the ocean at about sunset. This man then goes and dumpes his drink into the ocean, yet when it comes back over him there is a feeling of sweet relief in a sense. All of this is a metaphor for language because by him dumping his drink into the ocean shows to us how langauge (his drink) can be lost so easiliy in the vast ocean. His one drink was just a small thought for language where as the ocean represented the collectiveness of everyone else. His thought was mixed in and unable to be retrieved because language is so slippery and delicate. Just as trying to retrieve that drink is impossible, his thought is now gone and mixed in with everything else unable to be retrieved. But when the wave came over him, his thoughts were back to him, they were retrieved for a short time and them mixed back into the ocean. His thought had resurfaced only to be taken back by the ocean which he once gave it away to.
The second poem "The Problem of Describing Trees" is one which describes the complexity of language and how it can grow and develp just as a tree can. The poem uses verbs such as "flutter", "dance", "threw up" and "capitalized" in order to show how a tree can grow. It shows the tree from its earliest stages as a "wobbly stem", to an art form all the way to its fullest and most dominant, final form. The tree capitalizes over all other plants and often people to make itself strong. All of these stages are ones which language goes through as well, it starts off shaky, makes itself beautiful and metaphoric and then its final form delivers the punch that language needs in order to stick with people and make its point. This is how language capitalizes.