Final Paper - Ooh, A Rock; I'd Hit That!

Kristen Ohlemeier

11/18/10

Albert Rouzie

Final Project

Ooh, A Rock; I’d Hit That!

A Criticism of Ecoporn

Not an especially apt title. This is more like a criticism of the criticism of Ecoporn but the language of paper writing dictates succinctness and that was about as succinct as it could get. All photos hereby used in this essay are my own and will not be in the works cited list below, otherwise all papers and videos used for this essay are definitely cited.

To many noted environmentalist writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, Carol J. Adams, Susan Griffin, Susanne Kappeler, Charles Bergman, and now Bart H. Welling there is a developing medium that is as equally “harmful” to children as heterosexual pornography today and that is “Ecoporn.”

According to Welling, Ecoporn is defined as, “…a type of contemporary visual discourse made up of highly idealized, anthropomorphized views of landscapes and nonhuman animals” (57). This definition includes the sexualization of the landscape and animals, such as a tiger posing regally in the common position of feline relaxation being that of a woman’s pose in regular pornography, and going back to the colonialist view of the New World landscape being “virginal,” much like a woman’s womb.

Although environmentally-driven, Welling refers to Ecoporn as the next stop in exploitation of the environment much the same way that men supposedly exploit women after watching pornography. This is as much a fight against societal patriarchy that exists to this day and the same domineering attitude towards nature, as was instilled by the Judeo-Christian God and Western thought.

According to Jerry Mander, who is a Deep Ecologist and was among the first to use the term “Ecopornography” in a paper of the same name, Ecoporn has little to do with the sexual portrayal of nature as much as it has to do with how nature is used particularly for capitalist interests. As Welling states of Mander’s own views, “…the environmental credibility of the organization propagating a given image deserves more scrutinty than the rhetoric of the image itself” (54). A particularly apt example of this are the advertisements British Petroleum ran after the highly publicized Gulf of Mexico oil spill; in this attempt to save face BP forced the man who received most of the blame, Tony Hayward, to narrate commercials with unassuming and innocent machinery in the background. Through the ad, it attempts to offset the horrible disaster with a positive message of people working together on an ocean scenery and showing perfectly clean birds being handled by volunteers. Despite their work to spin the disaster to their advantage of improving their image from the greasy, money-grubbing capitalistic business that this oil spill made them to be, their relationship with the United States in particular remains rocky (Werdiger).

Welling, on the other hand, sees Ecoporn as far more nature-centric than questionable of the integrity of a non-living, industrial business, since he cites among various works in his article such as The Lion King as guilty of being Ecoporn (67). Although Welling is primarily concerned with the violence and sexism associated with regular pornography being applied to the environment, his other concern is that of the human being, saying:

“Either way, if you are a typical media-saturated resident of the United States, your response will likely be the same: you feel mildly pleased with the world, flip the page, change the channel…or fall asleep. This apathetic consumerist response should be exactly what environmentalists work to unsettle, no promote” (56).

Disregarding that condescension is likely not the best way to inspire the average viewer into crafting his everyday life around the effort to save the world, Wellings is criticizing a strategy of hopefully inspiring someone to do just that. One of the greatest examples of supposedly terrible Ecopornography is that of the popular BBC series known as Planet Earth, which practices several filming techniques Welling despises, in their attempt to make the planet seem vast and untouched. As it conveys the planet earth through overhead sweeps and tries to provide a clear picture of each of the general ecosystems at work, it uses the intricate network of the planet’s system to inspire a person to do its best to save the environment, implying that even as old as these networks are, the balance within which it exists is extremely fragile. As with the ills of the organic campaign against the meat-packing industry, the pro-environmentalists must realize if they want people to act on their message, then the tone must reflect one of hope rather than fear and despair. Because this is an age of proliferate technology, the people will expect environmentalists to offer technology-based solutions to maintain their current quality of life, which is something the more extreme pro-environmentalists seem to have difficulty grasping.

The fuss raised up about Ecoporn is very reminiscent to the fuss raised up about heterosexual pornography by Evangelist Christians, worried about the negative effects of porn on the sinner’s soul and also on the little children if they got their hands on it. As Welling states, “That the new ‘animal snuff films’ are branded ‘education’ and shown openly during prime time by various television networks does not render them less pornographic than films featuring voyeuristic representations of sexual violence against women…” (59). While some of his views are founded on the potentially denigrating view that consumers of pornography may have on women and, may in fact, pass over to the environment, this attempt at emphasizing the danger to children is not any different from the Evangelist Christians attempting to ban porn.

As a man named Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist, argues of porn in a congressional hearing in front of Congress, "Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance” (Singel Wired). In an effort to prove how immoral and psychologically unhealthy porn is, those trying to ban it completely are reduced to fear-driven rhetoric as though heterosexual porn will destroy children if not controlled or banished – note that the parents’ responsibility to make sure their children do not get a hold of porn is never brought up. Welling’s and other author’s statements about Ecoporn hardly falls into the same trap as fear-mongering, as the idea of there being Ecoporn at all is relatively new to the public and for the most part panned, but his feelings on the effects of Ecoporn are not dissimilar from those stated by Satinover above:

“…Carol J. Adams, Terry Tempest Williams…and Charles Bergman have shed light on the issue of how pornography and visual representations of nature…can code the viewer’s eye not just in similar but, as I will argue here, in deeply interrelated ways: as solitary, central but remote, omniscient…potentially violent…an all-seeing but simultaneously invisible consuming male subject to its marginalized…consumable female object” (53).

With a list of negative adjectives, Welling invokes the domineering patriarchal over the vulnerable Mother Nature so often portrayed in historical pictures, insisting later in his essay much like William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness that because most of the documentaries’ today refuse to portray animals and nature itself as an exploited subject, then they are effectively erasing the past of all original exploitation of the native peoples of the region. Although it is admirable to fight against the male dominion of all things as according to nature, there seems to be an undercurrent of extremism in regard to this issue that the rest of humanity has failed to pick up on, and it begs the question of whether the supposedly damaging effects of Ecoporn should be acknowledged at all. Much like heterosexual porn, the damaging effects are largely environmentally doctrinal and as widespread as heterosexual pornography is, the majority of the male half of the human race has not acted on the savage whims that pornography is meant to inspire, by seeing women as objects of desire rather than flesh and blood beings.

Wellings is worried about the consequences this Ecoporn will have upon the environment, but the problem with this is that man has already been exploiting the environment without thought of consequence since the very beginnings of civilization, if not even more savagely carried out today under the guise of corporate expansion and capitalism. Why criticize the efforts of the Planet Earth crew to try to show as it was meant to be without human influence? Granted, the disturbance of the environment, the idyllic view of the world particularly without humans is a little unsettling, and the attempt to separate humans from animals despite the fact that someone is holding the camera is not conducive to the idea of untouched human influence, but to Planet Earth crew, the pros completely outweigh the cons of instilling this particular view. And just because they feature many of the same filming techniques that Welling himself despises does not make it on the same level as pornography. With the issue of Global Warming gaining more ground, David Attenborough finishes the Ocean Deep segment of the series with a pacifistic call-to-arms, “It’s not just the future of the whale that today lies in our hands; it’s the survival of the natural world in all parts of the living planet. We can now destroy or cherish – the choice is ours” (Attenborough, Planet Earth).

The environmental writers, much like the people for the Liberation of all animals, appear to have, in the words of Michael Pollan, “A deep current of Puritanism run[ing] through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals' animality" (321). Not to argue that the natural view as humans should follow is for the man to be the sole provider of the family and the woman do nothing but nurture the offspring, but that these writers attempt to apply human concepts to animals with no knowledge of those concepts, such as the patriarchal society. As Welling cites other authors in his essay:

“Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan suggests that such narratives ‘work to reinscribe male-spuremacist ideologies, both in promoting a view of nature as dominated by aggressive and violent males….[This model] is designed…to arouse fear in women and to promote their sense of needing men’s protection’” (67).

Two words: spotted hyenas. The spotted hyena social order does not allow their male half to dominate the clan; conversely, an alpha female called the matriarch heads each clan. A Michigan State University researcher, Kay Holcamp, argues this to be the case as a result of their cubs not being able to develop the powerful skull and jawbones necessary to break bones for proper feeding until they are past sexual maturity (Michigan State University). The mothers must compensate their cubs’ weaknesses by being extra aggressive, especially since male hyenas are notorious for murdering cubs when left unattended. Perhaps documentaries on spotted hyenas can be construed as beneficial to the female ego since it depicts an opposing view to the regularly patriarchal state of nature in wild life documentaries.

Planet Earth remains to be one of the most popular documentaries of the age and, admittedly, it takes a far different approach from other nature shows such as The Crocodile Hunter, by almost completely removing the human element and attempting to refrain from disturbing the animals as much as possible. Also, instead of focusing solely on the animals, either, it tries to show the viewer how everything in each ecosystem connects via the natural mechanism of evolution. Probably its most astounding accomplishment was bringing the background of flora to the forefront. When, before, animals stole the spotlight, Planet Earth sets up cameras to record a day’s movement in a typical meadow, forest, or jungle and show just how plants are as alive as animals, how they move, how they struggle to reach the sun, how they protect themselves via chemical defenses, or how they best propagate their own offspring.

Among the most famous examples from the Planet Earth series is the clip of the wolf chasing the caribou on the tundra, which shows one set of filming techniques to help get the viewpoint across that despite each animals’ difference in physical appearance, many unconsciously display some of the same behavioral characteristics as other forms of life, such as ants.

The overhead shots of sprawling plains is used quite liberally in the Planet Earth series, obviously to depict a landscape much more vast than the human imagination can grasp. Perspective is always useful when the human social connections appear bleak and the world seems in dire straits, until people realize that it is quite difficult to destroy something that big. Can humans mutilate it? Eradicate all life forms from it? Certainly and easily, too, but despite what humans do to the Earth, it will survive and create new life forms to complete the chain that keeps it thriving, even if humans are no longer around to see that happen.

The Caribou herd in this particular video is filmed far above in an airplane with the engines muted for greater enjoyment, since no one wants to hear the roar of an airplane engine during a nature shot no matter how realistic it is. From above, it appears to be little different from a colony of Army Ant, snaking across the landscape in strange little columns, stopping to feed on the new pastures they come to until they have eaten their fill and moved on. As far as the food chain goes in this system, it is quite simple and broken down in bite-sized pieces for average consumer’s consumption: Caribou eat the grass, which is newly grown from the sun’s rays, which were scant months earlier during the winter, and the wolves are following in their stead, picking out the young and the weak so that the herd is stronger as a whole. As Pollan said of the photograph with his friend, Angelo skinning the pig, “There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life for a million years…one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what it is” (363).

Welling would have a field day with the next clip that may define just what the Planet Earth series is about and shows more artistic potential in it than any other example within the entire series as a whole: the Great White Sharks hunting Cape Fur Seals off the coast of South Africa.

Even before this clip came out, it had long been established that Great White Sharks occasionally power through the air in their attempt to snatch these seals as they swim. The elements are all there for Welling’s attributes of Ecoporn and then some: suspenseful music, slow-motion if not altogether graphic shots of sharks sinking their teeth into these tiny seals, cool coverage by Sir Attenborough himself, and even an atmosphere of gloom cast by the gray sky and green murky water. None of it is necessary, except perhaps the high-speed cameras to slow down the ascent of these animals, but even that element is arguable as effective and perhaps awe-inspiring as it is – which it should not be. This is the natural order, showing the little cuddly looking seals getting mauled by an animal more than ten times its size, and Welling argues that this is precisely the pornographic footage that should not have made it onto the television.

Welling writes of these particular sharks in his essay, saying “…sharks are undergoing an image restoration of their own….in print and on film to transform Great White Sharks in the popular imagine from killing machines to paragons of evolutionary fitness” (59). It would be difficult to argue that sharks are not the fittest among animals since sharks have retained their basic form since the Cretaceous period, but the video above does little to help the sharks’ reputation as heartless killing machines when filmed murdering defenseless and tiny – by comparison – animals such as the seal. At any rate, is it so wrong to attempt to stymie the effects of human consumption and degradation by educating the general public that sharks, as evil as they appear, are still key elements in an intricate food chain that would otherwise collapse without them?

Ecoporn. According to Welling and, as mentioned above, various other environmentalist authors such as Terry Tempest Williams, it should not even appear during prime time television where any child could stumble across it and become corrupted by its graphic display of the mechanisms of nature and one animal killing another, which is as much a part of life as breathing. Has nature, itself, been tampered for viewing pleasure by anyone who ever wanted to film a documentary series? Yes, it most certainly has because although humans are not meant to be in most of the environments that these animals survive in, we are still animals that were developed as a result of these natural mechanisms, and all the ecosystems must occasionally suffer the taint of the human being, just as the jungle suffers the tiger and the savannah suffer the wildebeest. We are humans and we are animals and it is time that humanity comes to terms with that identity and work to preserve the food chains that have unfortunately been broken as a result of our civilization.

Works Cited

Attenborough, David, Perf. Planet Earth – Wolves Hunting Caribou. British Broadcasting Company: 2006, Film. .

Attenborough, David, Perf. Planet Earth - The King of the Ocean (Great White Shark). British Broadcasting Company: 2006, Film..

Attenborough, David, Perf. Planet Earth – Ocean Deep. British Broadcasting Company: 2006, Film.

Singel, Ryan. "Internet Porn: Worse Than Crack?." Wired 19 Nov 2004: n. pag. Web. 18 Nov 2010. .

Welling, Bart H.. "Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman." Ecosee; Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Ed. Sidney L. Dobrin. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Print.

Werdiger, Julia. "BP Faces Long Road to Restoring Confidence in US." CNBC 27 July 2010: n. pag. Web. 18 Nov 2010. in_US>.

Hayward, Tony, Perf. British Petroleum(BP) Oil Spill - 2010 Commercial. British Petroleum: 2010, Film. .

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Michigan State University. "Studies Of Hyena Skull Development Put Teeth Into New Female Dominance Theory." ScienceDaily, 8 April 2009. Web. 18 November 2010. /releases/2009/03/090331112851.htm>.

Animal Liberation

We finally get down to my favorite chapter of the book: Is it moral to eat animals. For these past several weeks, I have been unashamed to say that I eat meat. So, what about this chapter where Pollan cited the writers for animal liberation and the near perfection of their argument? Have I ultimately decided that vegetarianism is the way?

No.

No, I have not. But thanks in part to Michael Pollan, I now have the tools to melt the wax of at least some of the animal liberation follower's wings. It all starts with that word liberation.

The animal liberation movement wants animals to be free and live happy lives. Now, who doesn't want this? Of course, we omnivorous humans do, but we at least recognize it for what it is: fantasy. To want animals to be free means that you expect them to not kill each other. Seeing as how evolution has made this chain of herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores so that this utopian ideal is impossible.

So, what about the case for at least releasing domestic animals? Well, why don't we focus on an animal that these animal liberation followers should loathe: a cat.

Look at that boy. Isn't he handsome? Doesn't he look healthy and happy? Animal Liberation would ban the owning of pets to prevent them from being slaves to our whim. Aside from the obvious reason that cats, in fact, own us, the majority of feral cats do no live more than 3 or 4 years, if they are lucky. The cat pictured at the side here, which is obviously mine, was a geriatric 13 or 14 years old when that was taken. Now, he is 15 or 16. As a result of being my pet, his life has seen what would otherwise be an unprecedented extension and even then he's not rooting through the garbage for scraps or expending the energy to hunt his own food. His quality of life is a hundred times better than it would be in the wild. And, as far as I know, he hasn't killed a single creature ever. has he hunted? Yes, but the family is pretty certain he has ADD. He cannot stay focused. On the very rare occasion he actually catches something, he bats it around for a little while before, again, losing interest.

Can't say the same for the other cat. She's murdered virtually every species smaller than her. The rabbits in our yard should consider themselves lucky she's 18-years-old and can't get around like she used to.

Both of those cats are very much loved and care for by the family. It would be difficult to argue that all cats everywhere would be happier scraping by, fighting for territory, mates, and even food.

Cats also happen to be pure carnivores. There is a protein they get from their meat that they need to survive. No exceptions. To try and make cats eat vegetarian is nothing short of animal abuse. Michael Pollan mentions a protein supplement for cats but I will unabashedly call it animal abuse, regardless. There are people who are forcing an innocent creature who does not care, let alone understand, their morals, to eat something its body wasn't made to process. How is this any different from the meat-packing industry and their feeding livestock corn? It is not. No matter how pretty you might pain it, this is an abuse to the cats and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Which moves us beyond cats and to address the animal kingdom as a whole. Michael Pollan wrote of how the very basics of the food chain and ecology work, saying of animal rights groups: "A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals' animality" (321). Animals eat each other. Obviously this is where the animal liberation movement began tripping over themselves in trying to think of a way to prevent this from happening, but it is here that shows they do not love animals anymore than the rest of us. In fact, I would argue they love animals even less than they claim they do. Much less.

It's very telling, in fact, when in their argument where omnivores argue, "Well, animals kill each other, so why shouldn't we be able to eat them?" And, of course, their return argument is, "Do you really want to base your moral code on the natural order?" Yes, animals do murder and rape each other, but they never do it without a good reason. Now, before I'm accused of anthropomorphizing animals, just hear me out. Evolution is all about survival of the fittest and the goals of most species is to find food and reproduce, but to even think this whole idea that the wilderness is some type of free for all means that these people for the liberation of animals, don't have any respect for animals at all. If they did, they wouldn't force their cats to be vegetarian, they would recognize the evolutionary advantage of domestication-driven relationships, and, most importantly, they would recognize that many species that live in groups and form societies show very little in the way of rape and murder, at least in their own communities, but balance.

The Earth's system is about balancing these herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. The survival of the species, or in many cases, small communities means that murder and rape are not likely to be a tolerated crimes. So, in an animals' own way, they do have a moral code it's merely embedded in their DNA that killing or hurting each other of the same species is simply not conducive to their survival. Humans recognize this too.

So no, animal liberation supporters, you're not morally better than the common man in your attempt to put animals and humans on some unearthly pedestal. In fact, you're right there with your own enemies, the meat-packing industry, in the way that you refuse to see all of us for what we are: animals. And that recognition doesn't meant we automatically have to fall into chaos and anarchy in order to embrace our animalness. That is a false dichotomy.

Food Inc.

And now the sister blog to Eric Schlosser's lecture from earlier in the year, on his baby Food Inc. There's not really much I can say that either he or Michael Pollan brought up that wasn't also covered in his film and thus wasn't also probably covered on here.

I do want to say, though, that people may not realize it but we have taken our first step to actually reforming the food industry. How? Universal health care. Now that we have passed a bill for the basic structure of a universal health care, we have started to address the health of the people and how best to keep us healthy. The next step, is tackling the costs and, ultimately, some of the causes of the major health problems in this country, and as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan keep telling us, it's mostly from the food industry and the raging obesity rate in this country.

Now that we have universal health care, that family in the film that has to live on a dollar a piece per meal will be able to afford more because hopefully the cost of medication will have gone down. That goes a long way to putting more money into the people's pocket so that they can actually afford healthy food. (I'm still amazed that anyone would think eating out was healthy at all - but it is getting healthier. Panera Bread is supposed to be one of the healthiest fast food restaurants.)

There is one other thing I would like to mention that isn't necessarily directly related to the movie, but I imagine it helps the meat industry in the same way that the pharmaceutical industry used it to keep costs low: lobbying. I really, really hate lobbying. Too often it drives the policy of this country and that is the very foundation of a corrupt government. I would very much like severe limits to be put on how much you can lobby say, each month, but I know it's not likely these regulations will pass since it's all about lining the pockets of our representatives and senators.

Much like how the food industry has a bunch of high level cronies running many of the institutions that are supposed to keep us safe, money is the driving factor here. Something should be done about it. I have no doubt that something will eventually been done about it too. It probably will not happen in the near future, but I predict a backlash of sorts to eventually hit Washington DC.

At the moment, though, we need to get through the insanity of the Republicans. They really need to level out before we'll be able to make anymore meaningful progress.

Sustainability - The Omnivore's Dilemma

If there is one thing this book has sort of reinforced is the reason why we industrialized food in the first place instead of sticking to less mechanical means. Because it's cheap, and organic living cannot be managed on a mass scale.

I hate to say this, but when I read that Whole Foods has virtually fallen into the same trap as the rest of the industrialized food industry, I was rather amused. Why? That's certainly not a good thing, but it goes to show that no matter how righteous one feels about saving the animals and providing organic fruits, you're still not much better than the industrial machine. They tried to fight it and they pretty much failed.

Because you cannot ship organic foods straight from the farm, across country, to a grocery store! Everything, thus, has to be local if you want straight organic foods and that simply is not possible, at all, for every city. Where is New York going to get their organic foods if there can't be any preservatives? Are there enough farms around there to feed 8 million people (I don't even know how many people live in New York. That's just a ballpark figure and it's probably very wrong) and the rest of the surrounding area? I'm pretty sure farm lands are in short supply up there. Not that they don't exist but that they cannot possibly produce enough to feed that many people. And even if they do, what about the surrounding areas? They'd just starve?

To be quite frank, though, I seriously doubt anyone is going to be able to get rid of the food industry completely. It may produce extremely unhealthy foods and have animal abuse (I love animals too and I think the FDA should look this more closely!), but it does make food on a mass enough scale to feed the 300,000,000+ in our population.

I guess you could rightly call this my primary criticism of this book. It's saying a lot about how good Joel Salatin's farm is, how much it produces, and how it produces but it is not saying anything about how we can transport this. Other than the fact that Joel Salatin refuses to go beyond local.

This is probably what I find annoying about quite a few environmentalist writings that we've read. They totally ignore practical reasons as to why Salatin's way farming hasn't spread like wildfire to other farmers. He seems to be making a decent living. And part of that is because it simply is not practical! Organic food can't be shipped! Or isn't supposed to be shipped because they prohibit the use of preservatives.

Durning did the same thing, because I criticized his article which was so bent on proving the American people are ill with consumerism, that he totally ignored the fact that happiness is quite largely based on job satisfaction. He was so certain materialism is the sole cause of happiness that he completely ignored how job satisfaction is pretty much at an all time low. Big business has CEOs that keep awarding themselves huge bonuses and severance checks(even for doing a crappy job), and meanwhile their poor employee on the lowest rung of the ladder is constantly ignored and withheld bonuses despite working 40+ hours a week. Yes, NOTHING wrong or even pessimistic about that picture at all. (See? I'm not a capitalist through and through. Unregulated capitalism is horrible! Ergo, our current financial crisis right now.)

The Omnivore's Dilemma

There is a point where limited scope of the situation is a real distortion to the reality of the situation, but I guess I never actually knew just how pervasive this problem of families eating only fast food really was. I even worked in the fast food industry for four years and I never realized how bad it really was. Had I suspected? Oh yeah. I knew that my friends' families usually ate out or, at the very least, did not actually sit down for a dinner together. It was every man for himself, usually.

I certainly remember the diet craze that swept the country, but I also do not remember my grocery stores actually changing all that much. My parents tried to partake in the craze, but my brother and I remained aloof. My mom usually cooks dinner at night and although my parents would pick and choose what things they ate, everything was still made and my brother's and my habits never changed.

I definitely remember the videos that had come out about the fast food industry that was meant to show incriminating evidence about how bad the food was and my reaction was, "What? People didn't already know this? Of course it's not good for you!"

And, as I stated in a previous post, it can drain your wallet fast.

Now, the actual book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I like how he starts off with how ridiculous these diet crazes have gone when he says, "Somehow this most elemental of activities - figuring out what to eat - has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?"

Yeah, I don't know either, Mr. Pollan. Although, you could take this several different ways. Forget what has actually led us to this point, you decided to focus on actually telling people what to eat. Well, that is nice and practical. Hopefully it will actually make families healthy, but I'm going to go ahead and say that there is actually a social problem at work here.

It all starts with the beginning of the century, when women stayed home and did the chores and the men worked. Man would come home to a nice dinner made by his wife. Well, now the women work and now they're tired when they come home too, but still, somehow, the dominant mindset is that the woman should still cook the dinner. Why can't Mr. Man do it? Or why can't they just pitch in together to create a healthy meal?

I will fully admit that my mom cooks the majority of the meals at our house (that's mostly because she's the best cook), but my dad occasionally cooks, mostly grills. Since my Freshman college year when I had to survive on horrible, horrible dorm food, I have craved home-cooked meals and I actually bothered to start cooking myself. So, this winter, when I'm working on my portfolio and not going to Dairy Queen, I'll probably end up cooking quite a few of the meals. Why not? I'm fully grown, I wont' be carrying a job, and I'm staying under their roof, ergo I have the time and the obligation to cook.

There is one more thing I would like to address that he finished his introduction with:

"Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them."

I am not ashamed to say I am one of those people, simply because I just don't care. I really don't. When these dieting crazes and shocking videos of what's really behind the fast food industry came out, I made sure not to bother with them. I had no interest and, as stated above, was actually surprised people weren't already suspecting at least some of the dirty secrets behind the fast food industry.

At the moment, there are far more pressing issues going through my mind like, "Will I get a job? Where am I going to apply? Crap, I need to do this paper! Shiiit, I could lose my scholarship if I don't make the grade in this class!" When you're a poor college student, who doesn't have anything close to a kitchen (no, microwaves don't count) then how you're going to eat a healthy meal just doesn't factor into your daily thoughts.

I probably think of the future and what lies there far more than most people do in a life time, but when it really comes down to it, that's the future. I'm in the present and all I can really do is live in the present. Maybe once my metabolism slows down, I will actually take greater care in what I eat, but until then...I will worry about what readings I have due for classes tomorrow and the day after that.

Thankfully, I do have the added bonus that I have spent the majority of my life eating home-cooked meals, a luxury that it appears most people have not had the opportunity to do and I feel sorry for them.

The Dangers of Consumerism and apparently Christianity

This last week had a whole host of themes, which might make this post a little jumbled and jumpy; consumerism, spirituality, christianity, western mindset, and even a little feminism thrown in there. With that said, though, I think I will focus a little bit more on the consumerism and Christianity aspect.

I'm glad Professor Rouzie said that, to an extent, there is truth to the idea that money can buy you happiness, mostly in the sense that the constant worry of paying bills and knowing where your next meal will come from is relieved with a good job and salary. Durning wrote in his essay, "The happiness that people derive from consumption is based on whether they can consume more than their neighbors and more than they did in the past." I personally disagree that everyone is driven by this imaginary competition to do better than their neighbor. Is it still a driving factor? Yeah, I think so. In grade school my friends were constantly telling me how "rich" I was but I had difficulty seeing their point. We lived in the same neighborhood, we went to the same crappy public school. But I had the nicest house, I had two TVs, and all kinds of video game systems to play with.

I had more stuff. Was I happy? Well, yeah, I was hardly ever bored.

But what about now? I am currently living in a dorm room that's barely big enough to qualify as anything but a closet - the lack of elbow space does annoy me and it always takes some getting used to - and yet I feel probably just as happy and fulfilled as I did ten years ago with the three-story house. Why? Well, I have great friends here, at the very least, but I was also able to squeeze in some of my most prized possessions: my Calvin & Hobbes books, a couple of Fantasy novels, my laptop, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Game Cube, my SLR digital camera, and my book of DVDs and video games. Just as my friends make up a part of my life so do some of the items that I possess and I can honestly say that I would be a far less fulfilled person without one or more of these items. Seem silly? Perhaps but there is a certain something about the material things we get that drives the very reason we insist on buying them: escapism.

As an artist and a writer, I am constantly looking for a new story to get lost in and even though I may read the same books and play the same games over and over again, I can honestly say that I always get even a little bit of entertainment from them. Material things can make you happy, it all depends on how you use them.

To an extent in Alan Durning's essay, I think he misses the point. He says, "Luxuries become necessities between generations as well. People measure their current material comforts against the benchmark set in their own childhood. So each generation needs more than the previous did to be satisfied" (774). Actually, my parents often reminisced about the frugality of their childhood to curb the materialism in my brother and I: "When I was a kid, we would go to the local burger joint and get a large drink, maybe once a month, and I had to share it with my three sisters. We never had individual pops. That was outrageous!"

But, to get back to the point, I don't think everyone actually measures their happiness based on what items they have. In my family, it's all about job satisfaction. I do not think anyone in my family has ever really and truly enjoyed their job. If they did, it certainly was not for long. We spend about 90% of our adult life doing work and rarely, if ever, does a person find satisfaction with it. If we spend 90% of our time working, then our job will most certainly factor very largely in the happiness scale.

I have worked at Dairy Queen for four years. I not only hate it, I loathe it. The very summer's beautiful hot days were tainted by the fact that I had to go to work and go through the same motions minute after minute, serving hoards of people. I do not work during the college quarters and I could not wait to get back to school and away from that miserable aspect of my life. Well, since I'm going into video games, job satisfaction should be much higher when I actually get a job.

I find it very surprising that Durning bases his whole essay on the evils of consumption and yet when he gets to the part about the most fulfilling aspects of our lives, he doesn't think for an instance that being happy with our job would factor in to how happy we are totally? He brushes over it but he turns away from that avenue almost as quickly as it presents itself:

"Similarly, analysts such as Scitovsky believe that reported happiness is higher at higher incomes largely because the skilled jobs of the well-off are more interesting than the routine labor of the working class. Managers, directors, engineers, consultants, and the rest of the professional elite enjoy more challenging and creative pursuits, and therefore receive more psychological rewards, than those lower on the business hierarchy" (775).

And for the record, my dad is an engineer and my mom has a masters in business and works at a bank, so they are among those "professional elite" but after thirty or forty years of putting up with the same thing, work loses the interest it once had.

Next up on the chopping block is Lynn White Jr.

Now he and I can actually agree on something: we both dislike Christianity. Him because of the psychological impact its had on the way our country thinks and me because the evangelists attempting to hijack the elections and apparently turn the country into a Christian theocracy are pretty scary, even as much of a minority as they are. I also dislike it because of the way it affected some of my friends and eventually came to dominate their lives.

To begin, I love how he starts his essay with an example of a new plow created to create suitable conditions for growing crops and implies a cold and calculating attitude to the peasants who used it. "Man's relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature" (406). So, peasant farmers from the 7th century are now evil simply because they used an instrument that allowed them to live and feed their families.

Now, this will seem like a silly analogy but there is a game called Bioshock, where you play as a man who has inexplicably found himself in this chaotic underwater city where the people are murdering each other to stay alive. There are these creatures that walk around, carrying a lot of money and energy that is essential to the survival of your character. However, they do not attack you. They simply wander around, living peacefully, but the game requires you to attack them or you cannot go on to the next level. Without this requirement, I would simply let them be. They are not doing anything to me and despite all the valuable items they carry, it wastes quite a bit of ammo to kill them.

Needless to say, humans are a common sense creature. If they did not have to "rape" the fields to grow their food then they wouldn't. Plowing them in this violent manner, as the text describes, is time consuming and it takes group work and a bunch of oxen to do it. If it could be done with two oxen and a man, no one would waste time pooling their resources to "attack the land." Furthermore, their being Christian had nothing to do with them developing new technology to stay alive. They could be Buddhist and still they would have to resort to such harsh means. That is the power of survival.

Furthermore, I remember watching this documentary on Christianity and it pretty much covered how very astrology-based it is and how it borrowed virtually every one of its elements from the other religions of the day. I believe it was called Zeitgeist, but the dominant religion that was constantly compared to Christianity was the Egyptian religion which was around looooong before Christianity came into being. Needless to say, I have a difficult time believing that Christianity is the first anthropocentric religion. It would not have become a dominant religion or come into being at all if people at the time, to an extent, did not believe that the land was there for the taking. They had the lion in cages, they rode the largest land mammal on the planet, the elephant, of course they would have thought pretty highly of themselves.

Michael Clayton

Ah, a pretty good film about how a man topples an evil corporation that did its best to obscure, mask, and road block its opponents into a stalemate and eventually achieving its aims: paying little to the plaintiffs while continuing to market their obviously harmful product, because the amount of money coming into the CEOs overrules the money that would go into fixing said product into something safer. But, still, first and foremost this film is not about some...not really lawyer person doing the morally good thing and bringing down the company for the good of the planet.

He managed to turn his conversation with Karen Crowder at the end into a confession of nearly killing him and definitely killing his charge Arthur. It's all about revenge. George Clooney had no other motivation to bring down this company other than the fact that he suspected someone had killed Arthur. It only turned really, truly personal when they stupidly tried to kill him. Of course the evil henchmen screwed up. They always do!

Since I'm a media student, I'll go ahead and just focus on the technical aspects of the film, namely the story. Touched on above, I can't tell if the film would have been better if it was started right at the beginning of the trouble or if it hadn't shown us the future and double-backed. I mean, it does say "4 days earlier" not long after the car bomb and cars don't usually explode. Obviously, someone was trying to kill him. We don't even have to get halfway through the film before we can recognize the enemy as the evil company. Obviously the evil company attempted to kill him so that they could more effectively clean up the mess their rogue lawyer made.

I guess you could argue that it made for an enticing beginning, to draw the audience in and make them want to stay, but it's a film about lawyers! Everyone hates lawyers! It will eventually get pretty boring and...it was. It was a little boring. And a little annoying. I kinda wish the little boy hadn't factored in at all and I'm not sure what his purpose was anyway. Was the boy's fantasy book (geez, was it Realm & Conquerors?) really that important to the story? I was under the impression that Arthur, as crazy as he was, always had a tangible idea of what was going on with that company and he proved his genius, if not his recklessness, during that scene where he calls - I'm not even sure who. He called someone merely for the soul purpose of heckling the people obviously listening in on his phone calls - and shouted about the kind of choice language that people within the company should write to avoid incrimination in lawsuits, particularly this one.

Smart, crazy man.

But, it's pretty obvious by this time that since the company listened in on this particular conversation, that this lawyer is in fact doing his best to win the lawsuit for their clients. Well, that would ruin their reputation and they would lose too much money, so they decide to go ahead and kill the annoying flies that pester them.

So, you go to all that trouble to make sure Arthur dies in a suicide, and yet you sloppily attempt to kill George Clooney with a car bomb? Not only did it fail but, as I said above, cars just don't blow up! It would be rather obvious that someone rigged it to blow and since Clooney just cleared himself of his debtors...who else would want to kill him? Man, this company is not very subtle.

At any rate, it is still a decent movie. Not especially thought-provoking since the basic premise of man overcoming evil business has been done before. I kinda wish they had gone more into the nature aspect of the movie, where a business obviously ignored laws and inflicted harm not only on the environment but on human life. But the whole violation of nature and its destruction was more of an irrelevant detail than anything significant and the movie was focused far more on how evil businesses will do personal harm in their eagerness to escape prosecution and lawsuits.

Even so, I still prefer V for Vendetta. Bundles a nice package of food for thought with incredible imagery and plenty of action.