Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. He writes widely on a diverse range of topics, including political theory, film theory, cultural studies, theology, and psychoanalysis. (Wikipedia) Although, Slavoj Zizek was hard to understand and a challenge to follow, his part in “Examined Life” was to make us aware. Surrounded by trash, Zizek talks about trash and ecology as ideology. Trash is an unavoidable consequence of human life and we try to imagine it goes away by some magical process. Out of sight out of mind, is often the case but Zizek wants us to see the trash and know (premise one) that our society is not good for the environment or ultimately good for humanity. Trash does disappear but we are not paying attention to its disappearance, since without a doubt it never really does disappear. It gets us thinking how much can we safely pollute our environment? He claims “nature is, in truth, little more than a source of catastrophe, using as proof the upsets that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the formation of fossil fuels. We humans cannot accept this explanation because we are …show more content…
But you see perfection in imperfection itself. And that’s how we should learn to love the world.” We need to reconnect with nature. We can see, own, and embrace our world as it is. When we are really able to see and embrace trash can we expose the factors that cause environmental destruction. Only after these factors and their impacts are seen and exposed have we built the ground for real and change to take place. According to Zizek, we are to love the trash, because it is real, and inspire others to be aware of the true ecological state of this
As a society, we focus some of our thoughts on how to preserve the Earth and different ways to recycle and keep it clean. Although we do have an effort into saving our home planet, we, as a whole race, don’t have our hearts in it. There are the people who are obsessive economists and worry about the world excessively and those who don’t care enough or at all. The two stories both present a possible outcome for our lack of effort in preserving the Earth in two different genres, fiction and nonfiction. Of the two stories “Silent Spring” and “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…”, the one i felt most affected by was Marvin in, “If
He is unable to understand why they can’t leave nature alone. His frustration stems from the fact that so much valuable land is being destroyed, to accommodate the ways of the lazy. It seems as though he believes that people who are unwilling to enjoy nature as is don’t deserve to experience it at all. He’s indirectly conveying the idea that humans who destroy nature are destroying themselves, as nature is only a mechanism that aids the society. In Desert Solitaire Abbey reminds the audience, of any age and year of the significance of the wild, enlightening and cautioning the human population into consciousness and liability through the use of isolation as material to ponder upon and presenting judgments to aid sheltering of the nature he
"An Ocean Of Trash." Scholastic Action 33.12 (2010): 16. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 31 Jan. 2014.
The disaster theory, Gould claims, is an example of good science. It has testable evidence and has an impact on studies in other fields of science, it develops further and explains why the extinction of dinosaurs occurred simultaneously with other events. This theory suggests that a large comet hit the Earth sixty five million years ago, causing the cloud of dust to rise into the sky and to block sunlight. As a result, world temperatures went down significantly, the ice age bega...
Man has destroyed nature, and for years now, man has not been living in nature. Instead, only little portions of nature are left in the world
... conservationism. He is inspiration for all of us to see the natural world as a community to which we belong.
Throughout one’s life, he or she will encounter an opportunity that will likely impact his or her perspective on a given situation. In Waste Land, Vik Muniz embraced the opportunity to travel to Jardim Gramacho in Brazil in hopes of making a difference with the pickers by incorporating the pickers as assistants for the art projects. While at the landfill in Rio de Janeiro, he experiences the life of the pickers which helps him to create the art that will transform the lives of the workers; these experiences allow Muniz to develop as a person (Walker). Vik Muniz’s perspective regarding the landfill and the pickers evolved from expressing pity to embracing the pickers as a group of friends.
He believes that the wilderness has helped form us and that if we allow industrialization to push through the people of our nation will have lost part of themselves; they will have lost the part of themselves that was formed by the wilderness “idea.” Once the forests are destroyed they will have nothing to look back at or to remind them of where they came from or what was, and he argues everyone need to preserve all of what we have now.
Another example she uses to make her point is about coral. When thinking of coral, the idea that comes to most is it is a plant that lives in the ocean and provides a beautiful color. Coral provides more than that for the ocean as we see it provides “Thousands-perhaps millions- of species have evolved to rely on coral reefs, either directly for protection or food, or indirectly, to prey on those species that come seeking protection or food” (Kolbert 130). When carbon dioxide enters the ocean, it forms into an acid called carbonic acid, which has been eating away at most of the coral and not allowing it to grow or survive in the water. This other example used by the author showing humans how we are destroying important aspects to earth. We should be more alarmed to what is occurring in the ocean because we also depend on it for some of our resources. It also goes to show if we are capable of putting other animals in danger we are fully capable of erasing our own
... of nature. In fact, this belief, which does beg the question, is what predominates his thinking.
Slums usually develop in the worst types of terrain, and lead to flooding, landslides, and fires that destroy thousands of people’s homes. Yet population growth and the amounts of waste created by urban civilizations are also pushed on the hidden faces and locations of those on the outskirts of the cities. “If natural hazards are magnified by urban poverty, new and entirely artificial hazards are created by poverty’s interactions with toxic industries, anarchic traffic, and collapsing infrastructures” (Davis 128). People who live in slums usually are given the rest of the world’s waste to live near, which could be detrimental to their health if that waste consists of toxic or deadly materials. Mike Davis notes that “the world usually pays attention to such fatal admixtures of poverty and toxic industry only when they explode with mass casualties” (Davis 130). He also goes on to conclude that this century’s surplus humanity can only survive as long as the slum remains a franchised solution to the overflow of materials and waste created by the industrial society (Davis 201). The living conditions of the urban poor and those in poverty stricken slums receive the hazardous consequences directly from the growth of
Imagine yourself in the middle of a rainforest, listen to the sounds around you, smell the fresh air, hear the wildlife; take that image and get rid of the trees around you, the sounds of wildlife, and the smell of fresh air. Instead of a rainforest you are now in the middle of a seemingly endless sea of trash and waste. The fresh scent in the air gone, the sprawling land of greenery and trees gone, and the sounds of the forest is reduced to the sound of heavy machinery trying vainly to reduce trash into smaller more compact waste.
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” he begins with “…the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” With this initial statement, Chakrabarty declares that the advent of manmade climate change in the anthropocene, humans can no longer be considered separately from nature as they had been previously segregated by Enlightenment and western thinking. In other words, “humanism,” or human-centered thinking is neither relevant nor reasonable in the face of global climate change. According to Chakrabarty, since human and natural history are both intrinsically tied together, the fate of mankind is now
...n. Many American shares a common image of not living in a finite world and are used to exponential growth in almost all aspects of that a developed country would attempt to obtain positively. Though when comparing the United States to other countries around the world with the amount of garbage produced annually, we top the scales around two hundred and thirty-six million tons. Even japan, ranked third and half the size of America, has less then fifty-five million tons of garbage annually. (Forbes) As we continue to diminish our sources at alarming rate, people often forget the treatment and infrastructure required to manage all our garbage. The sad but inevitable process of wiping out forests and preserved land for more space for urban living hugely hurts not only American population but foreign companies who wish to do future international business in our country.
She constructed her argument with the help of a fable having an initial state of harmony and productivity, then a drastic and profound fall silencing rebirth of new life with the introduction of chemical poisons. Then, she dramatically exposes the culprit behind the destruction, humans. However, it is just a story; she explains it has a thousand counterparts all over the world. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon nature is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. It took eons of time to produce, to develop, to evolve and to diversify life and reach a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. However, the situati...