Space

I liked the space presentation because it was interesting to learn about how suburbs are not as good as I thought they were.  They actually cause a bad carbon footprint on the the atmosphere because the people that live in them have to drive everywhere.  They cannot just walk to the grocery store or the gas station to buy milk, they have to drive there.  Since they are not in walking distance to anything and they do not have a lot of public transportation they just drive a lot.  Just having a green lawn does not mean that you are living a "green" lifestyle.  Yet it seems that living in a suburb and owning your own house and lawn is the American dream.  Living in a big city would be a better dream if one wants to live sustainably.  In the city there is public transportation, and one can walk to many of the places one needs to go. 

Planning the way things are built in the city are important as well.  For instance, the way roads are placed can have a huge impact on how people decide what transportation to use.  Before cars were made it was common the have very close roads used for walking, after cars became more popular, the roads became more spread out and harder to use for walking to places.  By planning a city in a manner that promotes walking to places, they can be more sustainable.

Greenways are also important for cities to have.  They are even better when they are connected by green strips.  This allows for an increased species diversity because the populations in the two parks can come together rather than being separated by a a few blocks of buildings.  This improves the health of the organisms in the park. 

Finally they talked about urbicide.  This term means "violence against the city".  Urbicide occurs when people destroy a city.  This destruction is really bad because it can kill people.  Even when people survive, they have part of their life killed because everything thing they own is gone and they must start over.  This is a really horrible thing to happen to a city.

Food Presentation

I really enjoyed the food presentation.  I liked how we had to answer questions during the presentation because it was a good way to learn about the topics.  The food industry has so many labels with so many meanings it can be hard sometimes to really figure out who is right and what to eat and for what cost.  For example, organic food can be very expensive.  This is because the farmers have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be certified organic.  For instance, they cannot use pesticides on their crops, they have to use sustainable methods, they can't use as many medicines like antibiotics for the animals,  and so on.  The presenters talked about a drawback to this.  Since there are so many regulations about the way the organic foods are produced sometimes just making sure that things like e-coli can be a problem because sanitation is not as regulated. Additionally, the presenters talked about how studies about the nutrition of the organic foods compared to regular food.  The studies have mixed results and may be bias, so as of right now there is no reliable information telling us whether or not organic food is actually more nutritious for people. 

The presenters also explained about food miles.  This is a term used to describe how many miles food must travel to get to your table.  It is often a good idea to buy local food in order to reduce one's carbon footprint.  Buying tomatoes in the middle of the winter may not be a good idea because they could be coming from Mexico, whereas in the summer they could be coming from somewhere more local.  One must also consider the impact of not buying food from poor countries as well because while the food has a lot of food miles, it is also helping out the economy of that poor country. 

Finally, the presenters also talked about Whole Foods.  This is a grocery store chain that is dominating the organic food market right now.  This chain can be looked at in both a positive and negative light in that they do sell good, sustainable, and organic food, but they have also been known to run out other smaller organic businesses.  Either way Whole Foods is a company that has definitely found its niche.  The presenters also talked about how Whole foods can be a bit pretentious because of their high prices.  In a way only the rich people can be sustainable and by this better organic food.  Since their prices are so high, people of the middle or lower classes can't really afford to shop there.  One must consider the other side though, Whole foods is a company that must make enough money to stay in business and pay their customers, and organic food is more expensive to begin with.  Whole foods really takes care of it's employees too, paying them well over minimum wadge.

Grizzly Man and Ecofeminism

Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell.  This film had a lot to say about how people view the environment and gender. Timothy had a pretty normal life growing up, he was on athletic teams and had a loving family.  He felt that something was missing though so he moved to California.  After he lost the part of the bartender in Cheers to another actor, he lost it.  Sick of being rejected, he turned to alcohol, which did not solve his problems.  Finally, he found happiness in spending time with the bears of Alaska.  While in Alaska, his trouble with human society seemed to melt away.  As he became closer and closer to the magnificent beasts he often forgot that they were wild animals that could harm him.  He often said that others, who might try to live with the bears as he does, would not survive, yet while watching the documentary, one gets the sense that he himself does not see the danger.  It seems as if he thought he was invincible because he had learned a few of the bears habits, but he still didn't know everything.  During his last expedition he decided to take his girlfriend along.  She and Timothy decided to go back at the usual time, but due to a conflict with the airlines, he decided to go back to his bears.  The combination of being in the bear territory at such a late time and the distraction of having his girlfriend may have lead to his untimely death, as well as his girlfriend's. 

It is sad that he could not have survived, yet at the same time it does not surprise me.  If you mess with nature, it will eventually respond to your presence.  I think that really symbolizes humanity's connection with nature.  The more we spend time  changing things, being where we shouldn't be, the more likely nature is going to fight back. Timothy spent extra time being where he shouldn't have been and humans in general have been spending too much time destroying the environment, therefore nature is going to respond at some point.  This relates back to ecofeminism.  Timothy as a man, was part of a hierarchy.  While his intentions were good (trying to save the bears) he was still just doing whatever he wanted to do.  He was dominating nature in his own way, using it for his own purposes.  He used to bears to sort of fix his problems when poaching wasn't even a huge problem in Alaska anyways.  Timothy would have been better off making his documentary on a more important environmental problem so that he could have made more of a difference.  On the other hand, Timothy may have seemed feminine in the way he seemed to care so much for the bears.  Caring is seen as a female trait usually, since female traits are usually seen as not as important, caring for the environment has been put on hold.  This is a problem ecofeminist see in society and they relate it to the dominance hierarchy in which males usually are on top.  All in all, Timothy was just trying to help, even if he was a guy.