Ben's Posts

Blog #1: Separate Ways: Returning to the Wood

In his essay Last Child in the Woods, Robert Louv believes that over the past half-century there has been a great human exodus from nature. He says that children these days no longer grow up with a love or appreciation of the environment. Instead, they spend most of their time inside either in a classroom or relaxing with electronics. There is no doubt in my mind that there has been a substantial decline when it comes to human interaction with the words. This could have very harmful repercussions. If we have had no interaction with something we are far more likely to devalue it and to see it has expendable. This is especially true when we become apathetic towards extremely detrimental environmental practices such as deforestation and fracking. I also agree with Louv notion that our education system has become antiquated and too much of a cookie-cutter response. Teachers have become afraid to put forth nontraditional curriculums that may indeed include environmental interaction because of things such as state tests and the powerful teachers union. The only criticism I would have of this essay is to say that Louv has fallen into the trap that the past was ideal and the present is lacking. We often had a tendency to glorify and romanticize about how good things were in the past. Change is inevitable and that the United States has certainly changed a lot in the past 50 years. Blacksmiths probably felt hard done when there was no longer a need for horseshoes, however, no one ever argues that we should return to the error of the horse and buggy. The key is to embrace the natural forward progression of a society while at the same time encouraging an active curiosity both about the past and the larger world around us.

Blog #2: My Reply to The Letters to the Editor

I have a general disdain for letters to the editor. The letters tend to be a form of a well-organized complaint. Don't get me wrong, it is every citizen's right to express their views and to speak out when they think something is wrong. However, complaining or stating a point of view without also providing at least a path for a rational solution is not constructive in the least. The citizens of Athens seem particularly adverse to change. They even vetoed a proposal to build an assisted living home for the elderly, on the Eastside, because of ridiculous traffic concerns. The letters that we read are no different. Somewhere down the line, certain citizens of Athens seem to have gotten the notion that if they live 1 mile outside the corporation limit of the city they are somehow experts on topics of ruralness, farming subsidies, property tax, and the advancement of urban sprawl. Unfortunately, most of these people are experts only in their minds.

Blog #3 A Woman’s Land:

The author of this essay presents two main propositions. The first one being that women have systematically been prevented from owning land and secondly, that women have an innate sense of the value for untouched land. I agree wholeheartedly with the first statement, not so much with the second. Throughout Western civilization land ownership has been a central tenet in order to determine the self-worth and power of a particular individual. It is for this reason that land ownership throughout the annals of history as almost exclusively pertain to white men. These men would want to keep their power, position, and the rights that the land endow them to have so they were unsurprisingly continue to pass their land holdings to their sons. An obvious side effect of this practice is that women are purposely written out of the equation. Women have every right to feel as if they have been hard done. However, just because they might be initially more appreciative of their land because they had never been afforded this opportunity before, it doesn't mean that they are somehow better environmental stewards. The essay engages in the very thing it strives to eradicate, stereotypes. A person's personality, ethnic, and general outlook towards the world has very little to do with her gender and very much to do with variables such as societal norms and the belief of their parents and others within their support system.

Blog #4 Environmental Ethics:

My research paper explores what it actually means to have a notion of morality or righteousness. In addition, I ponder what environmentalism should look like in a world that was created by a divine being. By declaring something as “good" we are making a number of unspoken assertions that we often take for granted. I have used logical reasoning to argue for the existence of a creator God who has given us free will, agency, and made humans superior to all other creations. In turn, (I applied the former to environmentalism.)However, this superiority doesn't mean that we have a right to destroy the earth and to harm the people around us. This endowment of a conscience and its moral law is meant to serve as a catalyst by which we are able to perceive the morally righteous path and thus foster a world in which we can live sustainably and harmoniously within

Ben Fultz