Eco-Ethics

    I've found the ideas that "Disability is part of the reality of living in a body - any body." and similar with a temporal dimension that 'everyone becomes disabled' or experiences varying degrees of disability to be the most helpful for understanding care and redefining disability not as lack but as a more artistic and ingenious way of engaging with the world and shared spaces that are designed only for normative bodies. Put on slightly crude but connective terms, if we age for long enough we'll more-than-likely experience physical and mental changes highly analogical to experiences different groups of disabled people have experienced, and that may be helpful for rethinking stigmas of care tied to aging, or that one has to "earn care" through certain metrics of pain and pleasure highly tied to labor-ability. Leaving room for pain and mourning is potent and I've definitely encountered in my own life, where my grandpa has talked about already ...

          Both of the non-textbook readings touched on Spinoza briefly while also having some implicit engagement with his thought, as Hill mentions "if one believes that a divine force is immanent in all nature, then too one might have reason to care for more than sentient things." which summarizes the Spinozist maxim of God or Nature pretty well and has certainly affected my "religious" and ecological outlook. (p.100) Spinoza says simply yet confoundingly that the substance (the immanent material) of all things is God or Nature. This substance gets extended into modes or finite things, which express attributes of God or Nature, somewhat like an ecological niche, as the body of Gods attributes must strive toward survival or conatus, a collective and particular survival closer to care than Darwinian competition, for each thing to "persist in its own being" in a perhaps nonhumanist understanding of necessity contra to Kant and Aristotle.      ...

           When thinking about my relationship to ecology and the environment, since I'm from Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Land Rush always comes to mind, especially since my classmates and I "reenacted" it in 3rd grade, a peculiar form of naturalized eco-domineering, colonial propaganda played out as a fun day where we all go on a run and set up little picnic spots. Descriptions of this spectacular event of the frontier seem to foreshadow the underbelly of manipulation, broken-treaties, & unrestrained violence against native peoples and the environment that permeate and often give basis to structures of colonial domination like the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Parks Service (less now than its origin), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Many of what would become the largest cities were already plotted out and marked before the signal to move on the "empty" land was even given, and the symbols of the rugged Cowboy and the cheating Sooner still embody t...