Article Summary

What Other Americans Can and Cannot Learn from Native American Environmental Ethics

            This article introduces the idea that Americans are dealing with a moral crisis related to spirituality and the environment. It then discusses the idea of looking back at the ways of the Native Americans in order to solve the crisis. There is a good chance that a lot could be taken away from studying Native spirituality, morals and ways of life. These studies could then be easily applied to and improve Americas’ current culture. The article tells two sides to the argument. The first side is that we can in fact learn from the natives, but the second side is that the natives’ culture can’t easily be applied to ours. Natives may not have intentionally been environmentalists and in some cases they may have been harmful to the environment just as Americans are today. The article discuses these opposing views in order to show that no matter how much we criticize, there are still many things we as Americans can learn from the Natives.

            This article is relevant to my paper because it helped me define my focus. I want to discuss what can be learned from Native Americans to improve our environmental crisis today. After reading this article I decided that I want to take the same approach of telling the two sides of the issue in order to create a compromise or prove my side more worthy. 

Food Inc. Rogerian Argument

The film Food Inc. is very well made and informative. It tells about very important issues in the food industry and exposes people that have caused the problem in the industry. Drama and emotions play a big role in the film, but the context of the terrible thins the food industry is doing, the drama is appropriate. The film is very effective in making people want to take action, which is important. One thing that could have been better though was if Food Inc. described exactly how consumers can make a difference. It is hard for some under privileged families to shop well even if they wanted to so what can they do?

Food Inc. is a very bias film that tells the sob story of one side of an unimportant issue. The film is just trying to scare consumers into believing that the food industry is a terrible and corrupt thing. Really though, the consumers are the problem because the companies just try to produce a lot of what is needed in the easiest way possible. Food Inc. also tries to use sob stories, but in reality it is a very small fraction of people who are affected with diseases such as e coli, so it is really nothing to worry about. All this film is good for is getting people worked up and worried about issues that aren't very important and that will be taken care of by the companies. Also if there are people struggling to get what they need or want that is there own fault and if they live right they will be able to work themselves up in the world.

Food Inc. is bias and skewed towards one perspective, but it is informative about that perspective. Both sides are important so it would be better if they were shown, but what is show is better than nothing. Unfortunately the film is over dramatic, which makes people want to take action, but their actions may be too strong. It is important to take action in order to create change, but Food Inc. works people up an unnecessary amount. The viewers may just become agitated and stressed over the issues which only hurts them more. 

The Truth About What You Eat

If anyone wants the outright ugly truth about something very important to their life then watch the Documentary Food Inc. If I had the choice I may not go on eating after watching this film. This is the second time I have seen Food Inc. and both times it has made me immensely grateful that I was raised as and remain to this day a vegetarian. There are two main reasons for my choice of being a  vegetarian: the first is that I can't even imagine the idea of eating a dead animal and the second is that the meat production industry disturbs and terrifies me. This second issue is exactly what Food Inc. discusses and exposes in detail, but as disturbing as it was, I already knew about the terrors of the meat industry, so it was not very shocking. For me, the most shocking truth told in the film was about other foods such as corn and soy beans.

As a vegetarian, soy is a much bigger part of my diet and I have always seen it as a healthy and reasonable protein source. Food Inc. exposes though, that there is a type of genetically modifies soy bean that isn't effected by round up and that this is now almost the only soy bean available. One company owns all of the seeds for this soy bean and no farmer is aloud to keep their own seeds. I find it completely insane that one company can own all of the rights to such a large production. It is also the same with meat, there are just about four leading companies that control it all. 

As terrifying as this all is though, there are things that can be done and the film gives the viewer hope. The truth that most consumers don't understand is that they have all the control over what companies produce. Each purchase a person makes in the store is a vote for that product and that leaves many choices and opportunity for change. We can blame the corporations all we want, but no change will come unless each person puts in some effort. 

Native Americans and the Environment

 

Before the Europeans came to North America, the natives lived synonymously with the environment. They hunted, fished and grew crops, but only in amounts that were sustainable and necessary. The natives lived with nature, instead of trampling it. When the white man came ashore though, Indian agriculture was dramatically changed. As the Europeans bean to take over more and more land, they pushed away the ideas of agriculture that the Indians had to teach and instead, implemented their own. Not adopting the Natives' ways though, wasn't enough for the whites, they instead had to force their ways upon the Natives. The thoughts of the European's were that the only good kind of Indian, was one that was assimilated into European culture. This belief was so strong, that many whites thought that there was no point in a Native being alive if it didn't follow the European ways.

Cultural ideas such as language, schooling, and agriculture were forces on the Natives. After being relocated to specific reservations, the Indians were forced to cut out their old ways of hunting and fishing, and to implement farms. The Europeans were not pleased though, when they saw that the Indians were making a good profit off of their farms. Some farms were then cut into sections or taken over by the white men in order to cut off the Indians' profit.

We now know today, as we experience the effects of global warming, that the European forms of agriculture are not in any way sustainable or sensible.  It would have benefited the United States significantly more if the Europeans had listened to and observed the ways that the natives lived with the land.The Europeans could have leaned a lot from the Indians and we still could use their help in getting out of our current environmental crisis. This help that they could offer us though, is not what most people see. Instead, we continue to seclude the Indians to small unwanted pieces of land and then harm them with our terrible ways of polluting the earth. We should take a lesson from the Natives, instead of hurting them and ourselves more.


Below is a video of an old commercial that shows an Indian crying over what the white man has done to the environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM

Letter to the President

Dear President Obama,

            I am a huge supporter of yours and I think that you have accomplished a lot in your first four years in office. I agree with almost all of the policies that you have put into place and the ideas you have for America. There is a lot more that I would like to learn though, about the specifics of your ideas. It is important that information is credible though. I recently watched the documentary Inside Job and learned some things that surprised me.

            When talking about your policies, the documentary says that in your campaign, you were very confident about economic reform. “Obama Pointed to Wall street greed and regulatory failures as examples of the need for change in America.” To me, this was very correct, because you have done a lot for the economy sense you have been in office. Next though, the film talked about what you did once you were in office and it didn’t sound good or right. According to the film, many of the people you appointed to office, had been very involved in the banks and Wall Street during the crash. For example, you appointed Timothy Geithner as treasury director. Geithner though, had been president of the New York Federal Reserve during the crisis and a key player in the decision to pay Goldman Sax 100 cents on the dollar for bets against mortgages.

            I trust the film on the fact that you appointed him, but I don’t trust the film in that they didn’t give a reason why you chose him. There must be a good reason behind the appointing of anyone. I would be very interested to learn some of the specific reasons behind why you appointed who you did. A decision may look bad from the outside, but can actually be good for hidden reasons. I want to know what those hidden reasons were.

Sincerely,

Eowyn Lucas

Inside Job

Informative Entertainment

To me, there is a huge difference between bias and giving an opinion supported by studies and fact.

This was the second time I watched the documentary Inside Job and the facts were still shocking. The film was made in a way to entertain so that the message being sent to the audience is very powerful. Most people would claim that a film like Inside Job is extremely bias, but the way I see it is a well supported overview of an important issue. The documentary goes into detail on the series of events that caused the recent world recession. The events are explained in ways that are  attractive to the viewer and are made easy to understand. The film uses compelling imagery, stimulating music, interviews with many different people and informative charts and graphs.All of these techniques combined help portray the intended message in a well thought out organized way and make this a very good documentary.

Of course there are always going to be people opposed to what a documentary has to say, and people people who will dispute anything said in the film. For me, if these people made a film, I know I would disagrees with everything that they had to say. There isn't one specific right or wrong, but this film intended to give a specific massage and it did an incredible job of it. Below is a link to an article that is against the views in Inside Job.

http://www.goldenstateliberty.com/2011/03/gsl-movie-review-inside-job.html

I was also interested to see what the director of the film had to say about what he had created. In an interview, he told exactly what the film was about."The film is about the systemic corruption of United States by the financial services industry." As I said before, if this is what the film is about, then defining this and backing it up with support is not bias. Below is a link to the interview in which I found the above quote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS0hj4kiqsA

Attention Span

The film Koyaanisquatsi is made up of intriguing images and a compelling soundtrack. It is full of life and death, creation and destruction and beauty and horror. The audience is first shown the beauty and wonder of nature and then knocked down with images of destruction and of today's polluted environment. To me the images were moving and powerful, but the music tampered with and controlled the film. The emphasis in the music set the only emphasis for the film therefor creating very strong bias. Also for most of the people that watch this film, the music is probably the driving force and the main component that keeps there minds engaged and their eyes on the screen.

The soundtrack of this film was composed by a very remarkable musician, Philip glass. One of his works is shown in the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbwn6iVryQ&feature=player_detailpage

 For me, although I found the music beautiful, it became repetitive and i was easily distracted from the films grip. When one song continues to play for an extended period of time, no matter how much i like the song, it will start to bother me and grind on my nerves. There is a point I can reach with music where it has no beauty at all, but is only noise and multiple times the music in this film sounded only like noise to me.While watching Koyaanisquatsi I continually found myself wanting to turn the volume off and watch the film without it. The more a song built up and the longer it lasted, the more annoyed I became. I would have much rather watched this as a silent film.