{"id":17,"date":"2017-05-22T23:23:23","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T23:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/?p=17"},"modified":"2017-05-24T04:58:08","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T04:58:08","slug":"nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/japan\/nature\/","title":{"rendered":"“Nature”"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Nature”\u00a0<\/strong>We kicked off discussion today by examining\u00a0a\u00a0plastic Godzilla toy. We were asked, are we looking at\u00a0nature? Some of us argued that it is nature because the creature arose from nature. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, so it has to be from nature regardless of whether we are talking about the toy or\u00a0Godzilla itself.\u00a0Conversely, others in the group argued that it was not nature because humans interfered. Humans are the ones synthesizing plastics from oil and splitting atoms, and is that part of\u00a0nature?<\/p>\n

After this fascinating introduction, Professor\u00a0Matthew Klingle in the environmental studies department led our group discussion on\u00a0the following readings:<\/p>\n

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  1. The Problem with Purity<\/em> by Richard White<\/li>\n
  2. History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value\u00a0<\/em>by Julia Adeney Thomas<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Objective categories are pretty much impossible.\u00a0<\/strong>White\u00a0argued that\u00a0adhesion to purity is a problem. But why? When we start to define what is “pure” and what is not, we\u00a0forget the\u00a0social context that these definitions carry. For example, we talked about the problematic view that\u00a0gender is biologically determined. The societal norm is that the XX chromosome combination will result in a male and XY chromosome combination will result in a female, and those who do not fall into either of those categories are “unnatural.” But if it is genetically possible, i.e. through nature,\u00a0for people not to fall into those categories,\u00a0is that really against nature? This reminded me of Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was put under scrutiny over her gender. And also Dutee Chand (click here<\/a>\u00a0for more information–the person who wrote that gave a talk in a class I took two years ago), the teenage Indian runner who was banned from competition for having too much testosterone. It is not like she was taking steroids; that is\u00a0what her body produces. There was just some policy put in place to define what it means to be a woman (under the notion that having more testosterone means better athletic performance, which is actually not that well-correlated.*) The\u00a0people who make these policies\u00a0use\u00a0biology to\u00a0sound objective but really it is laced with social implications.<\/p>\n

    Think about\u00a0scale and value.\u00a0<\/strong>Using Thomas’s paper, we focused on agency, structure, and power.<\/p>\n