Final Reading Place Blog :(

Individual Portion

Our group pondered the expanse at which humans and nature interact. In the everyday world, most people interact with nature on such a minimal conscious scale that it is hardly worth studying.  When looking at a looser definition of “interaction,” it can be said that humans cannot go more than a few hours without interacting in some form with nature.  This can take all forms of interaction.  Think about it with your own life: how often does the weather dictate your decision to do something or affect you in some way? How often do you look out the window and see the birds flying in the sky or squirrels scampering from branch to branch? In this sense, humans interact with nature so frequently it’s hard to describe a time when we aren’t somehow affected by nature. In the more conventional sense, humans interact with nature on a very small scale, especially compared to the characters we have read about in class like Christopher McCandless or the Feral Child. Realistically, humans only come into contact with true and untouched nature every once in a blue moon.  Not counting climbing the occasional tree, when was the last time you took the time to completely separate yourself from technology or civilization and not constantly wish you just had WiFi or a TV?

As per contributing for our group’s project, I was the one who went outside for over two hours in freezing wind and rain (can you tell I’m a little bitter??) and took all of the pictures that related to the passages our group picked out from our four sources (The Land Ethic, Where I Live and What I Lived For, Feral, Into the Wild) which Chloe then put into the PowerPoint. I also bought Feral and annotated scenes from it that we found most powerful as well as annotating a section of The Land Ethic before realizing we only needed one per group and Chloe had done one too.

I think this project was a great idea in theory, but it also lacked structure, which made it extremely difficult to get started and cement an idea with the group.  I feel like making it a group project was a good way to end the year and made the coordination of all of the project pieces an obstacle that every group had to overcome. Battling through adversity is a great way to test a group’s strengths and see how much effort they were willing to put in to get a good grade.

For my individual texts, I used songs that depict man’s relation to nature and the artists’ views on them. The first song I chose was “Songs for a Dying Planet” by Joe Walsh, which is a statement about how politicians are lying to the public and that humans are killing everything that lives for their own good: “We're killing everything that's alive, and anyone who tries to deny it wears a tie and gets paid to lie.” The second song I found is called “The Last Great American Whale” by the legend Lou Reed, which talks about how Americans only care for artificial beauty, and that the technology and guns humans have invented take away Native culture and are destroying Native lands and ideals.

"Songs For A Dying Planet"—Joe Walsh

Is anyone out there?
Does anybody listen or care anymore?
We are living on a dying planet,
We're killing everything that's alive,
And anyone who tries to deny it
Wears a tie

And gets paid to lie
So I wrote these songs for a dying planet,
I'm sorry but I'm telling the truth,
And for everybody trying to save it
These songs are for you, too.
Is anyone out there?

"Last Great American Whale"—Lou Reed

They say he didn't have an enemy
His was a greatness to behold
He was the last surviving progeny
The last one on this side of the world

He measured a half mile from tip to tail
Silver and black with powerful fins
They say he could split a mountain in two
That's how we got the Grand Canyon

Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale

Some say they saw him at the Great Lakes
Some say they saw him off of Florida
My mother said she saw him in Chinatown
But you can't always trust your mother

Off the Carolinas the sun shines brightly in the day
The lighthouse glows ghostly there at night
The chief of a local tribe had killed a racist mayor's son
And he'd been on death row since 1958

The mayor's kid was a rowdy pig
Spit on Indians and lots worse
The old chief buried a hatchet in his head
Life compared to death for him seemed worse

The tribal brothers gathered in the lighthouse to sing
And tried to conjure up a storm or rain
The harbor parted, the great whale sprang full up
And caused a huge tidal wave

The wave crushed the jail and freed the chief
The tribe let out a roar
The whites were drowned, the browns and reds set free
But sadly one thing more

Some local yokel member of the NRA
Kept a bazooka in his living room
And thinking he had the chief in his sights
Blew the whale's brains out with a lead harpoon

Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale

Well Americans don't care for much of anything
Land and water the least
And animal life is low on the totem pole
With human life not worth more than infected yeast

Americans don't care too much for beauty
They'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
They'll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
And complain if they can't swim

They say things are done for the majority
Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear
It's like what my painter friend Donald said to me,
"Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done"