Here are the most important places to conserve in America
The United States has joined more than 90 countries in a pledge to combat climate change and species extinction by safeguarding 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030.
These maps show areas where scientists think conservation would offer the greatest benefit to people and nature, based on four key environmental goals.
Draw a picture of yourself doing what Jenny Odell describes as doing Nothing, or “quality attention.” Then add in the “enemies” of good attention attempting to disrupt that attention. Annotate your drawing with the qualities of attention (non-instrumental, etc.).
Nothing / quality attention:
Enemies of noticing / quality attention:
If you kept your laptop / phone in the center of last class, what kind of attention did that give you? Was it different from previous in-class experiences with those devices?
In this first assignment, we are aiming to cultivate a form of “doing nothing,” or a special kind of attention / noticing—similar to how Odell describes her time in the rose garden.
Frijof Capra, a physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist argued that the crises of our time are unified by a crisis in perception. We require a perceptual shift:
The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent. For example, stabilizing world population will be possible only when poverty is reduced worldwide. The extinction of animal and plant species on a massive scale will continue as long as the Southern Hemisphere is burdened by massive debts. Scarcities of resources and environmental degradation combine with rapidly expanding populations to lead to the breakdown of local communities and to the ethnic and tribal violence that has become the main characteristic of the post-cold war era. Ultimately these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our -overpopulated, globally interconnected world.
Capra proposes a shift in perception toward “deep ecology”:
Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena _ and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature.
Deep ecology questions “the very foundations of our modern, scientific, industrial, growth-oriented, materialistic worldview and way of life.” Capra summarizes the crisis of perception as the following, an imbalance in thinking and values towards the “self assertive” over the “integrative” (in other words, self assertion does not need to be eliminated, but put in balance):
One way this crisis in perception manifests is in everyday life, and how we relate to the world around us. To begin, you are nothing without the place you live. You require food, water, protection, etc., making you fully interdependent with the systems and infrastructures that deliver this to you. At the base of these infrastructures are the non-human ecologies that make a place like Austin livable.
At it’s foundation, your human body is grounded in time, place, and soil—interconnected and interdependent with all organisms.
If everyday life, grounded in time and space, is the underlying matrix of human experience, care and mantenience of our physical place are the everyday practices of countering the extraction at the heart of current crises. The first step is to listen to what’s there.