Last Post

As next week is finals, I'm guessing this will be my last post of the course (but I think I may keep it going after the class is done).

As this course concludes, this post will be a summation of what I learned on top of the final projects.

During this course we delved into dozens of fields, which led me to understand that the three topics that provide the name of this course-- culture, religion, and the environment, make up the core of what our world is. This reminded me of the philosophy taught by the Polynesian Voyaging Society-- that the earth is a boat on which we are all traveling, and can only carry a limited amount of resources for us to share and understand. I was constantly reminded during this course of the image of "the blue marble"; the first time humans had a chance to look back at each other. This photo was the most selling photo of all time (a fact I recently found out from Cash Cab), and this tells me of the interesting we have in ourselves. If we can spur on this interest in this blue marble that we are all right now, we might find a way to try to protect it.

Culture, Religion, and the Environment are the veins that run through the human population. There is no one on the planet who is void of any of them or can try to remove them. They have a symbiotic relationship, and if any one of them is hurt, the other feels its pain. We can see this all over the world as the destruction of environments harms cultures, as changes in the human culture harms the environment, and as religious fervor harms all three. While there has probably never been a perfect relationship between the three, it is a perfect relationship we should strive for.

Panda Diplomacy and Other presentations

This week we had our first set of final presentations. I decided to do my presentation on "Panda Diplomacy" which is the gifting of the of Pandas by China for the purpose of heightening foreign relations. I thought that this would be a good topic for this course as it is an example of how a nationally and culturally important icon (the Panda) plays a role in conservation. Specifically the national conservation efforts through the creation of over 60 reserves meant just for Pandas. While I didn't include it in my presentation, I wanted to talk about how other animals, such as tigers, don't receive as much special attention by the Chinese government even though they are highly endangered. I also wanted to talk about the struggle between the environment and religion, as traditional medicines, which can involve the body parts of endangered animals leading to poaching, is still a multi-billion dollar industry.

Some of the other presentations I especially enjoyed were the presentation on solar panels and the presentation Nicole did on the oranges.

The solar panel presentation was interesting to me because he talked about how many people have had an aversion to solar panels not just because of their cost, but also for aesthetic reasons. To solve this problem, some companies have been cutting solar panels into solar panel art. The powerpoint included very interesting examples of this type of art.

Nicole did a short presentation of an experiment which she explained a few weeks ago. She cut an orange and passed it out to three different people with the instructions that one was to be yelled at and given negative energy, one was supposed to be told loving words and given positive energy, and one was supposed to be a control. I was really looking forward to seeing the results, but sadly, the person who took home the negative orange forgot to bring it to class, and only had a cell phone picture. While it seemed like the positive orange did a little better than the control, I would like to have seen the negative orange.