or...
In this video, Kevin Pereira, who is one of the host of "Attack of The Show,"
talks about the experience he had going to visit the Gulf of Mexico which is one of the areas affected by the huge BP oil spill. He decides to go visit the area because he knows that there are many thing you could hear from the media but you will never get the entire truth as if you on your own physically went and visit the affected area. As he was there he went on a boat ride and noticed all the people that were actually working there putting up barriers, cleaning the beaches, and getting affected animals and taking them to shelters to get them cleaned. He noticed that the barriers were not doing a very good job stoping and collecting the oil and that there were hundreds of animals that were still getting filled with oil and started to wonder if they were only putting up the barriers to trick people into thinking they were actually helping. In the video he says that if thats how the animals outside of the water look, how would the animals in the water look and be affected? They are probably dead. Not even us, humans, would be able to live being completely filled with oil, inside and out. He also went to shelter and saw how long it took to clean the affected animals and talked to people about them getting paid for what they are doing and how it has affected the whole Gulf Coast. He also talks to a BP rep who explains to Kevin everything BP is doing to stop the oil spill and what they are doing to help all the people that live there and are being affected by the
situation. In the paper, "The Trouble with Wilderness," by Cronon, Cronon talks about the different point of view that people have about the wilderness and what to do with it. One of the point of views he talks about is the modernist point of view. Modernist believe that we
should be able to use our resources but believe in conservation. "When Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem." (P. 8-9, Cronon) And thats exactly what we are doing now. BP is one of the many oil drilling companies around the world and they are using their freedom of using the earths resources to supply to us. But are they using them in the right way? There are thousands of oil drilling platforms around the world and ever day there is some type of oil spill. We do not hear about all of them because most are always relatively small but, as its shown in the video, oil spills are capable of causing mass destruction and who know what the after effect of this disaster will be in a couple of years. Even though it is the spilt oil that has caused many animals to die and for there to be many other destructions, i believe that this was not a natural disaster. This was caused by humans trying to make as much money as possible. Is this the right way to use its instrumental value? Should we allow these kind of "accidents" to keep happening? Is worth it to keep drilling for oil? No one really knows the answers to those questions but how far are we going to go? At this rate it seems that we will go into every wilderness and use it as we please, and when we run out then we will finally see and understand how important it really was to us. People seem to only care about the wilderness that looks good, because thats were they would chose to spend their money to go to. If some wilderness, has dried trees, nasty swamps, many bugs and many other ugly things, people will not want to go there and wont care if its tore down or not. "the wilderness as a landscape where the supernaturallay just beneath the surface was expressed in the doctrine of the sublime, a word whose modern usage has been so watered down by commercial hype and tourist advertising that it retainsonly a dim echo of its former power." (P.10, Cronon) I think that since our oceans are hug and they seem to never run out, we don't really care about what happens there unless it starts affecting us, like the BP oil spill. If the spill would have been small, as many other spills there are all the time, and would have never reached the shores than people would not care about what is happening out there and the media would not even bother to pay attention to it. What effect will this huge "accident" have on or eco systems and "mother" nature? No one really know but, everyone know that it is definitely not good and that we are going to have massive after effects in years to come. We need to do more to try to prevent accidents like these to never happen again and to take care of our "mother" nature, because this is where we live and the reason we are alive.
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written by: Alejandro Torres
Hey Alex,
ReplyDeleteLooking over your post, I think you did a good job formatting it like a blog: you have an embedded video, two pictures, and hyperlinks. Something else you can work on is breaking down your paragraphs more and blockquoting.
In regards to content, you should be focusing more on an analysis of the media piece (in this case, the video or pictures). Most of the post is summary, not analysis of the media piece. Also, you should go into more depth with some of the vocabulary.
I was mot interested in your discussion about beauty and aesthetics. How much does the fact of how "ugly" the oil spill look affect how we evaluate it? What about who is affected? For instance, why do we barely hear anything about the dozens of oils spills in Nigeria every year? How has oil clean up make people feel better? What is the ultimate cause/indirect driver of destruction? Was this merely a fluke, or is event endemic to a certain worldview, institution, etc? What roles does the sublime play? What about instrumental vs intrinsic values as discussed in these pieces--which is more emphasized?