3640 Response Assignment #2
Due Wednesday10/11

Instructions: Using the following questions as a guide, develop a response essay for your viewing of What A Way To Go, Blackfish, and Edible City. Your essay should incorporate some of the ideas in the assigned readings for these films. The emphasis on this writing exercise is to continue the themes developed by Leopold and Rachel Carson’s while incorporating environmental philosophiesof deep ecology and animal rights theorists like Singer and Regan.

Make sure you discuss each of the films, but do not simply answer the questions--use them to guide your thinking (i.e., keep them in mind) as you write a response essay. Length should be 4-5 pages double-spaced. You can partner up with one other person to complete this, but see me first if you plan to do this.

What A Way To Go (discuss in the context of Carson and Leopold)

  1. The filmmaker says that we are “born into stories” and that we are not conscious that we are being told them. What are these stories about? (Hint: did you hear the one about…?). Compare to Plato’s description of the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave, Carson’s Silent Spring, and/or Quinn’s discussion of captivity in Ishmael.
  2. The culture of empire is said to believe in the fantasy of no limits, to be obsessed with power and control, and perceive science as creating neutral technologies. Jerry Mander says that neutral technology is a myth and that technologies always have built-in features. Explain this point and how this myth feeds into the fantasy of no limits and the obsession with power and control.
  3. Totalitarian agriculture, which started 10,000 years ago, is said to be fundamentally unsustainable, tied to endless population expansion and hard work, wealth and inequity, and overall poor health. Explain what this type of agriculture is and why it is said to have brought on these disastrous consequences. Compare to what Rachel Carson said about mono-culture in Silent Spring.
  4. We are said to have become self-domesticating animals, caging ourselves and resultantly (as an animal in a zoo) becoming psychotic. As a consolation, we are focused on making our prison comfortable, instead of finding and removing the bars of the cage. Explain this point.

For Black Fish(discuss in the context of Singer and Regan)

  1. Comment on the wild capture of orcas, why the hunters choose the young, and the communication between the captured young and the adult orcas looking on. Why did the interviewed captain of the ship “loose it” when he realized what he was seeing?
  2. Several of the former SeaLand and SeaWorld trainers give testimony about the conditions in which orca whales like Tilikum were kept. Describe the environment and habitat at SeaLand, then compare it to SeaWorld, and finally compare it to the whales’ natural habitat. What was life like for Tilikum? How was he treated by the trainers and other whales? Is his life in an amusement park justifiable on any grounds?
  3. According to neurobiologist Lori Marino, the MRI readings of orca brains demonstrate that “the Orca brain screams out intelligence and awareness”; and these whales have “highly elaborated emotional lives” including a sense of self and social bonding on a scale “much stronger than most mammals including humans.” Should we treat more intelligent animals such as killer whales differently--and are SeaWorld visitors complicit in the abuse of orcas?
  4. Animal rights and liberation authors like Peter Singer and Tom Regan characterize animal use as a system of slavery. Comment on the training and use of orcas using this interpretive framework. Keeping in mind the orca’s level of intelligence and sentience, is human slavery an apt comparison?

For Edible City(discuss in the context of Callicott and/or Naess and Permaculture)

  1. Discuss Peak Oil’s bearing on food production. It is said that we have been eating oil for the last 40 years. Compare the analysis here to those offered in What a Way To Go andFood Matters.
  2. Our government subsidizes monoculture (it is even said to be illegal to diversify your farm if you are on a subsidy) and promotes a system that produces food with very little nutrient density. Meanwhile, it is said that our bodies are chronically deprived of nutrients and that this has created multiple negative consequences for health--including mental health (remember alsoFood Matters). Comment on this from a public policy perspective.
  3. What is depicted in the film is described as farming with nature, as opposed to battling nature. This is also known as permaculture. What is permaculture, and how is it an alternative to what Daniel Quinn characterized as totalitarian agriculture?