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TUESDAY, JUNE 3 WISDOM Today is our chance to sum up what we have been doing all quarter, in terms of what it means. We will begin with the class evaluations, and then at around 2:00, begin the discussion. I hope that today we can put all our specific and quantitative material into some kind of ethical perspective. In order to do this, I want you to read two chapters: Jeffrey Ellis's On the Search for a Root Cause, which talks about the relationships among various advocates of single-cause explanations for our current environmental predicament, including some that you have read early in the quarter. Nancy Turner's Looking After the Lands and Waters gives you a perspective on our own local environment from people who lived here a long time and didn't manage to wreck things. For our discussion, I would like to consider the relationship between native knowledge, kinship with the earth, and scientific knowledge, the attempt to explain. How do they fit or not fit with each other, and can we combine them to come up with something approaching wisdom about our own situation in the next few decades? |