Thursday, March 6, 2014
Responsibility
Class this week got me to really think about responsibility and how it relates to care taking. If stewardship isn't the right word for our relationship with the Earth - I think we need another one. Because of our cognitive ability, we became the care takers of the planet, but I think that that needs to be defined and analyzed. If we look back to the bible the earth was given to Adam and Eve to take care of - is that the same responsibility we have with the Earth today? Or did the responsibility stem from the fact that we use the planet for our own benefit, thus we have to take care of it? Or is it solely because of our cognitive ability? If we need to have a relationship with the planet that is beyond it stemming from humans benefiting from the resources it posses, then I think that we need to define that relationship and give it a label/term. I feel like if stewardship doesn't have all the right connotations, we need to find another word that does. Words are really powerful and perhaps if we could label our relationship, people might have a better chance of understanding why they should care for the planet.
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My post is very similar to this issue in that I purpose a new word for "tax" with the knowledge tax issue. I think that you may be right, we need to words because the ones we are using for some reason carry negative connotations. I believe that just like I stated in my post if we used a word like "contribution" or something along those lines then things would change. People love to feel like they are making an impact, and a word like that would go a long way, as you said words are very powerful, so I think this is a great idea.
ReplyDeleteI think we should be equal partners with all others beings on the Earth when it comes to caring for the planet. Almost all other beings don't harm the environment in any way, therefore it seems silly to think they should improve it in any way. We on the other hand do an incredible amount of harm to the planet, so we should be bringing our net effect back to zero. We need to work towards being like the other animals. It's fine if we wish to do things that might cause harm to the Earth, ONLY if we also do things to benefit that have equal worth.
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