This week’s discussions of objects of concern presented several, difficult, multifaceted problems. Everyone could find something of interest to relate to and talk about resulting in some interesting conversations. We began this week with Carbon Dioxide, and one idea that stuck out for me was the use of green rhetoric. Deliberately calling CO2 a type of pollution completely changed the way people thought about and treated the greenhouse gas. This is interesting because the argument can be made that we need CO2 in our atmosphere, so therefore it cannot be a pollutant. This gets down to the specifics of what really constitutes pollution, but this doesn’t seem to matter as much as the negative connotation that people associate with pollution. Using green rhetoric was very successful in changing the way people thought about CO2, so while its hard to change definitions, simply using different words can help create change. I wonder if this could same idea could be applied to other problems that are often treated as nonissues.
One idea that stood out to be in our discussion of trees was the notion of tree rights and what that would look like. While seeming initially outlandish seeming, we need the logging industry to use trees for our benefit, but I thought that rights might be different that protecting all trees. The book also mentioned that a similar set of rights could be used by streams and other habitats. This was easier to understand; streams could have the right to not be polluted, which would prevent the killing of plants, animals, and insects in the stream. While this might not translate directly to trees, there could be a set of ecosystem rights, including forest rights, lake rights, desert rights, and so on. What these might look like could be the right to maintain the biodiversity of an ecosystem, but this also gets quite complicated for what constitutes maintaining biodiversity and how humans fit into this system. There is no easy solution for flora rights.
Something I really liked in our discussion of wolves was their social construction. I assumed going into the chapter that they would talk about how wolves are perceived as synonymous with wilderness, which they did, but then they also talked about how wolves used to be seen as an evil hunter of sorts, appealing to a masculine ideal of man taming the wild. It makes sense that wolves could be seen as such, especially with the portrayal of wolves in fairytales like Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. However it is still off putting when I’ve always seen wolves as expressing majesty, solitude, and the untamed wild. It is interesting to see how far social constructions have changed over time, and I would want to know more about how this happened and how other social constructions have evolved with time.