I ‘ve always heard that the human race is on the top of the food chain, and in that way have assumed that humans are part of the natural order of things. With the evolution of tools, human beings have learned to shape technology to further their interests to hunt down animals of all shapes and sizes, even whales. While reading the chapter “Stubb kills a whale,” I was actually horrified by the violence depicted in the chapter. The ship stalked this gentle way, and in a ferociouisly gleeful manner tore it apart. Was this right, I wondered, is this how things are supposed to be? But I guess looking around in nature, this kind of predatory action is seen pretty ubiquotously, lions and gazelles, a pack of hyenas, those dog alien things in Avater. So maybe what really scared me about that chapter is to see human beings become something so less than human, something bestial.<\/p>\n
Our society has always had different view points on nature. On one hand, some people feel thatq things would be better off if soceity went closer to nature, and depart from teeming industrialism that pollutes and sets us significantly apart from Nature. On another, the ability to create tools, and whatever path that leads have always been what defines us as homo sapiens<\/em>, as wise. No matter how far technologically we become, it will be pretty far into it before we are considered inhuman. Isn’t anything that springs up from our unique cognitive mind, from our wisdom, a mark of this humanity? It is when we closer we become to nature, disregard tools and the mental impressions of a society that people begin to be called something less than human. To see the brutality of this crew at this chapter is something that disturbs the sheltered Vassar college student in me.<\/p>\n “sent back its reflection into every face, so they all glowed to each other like red men”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I ‘ve always heard that the human race is on the top of the food chain, and in that way have assumed that humans are part of the natural order of things. With the evolution of tools, human beings have learned to shape technology to further their interests to hunt down animals of all shapes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1225,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions\/1225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}