Economics and Environmentalism Tia Stajkowski Yesterday in class, one of the presentations posed an interesting question that I have been thinking about more since then. I don't remember the question word for word, but it was essentially asking what would happen if we created a closed loop economy and what the reactions of society would be. My first thought was that it would obviously be great for the environment. Regenerating systems are cyclic by nature, so there would be no need to extract anything else from the earth, at least not nearly as much. My second thought is that this is also the reason why nothing has been done to close the loop. The national GDP (an incredibly arbitrary method to measure economic growth in my opinion) is held in higher regard than pretty much anything else: the environment, human rights, social justice concerns, etc. Whatever it takes to create a rising GDP, we will do it no matter the cost. Unfortunately, a closed loop economy goes directly against ...
The Ritual of Music Tia Stajkowski The other day we were talking about the connection between nature and music and how often people don't associate them with each other. I really enjoyed the conversation we had, but I had an afterthought that we did not discuss in class. All of these different forms of art such as music, dance, and drawing somehow arise in every human culture that has ever existed. Now all of these art forms may look or sound very different from each other, but for some reason, it seems like a natural human phenomenon to create art as a means of communication and/or tradition. It makes me wonder if this urge for these artistic rituals are human instincts, and it's not like humans would be the only species to have instincts like these. For example, birds communicate with each other through a series of songlike phrases, and listening to them, especially now in the springtime, is undoubtedly a musical experience. There are also certain species of birds that do cou...