Given humanity’s innate ties to food, as a cultural centerpiece, a custom or family tradition, and as the energy that sustains us, it has been helpful to me to explore an emotional approach to understanding the material covered in this course as a means of supplementing my logical and analytic understanding. Several of the contemplative practices we have conducted throughout the past few weeks have been helpful to this end, if only to a minor degree. The activity our class partook in that involved the slow breakdown of the processes required in eating a single raisin, helped me to picture the processes involved in growing, producing, and transporting the raisin.
This accentuation of the effort required to produce and deliver something so basic, helped me to appreciate the value of the raisin more, which can be extended to food in general. What was more helpful was the exercise that involved slowly picturing different steps in the production of fossil fuels, taking guidance from the pictures shown on the projector. This really helped me to gauge my emotions in regard to the continued use of fossil fuels, and the trajectory the world is taking towards future energies: do we want to fight tooth and nail to squeeze out one last painful half century of fossil fuel energy, or do we want to use our time and energy (no pun intended) to advance a future of renewables, one that doesn’t endanger our species due to resource conflicts and trade disputes?
I really appreciate how you analyzed the emotional analysis you had during the contemplative practice about consuming the raisin. It also made me analyze that contemplative practice a little bit more because I realized it took a long time for the raisin to be processed and shipped and somehow made its way to the classroom. I also went full scientific analysis on the raisin and thought of all the different types of bacteria that was living on the raisin.
When you made the philosophical questions on what society should do in terms of how we should get our energy in the future it made be contemplate a lot of current technological advances we have had recently. With Tesla we have Elon Musk trying to “squeeze” out the slower consumption of fossil fuels by making cars more and more less dependent fossil fuels. The only problem with Tesla is that it has not been streamlined because there are not enough mechanics that specialize in maintaining the vehicle so it costs a pretty penny in order to take care of the car and you can’t actually just drive up to any repair shop and have a mechanic that specializes in electric cars.