As a result of the recent global health crisis, our project has been unfortunately put on hold until further notice and now I am assigned to reflect on the book Climate: A New Story and how this book pertains to the class and more importantly the impact it has on the world. The first chapter introduces many ideals and essentially forms the basis of what the rest of the book will be about. He makes a clear emphasis for dealing with this environmental crisis through balance and that going too extreme in either direction can actually make the problem worse. The chapter is broken up into three sections where the first section states concepts like the Story of Separation, interbeing, and the concept of they. The story of separation was basically stating that there is the self and the other. The self will always try to dominate the other because this means a better quality of life for the self and the quality of life for the other does not matter because it does not impact the self. This correlates with the idea that man feels the need to dominate over nature because this will give man a better quality of life with no regard for the other which in this case is nature. Eisenstein says that we need to get rid of this idea and adopt the notion that the other matters too so getting along helps everyone out fixing the environmental dilemma. Interbeing is just the concept that we are all one and that what one does affect the other so we need to think about how our actions affect the environment. The notion of "they" was the one that affected me the most because I never heard about this term before in this concept. In summation it is used to to justify other people actions because they feel it is necessary to do what they are doing and to blame another group of "theys" for making them do that.
Eisenstein to me seems like a breath of fresh air. Introducing "they" is something that I never hear from environmentalists. To me it always seems that one side goes out of their way to vilify the other side which I always thought was so counter productive. He gives an example of taking into consideration the needs of the fracking executive highlighting the fact that they are human too and are just trying to make a living. Him also suggesting that we should give up fighting is not something that I see too often from environmentalists. I think that Eisenstein should be applauded for saying this because I also agree that fighting will solve nothing and might make things worse. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the book has to say on the environmental situation we are dealing with.
