Author: Warren Tang

I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.

The Earth, its environment and resources

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Recently I had to evaluate a writing textbook for my Teaching Writing class. It was a textbook for teaching English writing to second language students for academic purposes. So the articles were all social related.

The chapter I chose to examine was called Our Earth, Our Resources, Our Environment., a chapter obviously about sustainability issues. Yet the title struck me as problematic. Not that the Earth the resources and the environment are unimportant words (they are undoubtedly “trend words” for today) but it was how they were determined. The other three words or to be exact the other word repeated three times – our – was just begging for criticism.

Of the three possessive cases that occurred in this short “punchy” title resources stood out for me. What are resources and who owns them? These are questions I would like to answer here. The Oxford English Minidictionary on my desk defines resource as “a supply of an asset to be used when needed”. A fair and straightforward definition. But what about the assumptions of the word. The use of the words supply and asset are interesting here because they are not words usually associated with the environment, especially the protection of it.

And what about the verb form? It is in the passive. Passive sentences have a feature which make it a favourite of some writers because of what it can hide or ignore – the doer. To complete the definition it omits the doer partly because it is assumed and partly because it wants to obscure its negative impact. Let me put it another way: I do not know of too many animals that see the trees and mountains as “supply”, “asset” or “resource”. These are wholly human terms.

Habitat may be a better word to describe the areas we term resource. But that too has its problems. It is always “the dwarf mongooses’ habitat” or simply “their habitat”. usually it is not an area human inhabit but always a step removed from, or to look at from the outside. In other words, it is the The Other world or place and not ours.

About five minutes drive from my home is a quarry. I literally drive through it almost everyday to get to and from college. Every time I do so I shudder. Slowly what once was a mountain, a forest and habitat for animals is now bare yellow sandy rock. The huge bulldozers power shovels and dump trucks that sit by the roadside has gradually been transported away to some factory somewhere for use, for human consumption. The mountain face that once dominated my peripheral vision as I drive now opens up to a dusty sky. How sad. I wonder if the workers don’t feel any loss by this. I do. But I guess it represents food on the table for them.

Last year I wrote a very short piece about Proudon’s famous statement “property is theft”. In this piece I deconstructed the term property and turned it on to itself, saying we are really stealing from ourselves. I still feel the same way now but I must qualify it. Not that I am an anarchist or believe in anarchy (not in the popular meaning of the word anyway), rather the things in the environment do not belong solely to us, the human species.

Animals, I feel, have the right to the use and protect their home and the place which feeds them. This may be a mountain or a forest, the very place we call a resource, our resource. Yet they literally do not have representation. Animal rights groups may attempt to speak for them but it may seem – to the other on the other side of the fence – futile and naive to try to protect them.

It reminds me of the scene in Seven Years in Tibet where the monks were shown spending an entire week removing all the worms they could find from a plot of land being prepared for a new building. This was so they do not harm life or kill. Jainism, another religion that developed in India practices similarly.

And it is this fundamental respect for life – that is lacking in Western thinking, economy, politics, philosophy, etc – that I would like to point out.

When I was in 21 I became a monk. In preparation for my move I sold everything I had. At first the lack of possession was rather unsettling but I slowly felt liberated by the loss of the burden toward my things. I do not know when but I had come to understand why Buddha taught this way of living and what it means to be living as a monk.

Once I had renounced possessions once I felt I did not need to have more. Nor do I feel nowadays the sense of loss when something is taken or given away. I now question whether it is really necessary for me to have something before I buy or receive it. And I look at the mountains not as something for me to enjoy but that the joy given to me is by its grace and its non-possession of me.

Spinsters and Hinayana Buddhism

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Right now I am readng Paul Baker’s excellent book Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. A corpus or corpora are linguists’ tool to uncover hidden agendas within language use. I was particularly interested in the chapter about collocation where Baker focused on the use in English of the words bachelor and spinster. But it wasn’t so much how these words are used but rather who uses these terms that caught my attention.

Spinster is almost always used by someone else who is usually not a “spinster” to refer to someone who is. An unmarried person would almost never use this term to refer to herself. The same could be said of bachelor but it has a more positive meaning. Depending on factors like age and social status being referred to as a bachelor does not necessarily have a negative connotation. But the term spinster invariably is negative.

So you may be wondering what does Hinayana Buddhism has to do with the term spinster? Bare with me for a moment. My introduction into Buddhism was through Zen. I actually became a lay monk. Zen has some very good aspects about it. But like most religions or sects it constructs itself to be the norm. It was years later before I would take a step back and look at Zen from the “outside”.

When one looks at Buddhist history one will definitely come across the terms Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana literally is the “lesser vehicle” and Mahayana is the “greater vehicle”. The type of Buddhism practiced in Japan comes under the umbrella term of Mahayana. Historically it is a kind of Buddhism developed later. As the term suggests it is “superior” to the Hinayana.

But this is really strange. Why would anyone – the Hinayana – want to make derogatory their own practice. This is fact is not the case. The Hinayana Buddhists never use the term to refer to themselves. They usually use the term Theravada. Theravada Buddhism is the only surviving Buddhism of the early form. They pride themselves in being the closest to the original teaching of the Buddha (and whether this is a necessarily a good thing or not is another debate). So like spinster it is a term used to refer to The Other. This of course has a lot to do with power play and legitimation of one’s own discourse. The term Mahayana really has no meaning other than in contrast to its binary – Hinayana.

I have had dialogues with Zen Buddhists who think these terms are not an issue. But I believe they are and they need to be looked at in order to understand what their own beliefs are because to not question one’s position is to be blinded by it. I would hate to think what would a spinster Hinayana Buddhist would think of all this?

Postmodernism2

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In my last post about Postmodernism I mentioned that it is not dead but very much alive. And in academia if you are trained to pick it up you will. So let me give you just a few examples from my first week back in university.

In my Teaching Writing class we started reading the first chapter of Second Language Writing by Ken Hyland. This is what Mr Hyland had to say:

So, while [English Language Teaching is] often treated as historically evolving movements (e.g., Raimes 1991), it would be wrong to see each theory growing out of and replacing the last. They are more accurately seen as as complementary and overlapping perspectives, representing potentially compatible means of understanding the complex reality of writing.

The “next replacing the last” is a dead give away of Modernist ideology. And anytime one thinks and believes that everything is complementary one is leaning towards Postmodernist ideas. Here is another example from a textbook on the history of English Language Teaching:

If we examine each of the [three language teaching] principles in turn, we can see how they generated unexpected consequences, some of which turned out to be more controversial than they seemed at first sight.

Here we see how wrong someone can be eventhough he or she was sure of their methodology. Actually this is somewhat like the statement in the first example where they believe it replaces what has come previously. This kind of thinking was typical of the early twentieth century. It is a firm believe – wrongly – in the idea of progress.

But even life is not a continual march toward some pinnicle, a straight line to the top. If life was that simple then we would be there by now. Or as the author John Barth put it: like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back. Life is not a straight line. Even if it is windy it is not always mean we are getting closer. We must travel away from it sometimes to get close to it.

So Postmodernism may sound complicated in the end it really is not dissimiliar to “good ol’ fashion commonsense”. But don’t let a Postmodernist hear you say that. You would be accused of being Modernist.

Human/Nature

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I have just started a course on the understanding of the natural environment. In it we are to given firsthand experience in observing what nature not just in the photographs or in the classroom. The aim of the class is also to show how to make our own instruments for the observation of natural phenomenon.

After the class and during the long drive home I recalled a question that has been puzzling me for two years now – what is the natural environment? It seems to me that every time we talk about the natural environment we talk about it without us – human beings – being involved in it. But are we not a product of the environment? Are we not really just another animal within the animal kingdom?

Sure we separate ourselves from the rest of the animal world. The binary opposites we, humans, use is animal and human. And with these terms we pretend to be rulers of some sort. Our practices show that we feel we have the right to choose how animals live (or die). We simply rank ourselves higher than the animals over whom we believe we own. In short, the world is our slave and property.

This is not new of course. Animal rights as a movement has already pointed this out. Animal testing is a contradiction in itself – the use of animals is justified they are similar enough to us (humans) to make the results valid, yet they are different enough from us (humans) to consider it not cruel to do the types of experiments we wouldn’t do to other humans in the first place. So which is it?

Assuming we are just another animal within the web of life, not one that is at its pinnacle, but one that is only one part of it. So what are we doing to this web and what is our role within this system? If we are to take our present way of living as an indicator then we are like a cancer. Ecosystems generally try to reach a self-sustaining mode. But humans try to destroy as much as possible for the sake of things called economy and nation. Sustainability seems to be the last thing on the minds of economies and nationhood, seeing not the larger picture but choosing a narrow view of life.

One has to ask are we higher creatures or just shortsighted animals within a capacity to not only deceive others but ourselves also? Or perhaps this is nature’s way of culling planetary overpopulation, or if you are religiously inclined God’s sick sense of humour.

Mara’s Dictionary – internet security

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internet security – (n. phr.) the warm fuzzy feeling one gets when one connects to her/his internet service provider and finds it is not down due to server failure or maintenance.

See the rest of Mara’s Dictionary

Postmodernism1

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The question of whether postmodernism is alive or dead is really not an issue. Because it is all about perspective. And it is about how postmodernism is used and who uses it. To put it in the negative it is about how it is dismissed it and who dismisses it.

Postmodernism isn’t dead. It is very much alive simply because we are talking about it. We debating whether it is alive is in itself to give it life. It is however different to, say, Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation because Nietzsche was making a statement about the end of religion’s grip on power over us. And it is also different to saying that Elvis is dead since this is a fact (or as some may want you to believe that he is living as an old man somewhere in Florida).

But if we are to take it to mean something like Nietzsche’s declaration, that is God has no power over us anymore, then I will still have to contend the point. While it would be ridiculous to say it is trying to become the dominant discourse, it never was trying to do so in the first place. And if it did try it isn’t postmodernism. It is only a modernism in the guise of postmodern sheeps clothing. Postmodernism must therefore always be an anti-thesis to a thesis (which was an anti-thesis to something else) without ever coming to syn-thesis.

So now do you care to argue about whether Elvis is alive?

The problem with trying to reduce greenhouse gases

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You know the problem with greenhouse gas emissions and laws like the one passed by Governor Schwarzenegger is not that there aren’t people like him willing to do it but rather the process to see it through is a difficult one if not down right impossible. The BBC article raised two really good points about why it may not work.

Firstly, the rest of the US states and the federal bureaucrats must follow suit in order to have any effect. This is a big “if” which seems unlikely. The self-interest of America will always come first. And when George W Bush says it will hurt the economy the American public will believe him.

The second problem is that – according to the BBC again – is that those businesses which will be hurt by the law will simply pack up and go somewhere friendlier to their philosophy. That is why I do not see it making a big difference to the cause.

I may sound pessimistic but that has happened all too often before. And there is nothing different to this law being passed and other attempts like it.

So what is the solution? I do not know. But I know this much – our political practices must change. I do not know exactly what kind of political system needs to replace it (if it exists at all) but I know only it isn’t the one we have now. In short I am saying we need a new political paradigm.

California to cut greenhouse gas emission

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Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, has signed a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the first US state to do so. This is in direct conflict with current White House policy which sees any reduction being detrimental to its economy. Governor Schwarzenegger who like President Bush is a Republican. The law aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% before 2020.

British prime minister Tony Blair has praised the law saying “[it] will echo right around the rest of the world”.

And that is exactly what we will have to wait for. California alone cannot fix the problem but if other US states follow suit then we may see realistic reductions. America is still one of the highest in output greenhouse gases. So any kind of lead by them will truly echo around the world.

Safe searching with SiteAdvisor

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Here is a great Firefox Extension that will keep you informed about suspicious sites by McAfee called SiteAdvisor. It works with both Google and Yahoo!’s search engines. If don’t know what Extensions are take a look at Wikipedia‘s entry.

There are many suspicious sites out there pretending to be legitimate ones through copied content but contain dubious links and other . By analysizing its pop-up, link information and emailing policy SiteAdvisor shows you if the site is safe (a green tick), questionable (a question mark) or unsafe (an exclamation mark or red cross) so you can decide whether you want to visit the site or not.

I also recommend Mozilla’s Firefox browser (over Internet Explorer) for better internet security and experience.