tenshikurai9

Listed in order of completion or reverse order of starting.

3. The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World by James J. Farrell

This was the book my English teacher was using with his English Composition class. The author looks at environmental issues of consumption through the different activities of a college student and divides the book by chapters like, Food for Thought (on college cafeterias and their place in American culture and industrial agriculture), The Nature of Cars, and The Nature of Religion (like how there are traditions of ascetism so religion has already questioned stuff before.) What I didn't like about the religion chapter was that the author said he was going to use examples from Judeo-Christian tradition, but when he took examples from a more specific religion, it was always about Christians and not Jews.

4. A Conservationist Manifesto by Scott Russell Sanders

This was the book my English teacher assigned for my Research and Analysis, Land Use and Ethics, class. He attempts to use various essays and stories to inspire care for the environment and does have a manifesto near the back. Most of what he writes shows that he's a white Christian guy who lives in Indiana and loves being in the woods.

Then there's a chapter called "The Warehouse and the Wilderness" where he tries to talk about different worldviews that frame our stories of consumption versus nature. It was the chapter that I hated. He outright says, "I know scarcely more about deconstruction or postmodernims, say, than bumblebees and hummingbirds know about engineering." Then a few pages later he tries to comment on postmodernist literary theory even though he's already discredited himself. There's a chunk of babbling on about how we turn to the stories in our movies to see that all is right in the world. I guess he doesn't watch depressing films (like my favorite when I was 12, Salaam Bombay.) In this chapter and others, he also oversweepingly colors use of the internet as, not an aid, to connecting to others. The book would have been better without this one chapter.

The rest of it was, meh, to me since frankly I'm not going to be able to relate to tales of the woods when most of my life involves wandering back into the city. Apparently this book isn't a big hit with other students so he's going to use something else in the future.

5. The Snowboard: A Guide for All Boarders Book by Lowell Hart

I brought this book up to college when I was in January session and had a snowboarding class. It mentions snowboarding on groomed trails and snowboarding in back country, but no mention of snowboarding in urban environments. My guess (and another student's guess) is that when the book was made in 1997, snowboarding in urban environments hadn't fully developed yet.