The three quotations I chose are-
1. "What exactly does it mean to live like a lion or a wombat?" "It means. . . to live at the mercy of the world. It means to live without having any control over your environment." (p.68)
2. "Funny. . . This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can't eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill of anything that doesn't feed what you eat." (p.132)
3. "The story the Takers have been enacting here for the past ten thousand years is not only disastrous for mankind and for the world, it's fundamentally unhealthy and unsatisfying. It's a megalomaniac's fantasy , and enacting it has given the Takers a culture riddled with greed, cruelty, mental illness, crime, and drug addiction." (p.147).
"Ishmael" was an eye-opening book for various reasons. In biological terms, "Ishmael" opened my eyes to the ways we treat the planet due to our selfish belief that this planet is ours to do what we want with. Human have evolved and dominated the planet, manipulation their settings wherever they go to make these places "home." Human have disregarded other species and the environmental havoc they wreak when they chose to settle in an area. Species have gone extinct due to over-hunting, the land becomes dry and non-arable. Gonick and Outwater, in their comic book style book- "The Cartoon Guide to the Environment," discuss the ancient civilization of Sumer. Sumer was the first great civilization, artifacts from the period show us that the Sumerians built homes and complex irrigation systems. The irrigation systems resulted in water picking up salt and being distributed to the soil, making it infertile. In "Ishmael" the Gorilla teaches the Narrator that humans have little to no concern about the biological processes and life on Earth. Humans are willing to sacrifice life in order to establish their dominance and live comfortably.
About the WORLD, I learned that humans are disrespectful creatures. They have a selfish mentality. All the damage we have caused to the Earth is irrelevant because it has allowed us to live as we do now, this is one of the main themes in "Ishmael," I believe. The Takers, as the humans are called, feel entitled to control over the planet. They assure their power by creating food surpluses and continuing to populate the Earth. Medical advances and development of technology has ensure longer life spans and a guaranteed comfortable life for ourselves and our offspring.
"Ishmael" made me realize that it is wrong for the Takers to have such a ridiculous sense of entitlement. As the Gorilla tells the Narrator, the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden is a story by the Leavers (the other species on the Earth) that was taken by the Takers as their own. It is really a story about the "sinful" act committed by humans that has doomed them to eventually self-destruct. In trying to gain knowledge, the Takers have made their fate worse. Man was not meant to know how to control the Earth, they were meant to simply live in it. I believe this is one lesson the Gorilla sought to teach the Narrator. I have learned to see the ways that humans use to maintain power over everything else on the Earth. I have learned that man is willing to control the Earth by any means necessary, at the expense of the Earth itself. And most importantly, I have learned to appreciate nature and the beautiful patterns and cycles of life that exist there because that is how it was meant to be.
BIO230 is the perfect course to discuss "Ishmael" in. Some of the common themes between the book and the course are- humans degrading the Earth for their own selfish benefit, a lack of regard for the planet and other species, and ignorance on the part of humans toward other living things that has resulted in a culture where human believe they are entitled to materialistic lifestyles.
Hi Estefania, thanks for your post.
ReplyDeleteI want to point out that, in Ishmael, "Takers" does not refer to humans. There is nothing at all inherently harmful about humans themselves. This is a central idea in the novel. For millions of years, humans lived no more harmfully than a whale or a wolf. Then, just 10,000 years ago, a single culture took into their heads a new story: the world was made for man. The rest of the human cultures continued to tell the story of evolution: the world is a sacred place, and man belongs in a sacred place. They continued to live as other species. It is essential that we realize we are not destructive; we have only been possessed by a destructive story, which we must abandon.