Jason Gerbsch                                                             Approximately 220 words

jg33@geneseo.edu

INTD 105-19: Scientific Writing

In his essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness”, Cronon states that the American wilderness is not very natural, more so a construct of man.  He makes two points supporting his view of a constructed wilderness, romanticism and the frontier.  During the colonial eras and the beginning of America, the term wilderness was a word that instilled terror.  Romanticism changed this early on by changing the concept of wilderness from a place of terror, to a place of sacredness.  Romantics tied the wilderness and religion together, using faith to describe the wilderness as places of heavenly beauty and places to be close to God.  The frontier aspect painted the wild as a place of not only religious significance, but also a place for experiencing what it meant to be an American.  Both movements in American history led to the protection of nature not for the sake of protecting it, but for creating places where people can go to abandon their homes in civilization for a time in exchange for a false “home” in nature, where they truly “belong”.

This idea of falsifying nature in order to appease our desire to separate ourselves from civilization I can see with Sturges Hall.  The building, a sign of civilization, covered on ivy in order to appear “natural.”

Justin D’Souza                                                                                                                            About 170 words    SUNY Geneseo

Science Writing

The Paradox of Wilderness

By Justin D’Souza

Many equate “wilderness” with gorgeous, expansive swaths of land, free from any human influence whatsoever.  However, William Cronon challenges the notion that wilderness opposes the human world, calling it a “profoundly human place.” Unlike biblical times, where the wilderness represented the devilish deserts and jungles outside of Eden, environmentalists like John Muir perceived wilderness as a “sublime [godly]” region. This coupled with the idea of a “manly” frontier led many rich capitalists to nature…but only for the mere pleasure of recreation – the wilderness has been designated by humans for humans. In today’s age, environmentalists urge saving biodiversity against human interference, however, the only way to do this, besides killing off our entire species, is interference in nature. Therefore, irony and paradoxes cripple modern environmental ideology.

#

Geneseo’s Arboretum correlates with Cronon’s thoughts. Far from sublime and godlike, it is a “wild place close to home.” This allows us to “abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial…and the tree in the wilderness as natural.” The arboretum blends both a garden and forest.

Erik Buckingham                                                         approximately 150 words

ekb7@geneseo.edu

Student, INTD 105-19: Science Writing

“The Trouble With Wilderness” Summary

By: Erik Buckingham

Environmentalists take action against the destruction of wildlife, attempting to preserve national parks for as long as possible. It has been discovered that our ancestors viewed nature as something to be avoided rather than something to be appreciated. In “The Trouble With Wilderness”, William Cronon explains that, “Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling.”

Cronon envisions a world where we do not have to go outside a city to appreciate wilderness and nature. For example, trees and flowers lining the streets of Boston are not affected by the concrete around them, and people living in the city are not negatively affected by the trees. My mini-essay relates to this because the Suess Spruce tree is found in the middle of a college campus. We learn and live in brick buildings but allow various trees, especially the Suess Spruce, to exist.

Mike Emanuele

The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronon

Humanity has taken it upon itself to preserve nature because of it’s beauty and it’s importance to earth. This is the popular opinion of environmentalists and most people. However, Hundreds of years ago the wilderness wasn’t something to be preserved but something to be avoided. The author, William Cronon, describes the wilderness as non-human. In history, towns and cities would always sit on this boundary between the humanity and inhumanity. This creates a dualism that the majority of people are unfamiliar with. In modern day we’ve learned to coexist but we still manage to destroy wilderness when we touch it. Humans have created a paradox from the moment our existence began, “if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves.” My essay is about learning to coexist with nature and finding it’s similarities between human and non-human. We try to live amongst nature because it is natural. Nonetheless, Humans cannot live in a primitive environment such as the wilderness, we must create our own homes by taking it away from other life. This isn’t necessarily something bad.

Hunter Cowles                                                                               About 150 words

 In Donna Haraway’s article, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Haraway explains there are three boundaries that divide humans from animals, organisms from machines, and organic from inorganic. The metaphorical  “cyborg” symbolizes something that can go beyond these boundaries due to the fact cyborgs have both mechanical and organic components. Haraway states anything capable of overcoming  the things that limit it, can reach its true potential. Motivational speaker Eric Thomas once said “The most important thing is: to be able at any moment, to sacrifice what you are, for what you will become”.  This quote means in one must test one’s limitations  in order to improve itself. This theory also applies to social, racial, and gender related boundaries.  If we accept a society without labels or limitations, we can achieve prosperity. Haraway embraces growth under ambiguous, and unbiased circumstances. Since the cyborg is both natural and artificial, it is exempt from traditional binarisms;a cyborg isn’t confined to one identity.

Racheal Devine                                                                  about 150 words

rmd20@geneseo.edu

Science Writing INTD 105-19

A Cyborg Manifesto Response

In Donna Haraway’s, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, she develops her ideas about the late twentieth century, calling it “our time, a mythic time” where we are all cyborgs now. The cyborgs are a type of condensed image of our imagination and reality, hybrids of machines and organisms, a creature in the post gender world. She says that in this time, the border between man and animal has been breached completely, the uniqueness gone, as well as the boundary between machines and man, and between the physical and nonphysical. A Lot of her essay has to do with feminism and fractured identities. She believes gender, social, race, and historical constitution cannot be the basis for unity, nothing about being a female binds to “women”. She ends with the point that the history is dependent on the social relations between people and ultimately she says, there isn’t any other time where there is a greater need for political unity.

This can connect back to the vines on the buildings because they act as a barrier between man and nature/animal.

Aubrie Cross

In the article “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, a lot of different aspects were mentioned and then connected in some way or another. The points she analyzed were between feminism, socialism, and materialism. She broke them down into her main focus for the article and discussed the division between humans and animals along with organisms and machines. As you read more into the article, she begins to talk about how over time these divisions have become less noticeable. This is where she incorporates the “cyborg” which she explains it as an “organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” In other words, the cyborg is a metaphor to represent the progression between each boundary she talked about.

This article directly correlates with the mini essay we wrote because  it emphasizes the boundaries between human and nature.

Matt Klein                                                            approximately 150 words

mgk6@geneseo.edu

INTD 105-19: Science Writing

“The Cyborg Manifesto” Response

By Matt Klein

In the late twentieth century, many boundaries in society were beginning to break down. In “The Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway analyzes these boundaries in the context of technology and socialist-feminism. In her main points, she discusses the division between humans and animals, organisms and machines, and the organic and inorganic. Haraway demonstrates how these divisions have begun to disappear, and she hybridizes these pairs into the image of the cyborg. The cyborg represents the transgression of each of these boundaries, leading to a more unified society. In her words, “The cyborg is a creature of a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (292). Haraway thus illustrates how our world is transitioning from individualism to the inclusion and wholeness of our entire society.

This relates to my mini-essay on the arboretum in the sense that the arboretum, like the cyborg, is a hybrid of humans and nature.

Emma Cooke                                                                                     about 150 words

erc8@geneseo.edu

INTD 105-19 Science Writing

The Cyborg Manifesto

               Donna Haraway’s essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” is a new look on feminism. She draws attention to the idea that a world without gender would be superior to a world with equality between genders. In her essay she also focuses on her belief that the boundaries between the human and animal worlds as well as those that separate living organisms and machines are breaking. Her essay uses the idea of a cyborg society as a metaphor for this genderless and boundary-less society she envisions. However, there are moments within Dr. Haraway’s essay in which she contradicts herself and makes the cyborg society she has envisioned seem less appealing.

“The Cyborg Manifesto” can be connected back to Sturges Hall because the ivy which grows up its walls is a symbol of the blurred boundary between the human and natural worlds, a boundary which Dr. Haraway believes should be broken completely.

Juniper Tremper
Scientific Writing 105-19
Geneseo, NY
~170 words

A Cyborg, A Stump, and A Counterproductive Feminist Idea
Juniper Tremper

The beginning of A Cyborg Manifesto describes the deteriorating boundaries of “what counts as nature.” Donna Haraway’s lengthy metaphor of a cyborg as a genderless being   analyzes the usefulness of such an existence, and states outright that they could be an “imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.” In other words, there are advantages to embracing cyborgs because their neutrality unbinds them from our traditional loyalties to politics and parents. Haraway references the importance another professor places on “the limits of identification,” and elaborates that the gender labels we abide by are limiting boundaries, by inadvertently creating inescapable sexual objectification. She proceeds to explain that “transgressed boundaries” are also beneficial when applied to the dissonance between genders: that labels marginalize what effects would be possible in a “cyborg society” where dissimilar people “hold together… long enough” to achieve a common goal. In such situations, ignoring labels improves their ability to unify and cooperate.

Like a tree planted to be cut down, the purpose and use of identifying “women’s history” contradicts itself.