In We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour he addressing the dualism between natural science and society. He begins the chapter by discussing the contents of a newspaper. There are many topics included in a single page of a newspaper that have a union between the natural world and societal issues.
“The ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural…,” which is why it shows that the dualism between the social and the natural is an illusion created by the modern world. To describe the effect the ozone has on our world in an article or essay, societal problems and scientific information must be combined. Latour describes the ideas of critics who say a scientist can not include societal discourse in their academic work as societal issues are not in their field of expertise.
His ideas about the false dichotomy of nature and society connect to the farm land that you can see when looking out from the gazebo into the valley. Farming has been a topic of societal discussion recently due to the animal cruelty by large corporate farms and it is also a part of the natural sciences because it involves the health of plants and animals.
“The Trouble With Wilderness” by William Cronon discusses how the purity of wilderness is an illusion and that “..people have actually been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing.” He states that some think the only way to have pristine wilderness is to return hunter-gathering yet he believes we must learn to honor the wild while still enjoying the world as we know it.
Cronon also brings up the point of using land sustainably and thinking about the effects of our actions before changing the land. We have to learn to combine nature and humanity rather than thinking of them as separate entities. This connects to my mini-essay about the gazebo because that is a symbol of mixing of the natural world and the human world. In the article, he talks negatively about how wealthy humans use wilderness experiences to escape the industrial world. However, I believe that this escape is healthy and should be welcomed.
A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway brings up the idea of boundaries and relates them to feminism. Specifically the boundaries between human and animal and between organism and machine. She first brings up the metaphor that the rest of the article revolves around, this metaphor is the cyborg.
The cyborg in her metaphor is a boundary between machine and human or between fiction and lived experience. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world…” meaning that cyborgs have no specific gender. Haraway explains that society should promote unity of genders rather than enforcing the labels of female and male. When she spoke about the boundaries between human and machine being broken it related to my text because it gave many examples of the way humans have created machines or man made objects that help humans in some way just like the gazebo does.
I pass the gazebo up the hill from the College Union a few times a day but it always catches my eye when its silhouette is outlined by the sunset. Many people think about the gazebo as a place to sit and study or eat a snack. They enjoy the shade and protection of the environment that the man made structure provides. It is seen as a place to hide out when it starts raining or when the sun is beating down on a hot day, but I think of it as a place that also allows people to look around and enjoy the beauty of nature.
The view of the fields down the hill from the gazebo can be enjoyed at anytime and when people visit Geneseo for the first time they are amazed at the sight. This sight becomes even more incredible when the sun is setting behind the distant hill.
Although some may think of it as just a gazebo to sit at, the architecture makes it a sight to see. The curved circular roof leading to a sharp point at the top adds a very interesting element to the beautiful scene of trees, fields, and an orange sky. Geneseo is a very interesting campus in that it seems to enhance the wilderness with the human habitation. The views from the top of the hill, sitting in the gazebo, have been very relaxing. I think that the campus incorporates nature rather than destroying it and the gazebo is an excellent example of this.
