This week’s reading was super interesting to me and I found that I enjoyed the author’s approach in that they basically say here are the ways that we think are best to view/treat the environment and here are their drawbacks. They clearly stated in the beginning too that they are not out to destroy or dissect any bad ideas, it’s really just pooling what they believe are some of the best approaches. For my blog post, I want to talk about something that my roommate sent me off of reddit the other day and how it relates to this reading. I liked their introduction to explaining how environmental humanities will become a prevalent study in the near future. It reads, “Carolyn Merchant has argued that “a partnership ethic would bring humans and non-human nature into a dynamically balanced, more nearly equal relationship.” Such a new ethic requires a new narrative. This new story “would not accept the idea of sub-duing the earth, or even dressing and keeping the garden, since both entail total domestication and control by human beings. Instead, each earthly place would be a home, or community, to be shared with other living and non-living things” (Emerret, page 6). The other day my roommate sent me this link where someone asked Chat-GPT to “describe a world where the power structures are reversed. Add descriptions for images to accompany the text”. If you click on the link I would hope you are as baffled and interested as I am. It’s interesting to see in this world that we cohabit the environment with nature, opposed to the typical western approach of conquering the environment. Seeing cities and houses that look equally modern as they do ‘nature-ish’ is a wild sight, and in my opinion would be a sick world to live in. My only contingencies in this world is that for starters, I think it would be nearly impossible to get each and every person on earth on this same level of understanding and appreciation towards the environment, especially losing the emphasis on monetary growth in large corporations. Secondly, and what scares me the most, is a world that is predominantly run by AI. I think the concept of AI having no biases is super cool and could be extremely powerful, but in a nutshell someone has to create and train that AI model, and if fed with some level of bias it will inevitably surface in its decision making. But who knows, AI will continue to develop, peoples opinions around: money, positions of power, and environmental relationship could also be subject to change allowing room for this type of society in our world at some point in our future. If anyone checks out the link, let me know what you think! Is it a world you would want to live in? Is it a realistic future?