Ecology

Reflection Paper Writing Prompts
Please respond to 4 writing prompts for the Reading Assignment and then also write a substantial commentary on the interview with Chris Deutsch.  Please know you may exceed the 1.5 pages for this week.

Your Assignments for this week are (1) a Reading Assignment (three chapters of your large sized text book, CAFO: The tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, (2) a Listening Assignment in mp3 format and (3) the usual Writing Assignment (one Reflection Paper and two or more significant Discussion Board Postings). Please address both the three readings and the mp3 interview with PhD Candidate Chris Deutsch in your Reflection Paper.  Note that with regard to Scully’s impressive article, Fear Factories, please use numbers (1) and (3) of the following Writing Prompts. Address at least one prompt for the Reading authored by Andrew Kimbrell and at least one for the Reading by Wendell Berry.

(1)    With regard to the article Fear Factories by Matthew Scully, please comment on what the essay is about and how the author makes his case as he addresses the conservative commercial sector. How does he appeal to their mindset, and by the way, what is his audience’s mindset? This article by Scully was intended for and published in The American Conservative, a monthly publication out of Washington DC.
(2)    What passage from Scully’s powerful writing most captured your thoughts?
(3)    Please comment on the following excerpt:
“Yet when corporate farmers need barbed wire around their happy, sunny lands, and laws to prohibit outsiders from taking photographs, and still other laws to exempt farm animals from the definition of ‘animals’ as covered in federal and state cruelty statutes, something is amiss (…..with) the factory farms, where the suffering is immense and we are all asked to be complicit.”
(4)    What does author Kimbrell mean as he writes:
“…..the fear that profits will be lost and that a business or a nation will lose in the global economic competition is used as the single primary justification for not regulating the exploitation of the environment, the workers, and of course the billions of animals in the factory system.”
(5)    Again, in the pages of Kimbrell, please give your thoughts about his script:
“The ethic of competition also completely devalues the virtue of cooperation. Anthropologists tell us that the secret to a society’s longevity is the cooperation between its members and the cooperative relationship it has with the elements of nature.”
How does the “growth” of business, and business as machinery, reflect or conflict with his writings?
(6)    Wendell Berry is considered one of the primary voices in the area of Sustainability. What did you gain from reading his passage entitled Renewing Husbandry? He remarks that
“The effects of this process of industrialization have become so apparent, so numerous, so favorable to the agribusiness corporations, and so unfavorable to everything else, that by now the questions troubling me and a few others in the 1960s and 1970s are being asked everywhere”.
What questions do you think are being asked?
(7)    Please comment on Wendell Berry’s defense of the rural community, the conscious farmer, and stewardship of the land.
(8)    Please give your opinion on the mp3 interview with Chris Deutsch.