Katie Kish · Eco-Chick

Browsing all posts by Katie Kish

Katie Kish is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph and the multimedia director for the Center of Inquiry, Ontario.

http://liberal-debutante.com

This author has contributed 34 posts.

AUTHOR FEED

Durabook!

10 Comments

10/16/06

I don’t usually just come on and link to things, but this is just way too cool!!
Durabook

A totally recyclable, tree-free book!! I wish there was some sort of way that I could trade in ALL of my books for these ones! I lost an entire copy of Watership Down because of a bathtub accident. Check em out! Don’t doubt for a second that I haven’t already ordered Aqua Erotica!

Amazon, bath, book, books, water

Animals In Medical Research?

7 Comments

09/26/06

When we talk of using animals for biomedical research there are two ground cases as to why it is morally unacceptable; first, it wrongly violates the rights of animals and second because it wrongly imposes on sentient creatures avoidable suffering. In the following I will explain when neither of these arguments is sound based on the misunderstandings of rights and the mistaken calculation of consequence.

When we speak of rights it is understood as the claim or potential claim which one person or party may use against another. To claim that there is a full right we must know who holds the right, against whom it is held and to what it is a right.

adults, Animals, children, conflict, ethical, giving, party, reduce, singer, Tea

Patriarchy of Pork

3 Comments

09/06/06

While reading through my environmental ethics text book today (that will be used for a class called Philosophy and the Environment…woot!) I came across a section called “Patriarchy of Pork or Feminist Fuss” in a chapter called “Ethics and Animals”.

The section is only about a page long (a bit less, actually) but it goes on to outline a theory. The author of the book first pointed out that when asking his university classes who were vegitarians it was a majority of women that raised their hands. This isn’t an outlandish claim, and I believe that. What is wildly outlandish is his reasoning behind this.

Back-in-the-day, he says, women would cook for their family. The daughters and the mother would prepare the meal and set the table. The men would them come, and they would get the plates of food first. As they are passed around the table, all the men would take the meat, so that when it got to the women, there would be none left for them… So he argues that it is this patriarchial ritual that has made the women of today become vegitarians more so than men…

I fail to see the logic. Like, I understand how some women in these circumstances would just accept that fact they were probably not going to get any meat (oh why not just make more? or take some first? …whatever.) but as for this making people vegitarians now?…With the vegitarians I lived with last year it was a decision based on animal rights, health or the environment – not some internal pressure to release their oppressed past.

On that note of crazy feminist things, Feministing has the craziest anti-feminist quotes up, my favorite is:

I am not defending radical feminism, which I consider to be a minor mental illness…

animal rights, Animals, book, epa, ethics, Feminism, Food, health, meat, plates, skin, Theory, women

Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism

1 Comment

09/03/06

When I was in grade 12 I wrote a paper that I thought was fantastic. I hate that I can say I still have it – and got to read over it again today, it’s pretty horrible. Actually, for it being the first a) philosophy paper and b) environmental paper I ever wrote, it didn’t turn out THAT horrific, just by my standards now, it was pretty bad. I ended up getting an A on it, but I see now that my teacher was being generous. He must have really liked me.

The only reason I bring it up is because the paper was combining two very different subjects that can either have really great outcomes, or really disasterous ones. I’m talking about ecology and philosophy and for this particular post I’ll be looking at two especially horrible outcomes of these two subjects merging. The first being deep ecology and the second being ecofeminism.

I’ll start with deep ecology. In my naïve year of being a very hardcore and new environmentalist who actually cried at the thought of a tree being cut down, I could probably be pinned as a deep ecologist. However, now I see the stupidity in this, and how deep ecology is really… almost like the cult of environmentalism. Deep ecology speaks to take the boundaries down between humans and nature making everything whole.

Basically there are two core values that guide the deep ecology praxis. The first is self-realization. The environmentally conscious person in this case extends their self to include the environment and the world as a whole. It’s basically releasing ones self from a narrow, individual view to a larger view as ones self as the environment. Once a person has placed their own self to include the environment, the purpose is that it is then harder to destroy, take advantage of, or reduce the productivity of the environment.