Well hello again. I am Ashley, I wrote a bit in my first post about why I came to TCM, but here I'll just say a little about myself. I am originally from Fresno and although I love my home and who it turned me into, I have absolutely loved the last three years living in Oakland. My undergrad consisted of History and Women Studies with a minor in Philosophy. My personal and educational experience led to working (paid or unpaid) as an outreach worker and at the Fresno Needle Exchange. Harm reduction is incredibly important to me and along with the idea of trauma-informed care will greatly influence the sort of acupuncture work I do in the future. My hobbies include going to punk shows, yoga, and hiking. I have a dog named Hollybear and she's about the coolest dog and if you get to meet her I promise you'll love her. We hike a lot and take good care of each other. I also like to read, make my own lip balm/lotions/tinctures, etc, and veg with my roommates and friends. I like to garden but never seem to get around to doing it. I am REALLY REALLY REALLY excited about being back in school!
I really appreciated the conversation in class yesterday. Coming at biology from an integrated framework is refreshing and exciting. Our readings really spoke to one another about our responsibility on this earth as the species most able to affect change. Western science discourses have worked so hard to minimize and dismiss the knowledge and experience of the natural world, and that naivete has created havoc. Not that its all scientists' fault, but as innovators and creators of new knowledge, their inventions are not created in a political vacuum and their cultural biases have a greater impact than some would like to admit. Invention for the sake of glorious discovery without an eye to the greater implications is both naive and dangerous. The atom bomb is an excellent example that many scientists and philosophers have already explored, and our conversation about GMOS and synbio yesterday spoke to the dangers as well. Yesterday morning I read an article about Hawaiians protesting the building of a telescope on a sacred mountain and how astronomers are absolutely baffled why anyone would object. They feel they are working toward the betterment of humankind and there are no detrimental effects of astrophysics, so what's the problem? The problem is the complete ignorance and erasure of the very real needs and rights of the indigenous people to whom that mountain is sacred. Science and scientists do not exist outside of history, war, cultural oppression, or colonization, however much they may want to believe they can hide away from all those horrors. Maybe synbio will be the next big technological revolution, or maybe it'll have subtle effects on earth's ecology that trigger a chain reaction of catastrophic proportions (on the geologic time scale). In the final article of our packet the question of nature's value is raised. I hope that those driving movements such as GMO and synbio will in time be influenced by the economic data (because let's face it, nature's intrinsic value isn't enough to sway most decision makers). If synbio's impact is anything less than 110% positive it could be truly devastating, a cost we are not ready to shoulder, let alone the cost to future generations.
That's interesting about the Hawaiian protests! I can totally understand where they're coming from, and it's interesting how scientists get so blind-sided by doing good that they don't realize that they can actually do harm. Their views on good are completely different, and it's a shame that its hard to understand. As you mentioned, the thing with these experiments are that its hard to determine if it'll be positive or negative and it's not until the after effects do we realize it.
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