Graduate Student, Environment and Community
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Mark Baker
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About
My overall goal is to collaborate in appropriate social and technological solutions to challenges surrounding social and environmental justice.
Consumerism, waste and pollution, cancers of our disposable society, have been metastasizing globally in pandemic proportions. Metabolisms of the modern lifestyle swell, shadowing landscapes, atmosphere and seas. Obsolescence has served as society’s manufacturing mantra, while garbage choke points echo a resource curse. Disposability and sprawl have shepherded our society to a juncture between development and sustainability. Their wakes rise like terrible seas, obscuring equable horizons.
How do we remediate this toxic legacy? What are the cultural underpinnings of combat with our environment? Misanthropy and myopia frame our sense of intolerance and hatred of our own species. Who and what belongs where? Many in the environmental movement claim humans do not have a functional role in the environment; this fuels a sense of alienation from the environment of which we are a part. There is a certain absurdity of judging nature based on nativity. At what point in time is an organism natural or alien? This war-like default setting of our society is radical to destructive discrimination of humans and other species alike...to social and environmental injustice.
Government influences the fabric of our daily lives, yet people are able to incline government (and market) to institute changes. Active citizenship and collaboration are vital to developing feasible, efficient, effective, equitable and adaptive strategies. We are living in exciting and uncertain times; we are bearing witness to nature’s economy, punctuated financial collapses and great social awakenings. We have the opportunity to create the change we want to see. Now is the time to rise to the challenges that are before us. As the Hopi prophecy states, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Contact Information
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