Technology / Global Warming Undoing Term Paper

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If Americans continue to live as if technology is the most important thing, then there will be no technology and no improved quality of life for future generations. The scientist Wesselman underlines Nainoa's words with statistics, that current data on global warming suggests that the earth's increasing overall temperatures have exceeded normal expectations of variation in climate fluctuation (216). "The warming [trend] since 1957" when careful records began to be kept by scientists, "has been remarkably uniform over the east-west extent of the northern Atlantic" (217). In Africa, the glaciers on Mount Kenya have already shrunk by forty percent since 1963 (216).

These are all measurable statistics and facts. Deprived of science as a result of scientific so-called progress, Nainoa has the wisdom of a shaman, not a scientist, but the emotional impact he has upon Wesselman is profound. Nainoa is wise, even in a world lacking in science, perhaps even more wise than the scientists of the present, who doubt the truth of global warming based upon their biased views of the evidence, in the wake of political influence. Nainoa is uncomfortable in a modern kitchen, seeing a car or asphalt, yet he has an important message and a way of communicating with Wesselman that is equally powerful as science (50).

The fact that scientists have not sounded the alarm in America, the nation that is perhaps best able to do something to change the current state of environmental affairs in the world, shows how science itself is not completely objective. Scientists have become pressured by politicians to state that global warming evidence is not as dire as it might seem. The combination of fact and fantasy makes the reality of what humanity is doing to the planet seem more potent.

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Regardless of what one thinks of the author's visions, the idea that different modes of knowing and different methods of persuasion are necessary to change the world is suggested by Wesselman's narrative presentation of his concerns in his book.

All the while during his visions, Wesselman continued to teach courses in anthropology. His visions, he said, caused him to rethink some of his teachings, such as the widespread distaste within the profession for non-rational modes of discourse articulated by authors such as Carlos Castaneda (195). Wesselman was taught that spiritual shamanic visions are usually brought about by destabilizing the subject's sense of rationality through fasting, drumming, and drugs. Then, the initiate, through carefully shaped expectations, cultural pressures, and the nature of the setting is further rendered susceptible to receptions from the great beyond through outside influences, this time in a less deliberate, perhaps, but equally potent fashion. Finally, after the experiential component of visionary experience, the subject's past experiences are shaped through current environmental and cultural suggestions and stories (195). Viewed as such, Wesselman's own experiences, one might reflect, might be shaped by his own scientific training, knowledge, and his political convictions regarding environmentalism.

However, Wesselman's ability to combine science with shamanism and critical reflection with spiritual insight is testimony to the ability to merge different ways of knowing into one, and to suggest that the apparently primitive shamanic practices listed above do not have to be incompatible with scientific practice and modes of generating knowledge. Even if one doubts the veracity of Wesselman's ability to see into the future, the need to urge people to action about global warming through scientific data and emotional urgency is valid.

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