Coast Salish Synthesis

    Though the colonial period has long since passed, at least in North America, its effects linger to this day.  “Both British and American colonialism required categorizing, dividing, and confining Aboriginal people” (Marker 757).  This meant that entire communities had to be relocated or otherwise adapted, despite having resided on the same land for hundreds of years.  Most civilizations did not survive this process, as the Trail of Tears and fragmented Indian reservations demonstrated in the United States, but the Coast Salish people of British Columbia and Washington State were faced with a unique situation altogether.  Their ancestral lands, at least since the establishment of that portion of the border in 1846, lay in both the United States and Canada.  This meant that traveling across the community required a border crossing.  Luckily, the right of Native Americans to freely cross the US/Canada border was guaranteed in the 1794 Jay Treaty (Nickels par. 3).
    The general plan for the assimilation of Native Americans was to “isolate children in institutions and punish any expression of their home culture while reformatting their cognitive maps emphasising the superiority of the empire” (Marker 759); the Coast Salish language and cultural dances had to be kept alive in secret (Marker 761).  Eventually, Natives were allowed into traditional public schools, where they were greeted with racism stemming from political and cultural conflicts, such as disputes over fishing rights in the waters of the Puget Sound.  The Coast Salish people have historically had rights to half of the salmon by the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855; rights which Canadians wished to possess (Marker 765).  To escape this racism, many Coast Salish families embraced the once-detested boarding school system and sent their children to live among other members of their culture.

Marker, Michael. "Indigenous Resistance and Racist Schooling on the Borders of Empires: Coast Salish Cultural Survival." Paedagogica Historica 45.6 (2009): 757-72. Print.

Nickels, Bryan. "Native American Free Passage Rights under the 1794 Jay Treaty: Survival under United States Statutory Law and Canadian Common Law." BC.edu. Boston College, n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2012. <http://www.bc.edu/dam/files/schools/law/lawreviews/journals/bciclr/24_2/04_TXT.htm>.

Sustainable Eating in the Outer Banks

     As a narrow chain of sand bars off of the mainland coast, the Outer Banks do not have much in the way of sustainable food sources, aside from the obvious bounties of the sea.  However, even this reservoir is scarcely exploited, as a modern economy favors the importation of commodities and tropical delicacies alike to satisfy plundering tourists.  Eateries that do offer local catches are somewhat rare and offer the dishes as a delicacy, rather than a staple.  One is more likely to encounter Alaskan salmon at the grocery store than local catches, and this fact motivates activists like Jamie Berger, a student at UNC, to push for sustainable food sources according to the principles of bioregionalism, which are, in turn, funded through a "town-owned and operated farmers’, fishermen’s, and artisans’ market" (Berger).  This self-reliance is especially important for the Outer Banks since their land-based lifelines could easily be severed by natural hazards.
     The Outer Banks are also making great strides in reducing their collective environmental impact.  To name a few achievements, 80% of the land in Dare County is owned by National or State parks, the Outer Banks are moving toward banning plastic bags from grocery stores, and Dare County has the highest recycling rate per capita of the entire state.  A few simple changes go a long way toward making the Outer Banks even greater.

Sources:
http://outerbanksvoice.com/2011/03/09/food-a-source-of-sustenance-and-sustainability/ 
http://www.outerbanks.org/outerbanks-sustainability/
http://www.outerbanks.org/outerbanks-eat-local/

"Artifact" #2 of Environmental Ethics

This picture portrays how society is selling out its morals to make a profit.  The ship in the background has run aground, reminding us of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill and the dangers associated with drilling for oil in sensitive environments.

Source: http://jonbowermaster.com/blog/2011/02/turmoil-in-the-mideast-makes-the-arctic-look-balmy-for-new-oil-drilling/

"Artifact" of Environmental Ethics

This article describes the responsibilities of humans, as 'higher' mammals, toward the natural world. Since we are the only species capable of reasoning and organizing on a massive scale, we are responsible for the ultimate well-being of the resources form which we draw value.  To sum it up: "Only the human species contains moral agents, but perhaps conscience on such an Earth ought not be used to exempt every other form of life from consideration, with the resulting paradox that the sole moral species acts only in its collective self-interest toward all the rest. Is not the ultimate philosophical task the discovery of a whole great ethic that knows the human place under the sun?"
 http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/RolstonEnvEth.html

350.org

     Bill McKibben uses his organization, 350.org, to provoke global change for the benefit of the environment.  His website is a lot less scholarly-looking than www.treehugger.com because McKibben is more focused on the emotional appeal to audiences than whether his website will be used as a source for peer-reviewed articles.  Nevertheless, 350.org includes a “Science” tab listing fact-based information about global warming trends. 
     In an interview with the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, McKibben describes his shift from being a journalist for the New York Times to becoming a leading activist for the environment.  As McKibben states, “writing alone wasn’t getting the job done fast enough” (par. 6).  After having written The End of Nature and Eaarth, McKibben realized that the environment needed immediate relief and couldn’t wait for the lessons in his books to sink in over time.  His movement, titled 350.org, is responsible for “some 20,000 rallies and demonstrations in every country except North Korea” (par. 3).  This large-scale activism takes advantage of global social media to reach thousands of individuals across the globe. 
     The movement gets its name from the goal to have an atmospheric CO2 concentration at or below 350 ppm (parts-per-million).  Jim Hansen, a scientist who presented his findings to the American Geophysical Union, stated in his paper that a planet such as the Earth cannot sustain life, as it has come to exist, with a CO2 concentration about 350 ppm.  McKibben equates this number to someone’s cholesterol number.  By giving someone a number they should be at, when they are actually at a higher number (390 ppm), there is an incentive to make changes now, before it’s too late; as per McKibben’s example, someone with a cholesterol of 263 would be alarmed when told that the safe range is below 200 and he/she is at risk of having a heart attack or stroke. 
     A sit-in outside of the White House, organized by 350.org, involved 12,000 people and 1,253 arrests; it culminated in president Obama’s rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil to the US from tar sands in Canada.  McKibben justifies the need for immediate and drastic action: “Behavioral changes will come on the same day, too, when there’s a price on carbon.  If we had 100 years, it would make sense to do a slow process of education...for people to suddenly say, ‘Huh, perhaps I don’t actually need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store.’  [Instead,] send everybody in America a check for their share of the pie every month” (par. 32).

Works Cited

"Bill McKibben: Actions Speak Louder than Words." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2012): n. pag.
     Web. 1 Oct. 2012. <http://bos.sagepub.com/content/68/2/1>.