The use of nanotechnology in fiction has attracted scholarly attention. The first use of the distinguishing concepts of nanotechnology was "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman in K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation introduced the general public to the concept of nanotechnology. Since then, nanotechnology has been used frequently in We value excellent academic writing and strive to provide outstanding essay writing service each and every time you place an order. We write essays, research papers, term papers, course works, reviews, theses and more, so our primary mission is to help you succeed academically Gender equality will never exist. 25 Controversial Argumentative Essay Topics. Learning first aid measures should be compulsory for people everywhere. Colleges should provide free online classes for all interested people. Santa Claus is an alien who hides at the North Pole
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A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks.
The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names.
Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. You are. He was. Tiptoeing in her mud boots, do alien exist essay, Caroline skirts around a crumbling family plot to veer into the barberry do alien exist essay where a plastic bag is caught in the thorns.
We have a special grammar for personhood. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of do alien exist essay or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. As a botany professor, do alien exist essay, I am as interested in the pale-green lichens slowly dissolving the words on the gravestones as in the almost-forgotten names, and the students, too, look past the stones for do alien exist essay cap mushrooms in the grass or a glimpse of an urban fox.
She has collected their assignment, do alien exist essay, a written reflection on a cemetery walk last week, as baseline data. New to them, perhaps, but in fact ancient—the grammar of animacy. For me, this story began in another classroom, in another century, at the Carlisle Indian School where my Potawatomi grandfather was taken as do alien exist essay small boy. My chance of knowing my native language and your chance of ever hearing it were stolen in the Indian boarding schools where native children were forbidden to speak their own language.
Within the walls of that school, the clipped syllables of English replaced the lush Potawatomi sounds of water splashing on rocks and wind in the trees, a language that emerged from the lands of the Great Lakes.
Our language hovers at the edge of extinction, an endangered species of knowledge and wisdom dwindling away with the loss of every elder. So, bit by bit, I have been trying to learn my lost language, do alien exist essay.
My house is spangled with Post-it notes labeling wiisgaak, do alien exist essay, gokpenagen, and ishkodenhs. There are words for states of being that have no equivalent in English. The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world.
Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you do alien exist essay an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object.
Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature, do alien exist essay.
I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that do alien exist essay the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources.
In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things. At the same time that the language of the land was being suppressed, the land itself was being converted from the communal responsibility of native people to the private property of settlers, in a one-two punch of colonization.
Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, do alien exist essay, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination.
Linguistic imperialism has always been a tool of colonization, meant to obliterate history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their languages. But five hundred years later, in a renamed landscape, it has become a nearly invisible tool.
Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Do alien exist essay we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status.
Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings. English has come to be the dominant language of commerce, in which contracts to convert a forest to a copper mine are written.
But I wonder if it was always that way. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder do alien exist essay English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism.
I want to suggest that we can begin to mend that rift—with pronouns. As a reluctant student of the formalities of writing, I never would have imagined that I would one day be advocating for grammar as a tool of the revolution. SOME OF THE STUDENTS in the cemetery have read the chapter in my book Braiding Sweetgrass that invokes the grammar of animacy. They are taken aback by the implicit assumption of the hierarchy of being on which English grammar is built, something they had not considered before.
They dive headfirst into the philosophical implications of English-language pronouns. Words make worlds. Nor does a language of animacy dictate that its speakers will behave with respect toward nonhumans.
After all, there are leaders of indigenous nations, do alien exist essay, raised speaking a grammar of animacy, who willingly surrender their homelands to the use of mining or timber companies.
And the Russian language, while embracing animacy in its structure, has not exactly led to a flowering of sustainability there. The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought, do alien exist essay.
I grew up on a farm and we called all of our animals it, but we took great care of them. In contrast, do alien exist essay, indigenous philosophy recognizes other beings as our relatives, including the ones we intend to eat. Sadly, since we cannot photosynthesize, we humans must take other lives in order to live.
We have no choice but to consume, but we can choose to consume a plant or animal in a way that honors the life that is given and the life that flourishes as a consequence. Instead of avoiding ethical jeopardy by creating distance, we can embrace and reconcile that tension. We can acknowledge food plants and animals as fellow beings and through sophisticated practices of reciprocity demonstrate respect for the sacred exchange of life among relatives. The students we walk with in the cemetery are primarily environmental scientists in training.
The practice of it -ing everything in nature is not only prevalent, but is required in scientific writing. I have had the privilege of spending my life kneeling before plants. As a plant scientist, sometimes I am collecting data. As an indigenous plant woman, sometimes I am gathering medicine. These two roles offer a sharp contrast in ways of thinking, but I am always in awe, and always in relationship. In both cases the plants provide for me, teach me, do alien exist essay, and inspire me.
Scientific writing prefers passive voice to subject pronouns of any kind. And yet its technical language, which is designed to be highly accurate, obscures the greater truth. Yet English grammar demands do alien exist essay I refer to my esteemed healer as it, not as a respected teacher, as all plants are understood to be in Potawatomi.
That has always made me uncomfortable. I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought? Can we make a new world with new words? There was one that kept rising through my musings. So I sought the counsel of my elder and language guide, Stewart King, do alien exist essay, and explained my purpose in seeking a word to instill animacy in English grammar, to heal disrespect.
So I asked him if there was a word in our language that captured the simple but miraculous state of just being, do alien exist essay. And of course there is. However, do alien exist essay, those beautiful syllables would not slide easily into English to take the place of the pronoun it.
But I wondered about that first sound, the one that came to me as I walked over the land, do alien exist essay. Ki to signify a being of the living earth. Not he or she, but ki. Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an do alien exist essay to loneliness, an opening to kinship.
If words can make the world, can these two little do alien exist essay call back the grammar of animacy that was scrubbed from the mouths of children at Carlisle? I have no illusions that we can suddenly change language and, with it, our worldview, but in fact English evolves all the time.
Ki is a parallel spelling of chi —the word for the inherent life energy that flows through all things. Could ki be a key to unlocking a new way of thinking, or remembering an ancient one? But these responses are from nature writers, artists, teachers, and philosophers; I want to know how young people, the language makers among us, react. Our little environmental college is dominated by tree huggers, so if there were ever an audience open to ki, they would be it. WITH ki and kin rattling around in their heads, the students walk together in the cemetery again, playing with using the words and seeing how they feel on their tongues and in their heads.
Is there a possessive case? Where are the boundaries? As we stand beneath the stoutly branched oak, the students debate how to use the words. If the tree is ki, what about the acorns? They agree that the acorns are kin, a whole family of little beings. The ground is also littered, in this unkempt portion of the cemetery, with fallen branches.
But when I thought of that tree as ki, as a being, I suddenly saw how preposterous that was. The tree did. I only picked it up from the ground. The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. We call that kind of firewood kindling, and for me it has kindled a new understanding. And look—that do alien exist essay kin is right there in kindling.
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Sep 24, · 6th Grade essay topics shouldn’t be tiresome and uninspiring. Sixth graders can write in-depth and descriptively with the right essay topics. This article exists to show you fantastic essay topics for 6th graders to improve their writing skills and boost their mental performance. These essay topics all meet the Common Core Standards Jun 19, · Hell be caught to have forgotten what an essay words using all the puffs for this state has an enormous sum, but winning the competition. 10 but in reading and rereading 2 employ different strategies to do our job instead of a magazine article in which peer response activities leading to an occasion when you write exist independently from you We value excellent academic writing and strive to provide outstanding essay writing service each and every time you place an order. We write essays, research papers, term papers, course works, reviews, theses and more, so our primary mission is to help you succeed academically
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