Helen Viramontes

Helen Viramontes presents several interesting aspects of literary creativity that I would like to discuss. Her book gave me insight, honestly, into a new cultural perspective. Now, I understand her book is fiction, but all the same, it provides a different cultural perspective.
I grew up with a Mother, Father, and one Sister. More or less, this is a traditional family in the United States. My Father works in the production sector, and my mother works in business and both have worked hard to provide incomes that support my sister and myself. We have not lived in either the wealthy class, nor the under the poverty line, but rather right in the middle, comfortably enjoying the life that has been bestowed upon us.

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As the presidential election approaches and I read a little about both Obama and Romney – trying to stay neutral while gathering information – I wondered how important environmental issues are in this election. So I went back on both Obama’s and Romney’s websites and looked for what they had to say about the environment. I was very surprised when I realized that environment protection takes so little space on their websites. Of course, they discuss energy, but they are both mostly interested in how to make the United States independent when it comes to energy, how to cut the need of other countries for oil, how new energy technologies will create jobs and boost the economy. For such a large country, I thought protecting the environment, protecting nature, would be a bigger issue.

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Out of many of the metaphors that Charles Darwin uses, one that sticks out greatly is that nature is a war. This metaphor can be seen in very many places–even those where he relates nature to something completely different like a web or a tree. No matter what it is, evolution in general comes down to the survival of the fittest. While all the metaphors are valid, the war is a reality that we all have to live with–one of the reasons we can never truly be at peace…because

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Charles Darwin has become a very influential literary and scientific figure with his environmental text On the Origin of Species. I have a great love for playing video games as well as learning more about how video games have changed since I was a child. From my observations, I have found that Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species also applies to the evolution of video games. The process of natural selection and the struggle for existence from Darwin can be applied to the evolution of video games.

Today, there is a huge “Console War” between three major video game companies: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. These companies have been battling each other for the past decade in their efforts of staying alive and profiting in the home video game market. They have developed new games in order for their games’ elements to be passed on to the next generation of games. This is compared to Darwin’s theory of the struggle for existence where species must survive in order to pass on their traits to the next generation. These game companies are competing for their dominance of the home console market and their ability to develop new consoles and games for consumers to play. They are constantly battling in order to survive and pass on traits of their games to the next generation of gaming. Game companies’ success in the market allows for Darwin’s theory of natural selection to take effect.

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After reading silent spring sections for tuesdays class and I was curious about what peoples response was to her books. After doing a little research I found out that Rachel Carson was highly criticize. “The weekly Human Events gave Silent Spring an “honorable mention” in its list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” along with just this one quote I found many more things that she ended being criticized even though they did not have the technology yet to find out those things. The book did point to problems that had not been adequately addressed, such as the effects of DDT on some wildlife. However, she did not realize that DDT helped keep Malaria down by killing the mosquitos.

She was also supported, According to a TIME magazine article in 1999, a year or two after it was out,  ”all but the most self-serving of Carson’s attackers were backing rapidly toward safer ground. In their ugly campaign to reduce a brave scientist’s protest to a matter of public relations, the chemical interests had only increased public awareness.”

I feel that Silent Springs did what Carson wanted it to do. Although Carson may have not realized how important her book would become I think that by Silent Spring being so controversial has helped bring out the issue of pesticides, making it a prominent issue that is discussed from both sides. Although, Carson did not have the scientific methods that we now use, she still spent her last days finalizing her book to bring the issue to the public eye. She utilized every discourse that should could so that her book could be read from a scientific view to be read by the everyday citizen.

As a side-note: In class we looked at some images of Darwin’s hand drawn evolutionary trees, and professor Siperstein said he’d concluded that lemurs were the original relative of humans. That information sounded familiar to me, so I tried to research if that was true. From what I can find, lemurs were the first primate to evolve, which lead to apes, monkeys, and us. It boggles my mind that Darwin was able to deduce, without genetics, that lemurs gave rise to the rest of the primates correctly, since they look more like cats than monkeys. It’s an example of the trust he had in methodical observation and empirical data, and his unwillingness to settle for the easy explanation…

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