Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 30

Jo and Joe College never think about it this way, but a dorm room is a natural landscape. It’s not sublime, like the Rocky Mountains or the pounding ocean surf. It’s not picturesque, like the winding paths in parks or the rocky outcrops on the most attractive college campuses. But it is an environment, the habitat where students spend a large part of college life. Like a landscape painting, it’s also a cultural composition of nature, revealing the relationships of people to the natural world. In this landscape, we can see how people shape nature for their own ends, including aesthetic aspirations. To some extent dorm rooms are a museum of college life: Each of the artifacts on display has a story to tell, and all of the stories together add up to college culture.¹³

Biosphere and Buyosphere

Biosphere: Sphere of Life	Buyosphere: Sphere of Commercial Life
Ecosystems	Eco(nomic)systems
Ecosystem services	Business services, consumer services
Inhabitants	Consumers
Organisms	Organizations
Photosynthesis	Faux syntheses, chemical concoctions
Plants and animals in habitats	Habits in a habitat of consumption
Resource flows	Resource extraction
Gift economy	Market economy
A small world, after all	A mall world, after all
Environments intact	Environmental impacts
Evolution, natural selection	Fashion, cultural selection
Life	“The good life”
Natural cycles	“Progress”
Waste=food	Waste=waste
Commodious	Commodified
Solar-powered	Fossil-fueled
Self-sustaining	Unsustainable
The biosphere is the thin and fragile layer of air and land and water that supports all life on Earth. From space, it’s a thin strip of vitality on the Earth’s crust poised between an otherwise dead planet and the dead expanses of space. If the Earth were an apple, the biosphere would be no larger than the apple’s skin. The buyosphere is the lively sphere of commercial life that conditions much of the consciousness in the developed world. Sometimes, therefore, it seems like it’s a mall world, but the buyosphere is really just a small world inside the small envelope of the biosphere.