(SLP) Fishing with the Family, to preserve & protect

My student learning project consisted of day fishing with my family. This was not your ordinary day of fishing, this was a both a learning experience and the passing down of a lifelong heritage. Gaard goes into the traditions of the Makah and how a culture needs to be protected

“To support their claim, the Makah point to their tribe’s over two-thousand-year-old tradition of whale hunting. Tribes around the Puget Sound area as well as up and down the Pacific Coast have long recognized the Makah as a whaling nation. To the Makah, waling is a crucial part of their cultural identity.”(p.6)

Every time I take my family out on fishing or hunting trips I do my best to teach them about how important nature is. Not only to the sustainment we need to survive, but for the existence of life itself. I would like them to take on the goal of conservation. This entails the continuing existing of an ecosystem and everything involved in it. This process limits the suffering of animals to only death; if the process is done properly there should be no suffering at all. This is a process that must be understood, we need food to survive and animals are a source of that substance. I do not believe in the suffering of animals, like the ones on the factory farms. Pollen explains this in his readings.

“Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.”(New York times post, An Animals Place)

By becoming self-sustainable we can eliminate the factory farms all together. This puts the reality of the death the animals go through, hopefully changing the mind of people about factory farms with the torture of animals.

Teaching my family how to fish is a great way to spend time with them, and at the same time I can hopefully change the future. This also allows us to get away from the anthropocentric ways and understand why we don’t take the small fish or pregnant ones. It is important to see the ecosystem as a whole, and it does not center on us but we must work together with every part in it to survive.

Also learned in the experience is how challenging it can be to become self sustainable. This teaches us to use the entire animal to its fullest not wasting any of it. A lot of people forget to realize the problems we would encounter without population control. This would lead to a widespread disease and the destruction of an ecosystem. Leopold has a good statement on the balance of nature.

“The image commonly employed in conservation education is “the balance of nature.”For reasons too lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech fails to describe accurately what little we know about the land mechanism.”(p.114)

Do I think things need to stay the way they are, NO we need to find change not only for our family but for the existence of the planet as we know it. By getting back to nature, like we did by fishing, we see the impact of the issues affecting the world today. We come face to face with issue like pollution, over population, and the destruction to all our natural environments. When we come face to face with the problems at hand, we as the people will be more likely to do something about it.