Log 11

Due to the strong winds we have been experiencing lately, salt has been getting lifted out of the water and thrown onto the ship. Every time I touch something, I have a coating of sea salt on my hand.

Happy News! The Bering Sea won Trident Trivia last night. Our prize is early points towards Sea Olympics. I am not sure how many points we get, but hey, we are currently winning!

I am sitting in Environmental Ethics right now and I have the hardest time keeping myself interested. I took this class because it qualifies to cover my Ethics Gen. Ed. requirement for Umaine. I thought it was going to be interesting, but I just cannot get myself to find this interesting. Maybe it is the course itself, or maybe it is the professor, I don’t know. This professor is a religions expert and an expert on deep ecology. I think my issue with this class is that it is not purely scientific. It isn’t a situation where they ask what biodiversity is, but instead ask what is its importance to us. And I am finely tuned by my professors back at Umaine to think of all of the reasons we should fix the ocean for the ocean. But here, in this class, we touch on fixing the ocean, because humans benefit from the organism. But that is just the thing. We haven’t even begun to talk about conservation efforts and the possible ethical questions that go with it. We are talking about an ecological sense of self. Meaning, the processes of a human realizing we are all part of the surrounding world and interconnected with all other organism. I understand this is a philosophy class, but if one of you were to sit in on this class, you would think it is an environmental religion class. You almost get the feel that the professor is preaching to you about seeing yourself as part of the world around you.

I think that perhaps I feel this way because I had different expectations for the class. I expected to be given a scenario such as: conservational efforts to increase the number of sea turtles that make it to the ocean. Then with that, discuss the benefits and costs of this conservational effort.