Flamingos and SUV;ideality and material world(week2)

The reading material originally looked at human culture in contrast to the environment. It was focused on separating or saving the environment from human interference.

It looks at the ideology or beliefs people have about nature and the environment. the reading mainly focus on material world, or actual physical effect or consequences of human action on the natural world.

in the case study,Jennifer Price noted that for Americans there are many more plastic flamingos than real ones. We can see the same thing in China, which is famous for the giant panda. Nearly every tourist takes home a stuffed panda toy, but nobody I know has ever seen a real panda outside of a zoo.

An another example:William Rollins wrote about the SUV in the United States, it is sold as a back-to-nature escape vehicle, but most SUV owners never go near the wilderness areas. In China SUVs are popular with the middle class. These people are so busy working to maintain their lifestyle, so they never have time to travel the long distances to wild areas where they could interact with the real natural world.

In conclusion the difference is between ideality and material world. For example, people who live in the countryside where the world is still fairly clean and people do not worry about so many problems, their focus is on the economic side, however people who live in the urban such as Shang Hai and Beijing, where they do have material wealth for modern life and access to this things is starting worry about the environment because they see the problems. So is kind of dialectical.