Chantelle Koellner
Film and Culture: Thursday 5:30-9:20pm
April 30th 2015
What are the five most important aspects of culture you have learned while taking this
class?
Theater 1070 was a class I took and one that I was really happy I enrolled
myself in. I thought to myself, what about theater and film will I need to know that
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will coincide with what I am majoring in down the road? Stepping into the classroom
and watching many great informative and interesting movies, I found theater class to
be quite useful. It opened up my eyes to many other societal issues and difficulties
that certain “cliques” have to face, that I haven’t thought about or realized before. It
taught me a little about each of the different aspects of culture including, religion,
education, transportation, and so forth. Culture has important societal functions that
make an individual feel part of a group. Culture contributes to a person’s identity and
how they may view themselves and that group they are a part of.
Culture and Nation are often treated as the same term, although some nations
are made up of one cultural group, most nations contain multiple cultures within their
precincts. The U.S being a nation with a variety of cultural groups being born from
here is a good example. The cultures within the nation certainly have influences on
the regulations that the U.S may develop, but a culture does not necessarily determine
those policies. Within our culture we have different elements that place us in certain
groups or cliques. Cultures can be influenced to change weather it’s through
technology, or transportation ideas that are to help improve the environment, and start
making more conscious environmental choices in our daily lives like recycling. There
are other steps that need to be taken in order for change to happen within a culture.
Edgar Schein, an American professor explores extensively in the behavior that differs
between organizations, to develop a model to visually show culture within an
organization. Changes should be for the sake of our health, environment, nature, and
overall for less polluted food and world.
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With industrial farm animal production factories at the top for causes of
pollution by The United Nations: food and agriculture organization published in 2006,
“Livestock’s long shadow”. While factory farming methods still over crowd and stuff
animals in warehouse type environments, before slaughtering them along with massproducing their meat. “It is an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damages
the environment around us.” States the Pew Commission on industrial farm animal
production. I really feel that food is a very important topic for me as an individual. I
grow my own herbs and wish I had enough space to grow a huge garden. I live in a
small apartment and am limited to space, but I am always up for the challenge to be
creative when cooking and I get to do so on a daily basis. I am all about wanting to
eat healthier, so I started a small garden on my porch, but then I got to thinking, sure I
bought organic soil, organic seeds, and voila! I have organic produce. Well then I
started to think, what about our environment, this awful smog that sits in the Salt
Lake Valley, polluting everything it encases, I know this isn’t the only place so what
is it doing to our environment when we mass produce our meat. Farm factories
produce tens of millions of tons worth of animal waste and agricultural chemicals that
get pumped into the environment each year pouring into our water, our land, and of
course our life reliant air in the process. We all need to have that mentality the Food
Empowerment Project reflects to be aware of pollutants that are harming our
environment. They argue that becoming vegan is a much healthier option for our
health and the health of animals. Animal agriculture is responsible for contributing to
more than half of our humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions argued by Robert
Goodland and Jeff Anhang, in “Livestock and Climate Change.” Factory farms are
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responsible for more than half of the world’s pollution, which is created by us
humans, leaving 37% percent work of anthropogenic methane gas in the air. Methane
gas is 23 times more potent then carbon monoxide claims The United Nations, in
“Food and Agricultural Organization,” in 2006. Alix Fano argues that farmers use 750
million pounds worth and about 20,000 different agricultural chemicals a year, in his
published 1997 “Lethal Laws,” novel. Factory Farming is the leading role in our
climate change crisis. The EPA currently does not have authority to regulate the U.S.
livestock industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. The two primary sources of factory
farm pollution comes from the waste produce from the animals farms, and the
agricultural chemicals they use each year, harming our environment, the air, and our
water. Although, there are many other causes that contribute to our land, water and air
pollution, we need to be more conscious of what it is doing to our environment. The
point is that American meat consumers should decrease the amount they consume.
Americans still eat more meat per person here, with Luxembourger’s society at the
highest, but Americans still consume more meat than any other countries here on
earth. With individuals consuming 270.7 pounds of meat annually. Potentially what
we are using by just participating in eating one quarter-pound hamburger is 6.7
pounds of grains that feed that animals, and 52.8 gallons of drinking water and
irrigation water for the crops made to feed the livestock. About 74.5 square feet go to
grazing grass and areas for growing crops for those animals that we eat, and also on
fossil fuel energy we use 1,036 Btus to produce the feed and transportation. Which is
equivalent to 18 minutes worth of power for a microwave. We must stop massproducing if we want to stop polluting our environment land and water.
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Religion is defined by Clifford Geertz as an organized collection of beliefs and
cultural systems used to relate humanity to an order of existence. “The Global Index
of Religiosity and Atheism,” by WIN-Gallup international shows a global 2012 poll
reporting 59% of the world’s population as religious with 36% not religious. I used to
be more of a religious person when I was younger, and I had god to believe in.
However, once I became aware of how much religion can dictate your life, and
having that experience of a bishop tell me what I can and cannot do in my personal
sex life, seemed to me as crossing the line. I am a very cheerful, polite, and caring
individual who strongly pays attention to the way I treat people and what I say or do
around them. To have a bishop tell me that I am a high-leveled sinner for living with
my partner before being married, and word for word was “your sins that you have
committed are two levels away from murder.” Because of this statement I was truly
hurt, confused, and felt lost, not to mention guilty. This statement is what led me into
falling out of belief in any god; it is when I lost my faith and had very little hope and
security and desire to be part of religion. Watching some of the movies on religion in
class, really just amplified my desire to not be part of a religion. I am slowly starting
to view religion as True Corporation. My life hasn’t come to a complete disaster since
not believing in god is what I chose to do, soon after my experience with the bishop,
and that is what they want you to think, that you are nothing without god. In John
15:5 it states “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in me, and I in him,
he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Religion use to be an
important part of me, my intermediate family is very religious and so this is still a
continuous struggle, my family doesn’t know that I have completely stopped
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believing in god and religion. When I hint towards not relying on god to help me in
my difficulties, it seems they are so quick to stop me and say everything we have is
because of him. It is a very deep, and complex belief that ridding someone of it seems
almost impossible because so many of us rely on it.
I have always been intrigued with other cultures, their behaviors, beliefs, and
customs. The different aspects of culture is what help distinguish different individuals
through sets of values, attitudes, and behaviors that is shared by a group of people, yet
it still differs between each individual, that is communicated between one generations
to the next, claimed by many psychologists. Learning about different cultures is
important because the world is enlaced with variety of languages and with that comes
different ways to interpret the world in itself.