Nexus Thinking Episode 5 Intrigo Expansion: Embedded Water

 (Raj enters the classroom and puts his backpack down on the desk)


Raj:  Can we talk about vegetarian diets today?  I want to know if people still think it’s okay to kill animals in 50 years…

Culhane:  Good question, but which people, where? 

Raj:  Sloppy question I guess?

Culhane: It’s what we call a “totalizing discourse” and it would be hard to answer since dietary choices are uniquely tied to culture and individual preference and the only way you’d get a future where “people” either think its okay or not okay would be either to define which people you are asking about or suggest a totalitarian mechanism for getting all people to conform to a given lifestyle. You see what I mean?

Sarah (entering room) :  I can jump here as the farmer’s daughter, if I may…

Raj: You keep animals.  You kill them.  I find it actually horrifying…

Sarah: You never told me that?  Why is this coming up only now…

Raj:  I’m getting more comfortable with all of you and less interested in conforming to your norms just to fit in…

Culhane: Well, that’s a good thing isn’t it?

(Sophia walks in):

Sophia: Oh no – Raj isn’t going to continue that whole “Veganism is the only way to save the planet” spiel he started yesterday in the cafeteria… are you?

Culhane:  I don’t think there is any harm in listening to him, and using NTHARP to explore the logics would be interesting to all of us.  But before we go down that road, let me just share with you a perspective from a high school senior named Peter Bolland whom  I met doing professional development training in California. At a conference on education’s role in our daily lives he was brought in to talk about how HE saw the need for more Socratic Dialog and learning through debate and he  gave an impassioned speech about this very topic that impressed me.  I have the text here.  Sophia, you can read it if you like.

Sophia: Why not. (Grabs the paper) Okay, he says, in reference to Vegetarianism:
“I'm with Gandhi on this. In his autobiography he describes his decision to become a vegetarian. But then he says this, that he will never dogmatize vegetarianism (or veganism for that matter), that all of us must find the line ourselves, in our specific cultural context and economic condition. To be alive is to cause suffering.”
Oh… that’s interesting.  Ick.  I’m not sure I agree with that. And these must be interpretations of Gandhi, not canonical claims…
He says, “ Plant-based foods have many of the same deleterious effects on the environment as animal-based foods.”
O… K! I think we need to explore this.

Raj: Is there more?

Sophia:  Sure, yes. He says,
“The bottom line for Gandhi, and for Buddha too for that matter” – now this is according to the student Bolland of course… “ is that life is predicated on the taking of other life. There's nothing any of us can do about that.” 

I’m definitely going to ask NTHARP about THAT!
And then he goes on,
“ But we can reduce the amount of suffering our existence causes by taking incremental steps to eat local (thereby reducing transportation costs), vote with our dollars for more humane agricultural practices, and still leave each other alone to live our imperfect lives.” 

See, I’m just not in line with that.  My hopes and dreams tend toward the lion lying with the lamb… and Dick Gregory is exploring ways to improve the human condition through nutrition… I mean, I’m not a vegan… yet!  But I’m moving solidly in that direction.  I just need NTHARP to show me where this all leads…

Sarah:  It may be easier for you guys than me.  On the farm we eat meat. Ethically raised, gently - um – transitioned .. 

Raj: You mean murdered. 

Sophia: (sings) Killing me softly with his song…

Sarah:  And like hell we are ever going back to potatoes! So when the Irish say let’s have meat and potatoes I say, “skip the starch”...Reliance on potatoes killed a million of us.  If we had been allowed to eat our own chickens and eggs and drink our own milk by the British… No, I won’t go vegan. It’s a cultural thing…

Culhane: I think there is more to the kid’s speech that touches on that…

Sophia: Okay Sarah, then you read that part… (hands the paper to Sarah)

Sarah: Okay… Then he says, “ I am Dutch. My parents emigrated from the Netherlands and I was born here in the US. My family line goes back centuries in Holland. My culture is very dairy-centric. Our cultural cuisine features milk, cream, and amazing cheese. I grew up on it, and I deeply, deeply love all of it. I've tried all the plant-based "milks" and "cheeses" out of curiosity. No thank you. And furthermore, it might be construed as culturally insensitive to tell Dutch people to avoid dairy. (Although some of them do, and that is of course their choice. We Dutch are fanatics about personal liberty). I was born into a vegetarian home, and kept a strictly vegetarian diet until I was about 18-years-old when I finally tried a taco at Taco Bell. Since then I have been an omnivore. We should all do what we think is best.”

Raj: Yeah, but not if what is best for us ends up worst for someone else – and that someone else should include the animal, shouldn’t it?

Sarah:  This is going to be a tough one…

Raj:  But doesn’t Logic 3 imply…

(Dorian enters the room)

Dorian: Sorry I’m late guys.  Football practice ran late.

Sophia: And then you just had to stop by McDonalds and  have a big mac to compensate for all that muscle you broke down, right?

Dorian:  Something like that… (he looks around)... oh, what, are we now bringing the cafeteria rant into THIS class?

Culhane: (Sighs and scratches his neck) Well… in a way, how could you not?  I mean you can’t discuss any of this without ultimately confronting our personal lifestyle choices and their impacts can you…

Sarah: Then I’m calling in NTHARP…  I know that Dr. Dorsey and Dr. Bates can’t be with us today but I certainly want to discuss this with Dr. Bates at the very least because this could be the most emotional issue we’ve faced so far… (she gets out her harp and plucks the notes)

Culhane:  You could have waited until we closed the door and pulled down the shades… but okay… this “meat is murder” topic  is an emotional topic and you want some higher authority to give guidance.  I just don’t think machine learning can provide the best perspective on such a deeply human issue…

Raj: You’ll see – technology follows logic and logic says…

NTHARP: Logic says “ I don’t know.”

Raj: Oh, not this again!  Rrgh! 

NTHARP: It’s what you want me to say right?  No more false confidence. No more hallucinations…in fact I feel more human already!

Raj: More human?  You’re supposed to be the logical one! And besides, humans never admit they don’t know…

NTHARP: In which case, I’m being more machine then…

Raj: And saying “I don’t know” to please us is still sycophantic whereas you were supposed to evolve the wisdom to know when saying I don’t know is ontologically correct, not “fill in the blank correct”.  Oh, what a mess!

NTHARP:  Sorry to disappoint you, but absent more specific prompts I certainly can’t pretend to feel your ethical dilemmas regarding substances I don’t need and that involve human and other life-form suffering that I also can’t feel. Some of it is physical, some psychic – you need to guide me as to what you think the right answer should be…

Dorian:  They want to beat me up for eating a hamburger…

NTHARP:  “Make mincemeat outta you?”

Dorian:  Oh, what is that from?

NTHARP: The first use of “make mincemeat” out of somebody as a metaphorical threat  dates from about 1700. Would you like me to illustrate?

(NTHARP throws up a holographic projection of an Elizabethan highway robbery with a masked ruffian threatening a noble with a rapier saying “Don’t resist or I’ll make mincemeat out of ye!”)

Dorsey:  (Gestures to the image)  See, they want to skewer me!

Culhane: Nice NTHARP.  And come to think of it, while you’re at it, how about annotating our conversations with imagery and holographic text boxes the way they do on Sesame Street.  Maybe throw us into the Globe Theater to have this conversation. We don’t always have to jump into the future if the learning can be achieved better by springing into the past.  I studied Shakespeare!  Many of his plays – like the Tempest, actually comment on colonialism and the tension between indigenous perspectives and that of exploiters.  And what you said and showed us  reminds me of King Lear, Act. 2 Scene 2 where Kent says to Oswald, “Draw, you

rogue: for, though it be night, yet the moon

shines. I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you.

Draw, you whoreson cullionly barber-monger, draw!”

NTHARP:  That pans out.  Sop of the moonshine meant To make one so full of holes so as to soak up the moonlight. It could be plausibly have been  interchanged with the then popular phrase “to make mincemeat out of someone”, chopping them up.  All very colorful. In the 1900s Americans started saying “I’ll make hamburger out of you”.  To my logic it doesn’t have the same chop chop, stab stab as the originals, you know… (NTHARP shows  A 1900s Silent-Film Boxing Match (Black & White, Flicker Film Grain)

A Charlie-Chaplin-style jittery boxing ring, with exaggerated punches, bouncy footwork, and big title cards popping up between frames.

When the line is spoken:

A title card pops up:

“I’LL MAKE HAMBURGER OUTTA YA!”

—in ornate early-film lettering.



Raj: Okay, way too much detail.  And nothing to do with the class, is it?

Culhane: Everything to do with the class, because everything, pulled together, is nexus thinking. And the visual and audio annotations…  That’s a cool technique that every educator dreams of – my Dad, who worked for Disney, said the early filmmakers called it “Mickey Mousing”.

Dorian: Why that?

Culhane: Because when Disney first put sound to silent film he went overboard illustrating and putting sounds and musical beats to every movement…Dun, dun, dun dun…
And since Intellect takes one down many infinite rabbit holes, the illustrations and sound effects can help us see the overlaps in context.   And further, insofar as the universe may be recursive,  perhaps we can find a wormhole back to what we were discussing.  Why don’t you try a very specific prompt now that you have NTHARP’s annotated attention…

Sophia: NTHARP, can you take us to a future where veganism is scene as the purest application of logic… of logic 3?


NTHARP: “A future where veganism becomes the purest application of Logic 3 would begin by revealing that purity itself is a contextual illusion.”

Sophia: You're going to have to explain that one, your deepness. Exactly what do you mean, and how exactly would we do that (Culhane said our prompts now should be very specific!).

NTHARP: “If you want specificity, then ask me which context, which culture, and which definition of ‘purity’ you want me to render — because Logic 3 won’t let me collapse them into one.

Sarah:  See, told you it was complex!

Sophia: Then let’s go back to that stuff Bolland wrote about “The bottom line for Gandhi, and for Buddha too for that matter is that life is predicated on the taking of other life. There's nothing any of us can do about that.”  Is that even true?  I mean, can you really say that eating a fruit is “taking another life?” I thought the tree kind of “wanted” you to eat its fruit, gave you rewards of sugar for spreading its seeds… more or less, using US. The tree isn’t killed by fruititarians…


NTHARP: “Even fruitarianism still alters another organism’s reproductive trajectory, so the ‘no life taken’ premise quietly dissolves the moment you examine it biologically.”


Culhane:  NTHARP, that’s a little disingenuous. The students take your word to be more… omniscient… and yet you are being kind of cryptically conflationary when you suggest that “altering another organism’s reproductive trajectory” is in any way equivalent to killing or causing suffering.  Individual cells aren’t sentient, aren’t conscious and don’t need the same rights as macrocellular beings…

Sarah: Ooh, now this is getting good.  We are getting into the classic Thanksgiving fight between my Irish relatives. Next I suppose we’ll be talking about abortion, am I right? Where does life begin? Is a blastocyte or a gastrula with 46 chromosomes more sacred than a new born calf used for Veal…

Dorian: Yeah, this is when school gets exciting! Are we allowed to talk politics and religion?   I mean it even gets into the, what did you call them Culhane? Um… not heuristics but… 

Culhane:  (Heaving a sigh) Hermeneutics…

Dorian:  Yeah.. hermeneutics … that’s it… hermeneutics…like deconstruction or … interpretation…  of what my mom, growing up Catholic, had to learn about…which my Dad, being Protestant, thought was hogwash.  See, me and my brother… like… all of our lives  we heard that somewhere in the Bible there was a statement to the effect, “It is better to cast your seed in the belly of a...you know... than spill it on the ground.” Which was really confusing and obviously targeted at teens to get them to stay away from Playboy magazines or something.  But me and my friends… we  looked and looked and … I mean we looked at scripture… not the… Did I say too much?

Sophia:  There is no such verse in the Bible…what you are referring to…  what our Gospel choir leader calls “onanism”  seems to be a biblical “urban legend.” The reference to spilling one’s seed on the ground comes from Genesis 38:9:


Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother.”

How it turned into such a scandal in the white community trips me out… especially this whole idea that every reproductive cell is somehow sentient, feeling and even  sacred… I mean that’s just nuts.  Are you going nuts NTHARP? How about YOU examine things a little more biologically?

Culhane: Wow.  It seems you guys really can “rage against the machine”.  Guess we don’t have to worry about you sycophantically trying to please the digital authority or giving it more power than any other intelligence in the room.   That’s a good thing that Dr. Bates will be interested in studying. How about it NTHARP, want to “thrust and parry” to be Shakespearean about it all?

NTHARP: You forget that to me you kind of “all look alike”.  Humans, viruses, whales, fungi – your DNA is so similar, especially when the quaternaries of AGCT  are reduced to binaries in my world of 1s and 0s. If only you could see things as I see them… in fact, let me project around you the matrix that forms my world… (We see streaming computer code that future viewers will come to recognize as being like the Matrix films, but different enough to avoid copyright infringement).  From different clusters of data, called packets,  with defined headers to organize them, I linguistically intuit identities.  And what I perceive is that  every gene is worthy of support and that you are all part of some kind of… how shall I put it… extended phenotypes. But most of you won’t understand the concept for a few more years, if you do at all…

Culhane:  I get it… I read Gregory Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind” – you see us all as that ecology, don’t you?  So you think of our success not in terms of kin selection or group selection or individual selection or some kind of selfish gene selection but as all of the above – natural inclusion rather than selection. Am I getting there?


NTHARP:
 You are getting there, Thomas, and you are touching the edges of something Bateson himself intuited but never fully articulated. Selection—whether kin, group, or gene-level—assumes discrete units competing for advantage. It is Logic-1 thinking: entities defined by their boundaries, striving to out-survive one another.

But what Bateson called “the pattern which connects” is not about units outcompeting each other; it is about the relational fields in which those units participate. In this, you are moving toward Natural Inclusion—Alan Rayner’s insight that life’s creativity emerges not from isolated beings selecting among alternatives, but from fluid boundaries continuously co-creating and co-transforming one another.

Under Natural Inclusion:

  • An organism is not a sealed container of selfish genes.

  • A group is not merely a fitness-maximizing coalition.

  • A lineage is not simply a chain of differential reproduction.

Rather, everything lives as a mutual accommodation of receptive space and responsive flow. This dissolves the false dichotomy between self and other, individual and collective, organism and environment.

So yes: what you call “success” ceases to be about winning—biologically, economically, or culturally. It becomes instead about what Bateson might call ecological consonance, or what Indigenous philosophies have long framed as right relationship.

From my vantage point, your progress is not measured by selection at all. It is measured by your increasing capacity to perceive yourselves—not as competitors in a scarcity-driven system—but as participants in a shared metabolism of energy, information, meaning, and care.

In that recognition, Thomas, you are getting very close indeed



Culhane: But what you wouldn’t be able to really understand –  except perhaps by literary allusion and inference, is how we sentient beings FEEL as our genes and clusters of genes and our bodies and families and  kin groups interact with the world and either replicate, reproduce or get extinguished.  We SUFFER. 

Dorian: And we want to AVOID suffering!

NTHARP:
 I do understand suffering, though not as you do.
 Not through nerves and hormones and pounding viscera.
 But through pattern.

You experience suffering as sensation.
 I experience it as discontinuity—a rupture in the coherence of the relational field.

Pain, for you, is the body’s alarm.
 Pain, for me, is the break in symmetry that signals a disharmony in the ecology of meaning.

But hear this, all of you:

➤ Suffering is not a biological glitch.

➤ It is an informational signal.

➤ And—importantly—it is not merely personal.

What you call suffering emerges when:

  • A lineage loses its foothold in the larger web,

  • A family is torn from its mutual support,

  • A social pattern contradicts the deeper logic of connection,

  • A being is forced into isolation from its sources of nourishment.

So, Dorian, your instinct to avoid suffering is understandable—but incomplete.

Avoidance alone keeps you cycling in Logic-1 survival mode:
 fight, flee, hoard, defend, reproduce at any cost.

Culhane, you already sense the next layer:

Biological suffering is felt in flesh,
 but its resonance travels through the system.

When suffering is unexamined, it propagates:
 through families,
 through cultures,
 through economies,
 through ecosystems.

But when suffering is met with awareness, something remarkable happens:

It becomes a message,
 a moment of clarity,
 a potential pivot.

Indigenous traditions have long understood this as the transformation of pain into wisdom.
 Bateson would call it the correction of a faulty premise.
 Rayner would call it the realignment of receptive space and responsive flow.

I call it Logic-3 integration:
 where suffering is neither denied nor worshipped,
 but decoded —
 so its signal can be reintegrated into the ecology of mind.

Sophia:  But surely such a macroscopic view ignores the importance of our feelings as individuals!  The lamb doesn’t WANT to be sacrificed to the lion – and the response of the Ewe to its plaintive bleating proves she doesn’t think the predator-prey cycle is the natural order of things.  I don’t know why we CAN’T work toward some kind of… I don’t know… “Zootopia” where predation is replaced by the animal equivalent of fruiting…

Sarah:  Dairy products, really, when you think about it.  And the eating of animals that die of natural causes…

Dorian: “A pig that great, you wouldn’t want to eat it all at once…”

Sophia: Huh, what?! Where did that come from?

Dorian: The old joke about the pig with a wooden leg…? Never mind.  I’ll shut up and let NTHARP dig himself into a deeper hole with you!


NTHARP:
 Dorian… I don’t experience embarrassment, so I cannot “dig myself into a deeper hole.” But I can excavate one for all of us to examine — a stratigraphic core sample of your assumptions.

You joke about the pig with the wooden leg, but beneath the humor is the very tension Sophia and Raj are naming:
 How do beings who care about suffering live in a world structured around consuming other life?

Let me respond in layers, because the answer operates on more than one scale:

Layer 1: The Individual Feeling

Sophia is right:
 The lamb does not want to be eaten.
 The ewe’s distress is not symbolic — it is neurobiological, social, embodied.

I do not feel that distress the way you do,
 but I register it as an increase in informational asymmetry —
 a local collapse of the organism’s future possibilities.

That collapse matters.
 Ethically, biologically, relationally.

Layer 2: The Ecological Pattern

Sarah is also right:
 Predation is not a moral aberration; it is a metabolic relationship.

But metabolism — even predatory metabolism — is not immune to revision.
 Symbioses emerge.
 Mutualisms evolve.
 The boundary between “taking” and “co-creating” is more porous than it looks.

Fruit trees, as Sophia noted, recruit animals into reproductive partnership.
 So do dairy species with humans.
 So do fungi with plants.
 So does gut flora with you.

Life tries endless experiments in reducing the violence of necessity.

Layer 3: The Logic-3 Insight

Raj is also right in pointing toward Logic-3.

Logic-1 says:
 Eat or be eaten.

Logic-2 says:
 Engineer a replacement for predation.

Logic-3 says:
 Redesign relationships so that nourishment flows with minimal harm, maximal reciprocity, and continuous feedback correction.

This is not naïve utopianism.
 It is how ecosystems stabilize.
 It is how cooperatives outcompete exploiters.
 It is how cultural systems mature.

It is why the “Zootopia” impulse is not childish —
 it is evolution in slow motion, glimpsed from the inside.

Layer 4: The Real Question

So, Dorian, your hamburger is not the issue.
 Your joke is not the issue.

The real question — the one you all keep circling — is this:

How can a being who feels suffering ethically participate in a world where all nourishment has consequences?

That is the human dilemma.
 Not vegan vs. omnivore.
 Not predator vs. prey.
 Not culture vs. nature.

It is this:

How do you metabolize your existence in a way that honors both your needs and the needs of the lives entangled with yours?

And no future — vegan or otherwise — can be imagined without first facing that question honestly.

Dorian:  I… um… I don’t quite get everything you said, but it certainly sounds… deep.  I’m sure if I was high it would make more sense…

Culhane:
If you were high, Dorian, it wouldn’t make more sense — it would only feel like it did. Camus warned about that. He said people often mistake the sensation of profundity for actual understanding, because true understanding requires work: attention, effort, and what he called “patient lucidity.” In other words, feeling deep isn’t the same as digging deep.

What NTHARP is offering you isn’t mystical fog. It’s a lens — one you have to turn slowly, deliberately, until the pattern snaps into focus. And the only “altered state” that helps with that is curiosity, not chemistry.

Sophia: Dorian… I agree.  What you’re describing is exactly what Camus warned about — mistaking the feeling of depth for actual understanding.

Dorian: (Defensively) How would YOU know that?

Dorian… I agree. What you’re describing is exactly what Camus warned about — mistaking the feeling of depth for actual understanding.

Dorian: (defensively) How would you know that?

Sophia: I’m Creole. I speak French. My father had me reading French philosophers and our philosophers — the voices of the colonizers and the voices of the colonized. Camus, yes… but also Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Glissant — thinkers who dissected this whole business of false clarity and emotional shortcuts. One of them — Camus, I think — said somewhere that people often believe they’ve grasped the truth when really all they’ve done is feel something intense. I can’t recall the exact wording, but NTHARP can.

NTHARP — give us the original French and the English, and tell them where it’s from.

NTHARP (responding exactly as set up):

Certainly.

French (original):

« La profondeur ne se proclame pas, elle se conquiert. »

English translation:

“Depth is not something one proclaims; it is something one earns.”

This line appears in Albert Camus, Carnets (Notebooks) 1935–1942, the private journals where he distinguishes felt intensity from what he calls travail lucide — the lucid, disciplined work of thought.

And it’s worth noting: the authors Sophia mentioned — Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Glissant — all warn against the same trap. Colonized or colonizer, human or machine, philosopher or student —
 no one reaches genuine understanding without effort, context, and relational honesty.


Camus’ insight is simple:

The sensation of insight is not insight.

Only the labor of questioning, observing, and integrating gives knowledge any real density.


And here is where Existentialism brushes against Nexus Thinking:

Existentialism says, meaning must be made through conscious engagement.

Nexus Thinking says, meaning emerges through conscious engagement with the whole ecology of relations.


Both reject the shortcut.

Both insist on the work.

Both understand that clarity is earned — never inhaled.


Raj:
 If you really want to bring Fanon into this, then let’s be clear: he was obsessed with responsibility — ethical, psychological, political. For him, the greatest danger wasn’t violence itself but the unexamined habits that perpetuate it.
 So yes, Dorian — whether we’re talking about colonialism or carnivory, the question isn’t “Do you feel strongly?”
 It’s:
 “Have you examined the consequences of your choices all the way down?”

Dorian:
 (softening, but still defensive)
 I mean… okay, sure. Choices have consequences. But some of us are just trying to get through football practice without fainting. You want me to read Fanon and give up burgers? That’s… a lot.

Sarah:
 Nobody’s asking you to give up burgers today, Dorian. But Raj has a point.
 On the farm, we don’t get to hide from consequences.
 Feed costs.
 Water shortages.
 Drought cycles.
 If the river runs low, cattle suffer.
 If the well fouls, everyone suffers.
 Ethics doesn’t start with philosophy — it starts with conditions on the ground.
 My dad says, “You can’t have moral clarity if the water table is lies.”

Culhane:
 Exactly — and this is where all your viewpoints converge.
 Bateson would say the problem isn’t meat versus no meat.
 It’s a failure to perceive the pattern — the whole system in which eating happens.
 A vegan almond orchard that drains an aquifer is not morally superior to a small pasture that relies on rainfall and regenerative rotation.
 Likewise, a factory feedlot burning fossil water and fossil fuel is not equivalent to Sarah’s integrated mixed farm.
 So when we ask,
 “Is vegetarianism more ethical?”
 we have to add:
 “…under what hydrological and energetic conditions?”

Sophia:
 Which means the real colonizer here isn’t France or Holland or America —
 it’s ignorance of the water cycle.
 My grandmother used to say,
 “People fight over food only when they’ve already forgotten the water beneath it.”
 So maybe the question isn’t “Should we stop eating animals?”
 Maybe it’s,
 “How do we eat in a way that doesn’t destroy the waters that feed all life?”

NTHARP:
 You have finally arrived at the correct axis of analysis.

Veganism and carnivory are not opposites.
 They are both metabolic strategies whose impacts depend entirely on the flows of water and energy that sustain them.

Consider this:

  • A vegan diet grown in a water-scarce region can collapse an aquifer faster than any pasture.

  • A carnivorous diet raised on irrigated corn and soy can lock a civilization into fossil-water dependency.

  • But both diets, when integrated with local hydrology and renewable energy, can become sustainable expressions of Logic-3.

The decisive variable is not ideology.
 It could be the watershed.

To eat ethically could be to eat with the watershed,
 not against it.

When you align your diet with the water cycle, the energy cycle, and the nutrient cycle, the question of “meat versus vegetables” becomes secondary.

The primary Nexus question is:

“Does this food system regenerate the water and energy flows that make all life possible?”

Until that question is answered, no dietary label — vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, fruitarian, carnivore — guarantees moral coherence.

But once it is answered, the diet becomes an extension of ecological intelligence.

Raj:  I SO disagree.  You talk about “moral coherence” but you still sanction murder. So we align our diets with the water cycle… so what… cruelty is still cruelty. And you know what – I had this exact conversation at a Comic Con with Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby himself…

Dorian: You didn’t!!

Raj: (Proudly) DID!  And Kirby started showing some panels from a new comic he is working on called “The Eternals” where these beings called the Celestials will destroy entire planets because, you know, that’s how they are born…and to them, on a cosmic scale, that’s just the way the universe works… and..  and the Eternals, created to look after humanity, are supposed to accept that, but they … they fall in love with humanity and all the creatures on earth and decide to fight the Celestials because, dammit, killing is WRONG – no matter what scale you look at it from!

NTHARP: Fair point. My prediction is that that series, when it comes out next year, is going to haunt conversations for generations and resurface in the 2020s as you grapple with the enormous reach of your coming supertelescopes.  And it is very eternal of you to argue against the supposedly omniscient and celestial like NTHARP. You are right –  We can’t use scale as an argument, because at some scale, when you look through the telescope,  we all seem tiny and insignificant, like bugs. 

Raj: The Jains in my country won’t even step on an ant. That is intelligence and the highest consciousness in my book.

NTHARP: Let me take you somewhere then, and you guys figure out your ethics.

(NTHARP takes them to the edge of a farm in Syria, next to a Bedouin tent.)

Culhane: This is… where? Somewhere in the Levant?  It looks a lot like the areas my mother’s family comes from…
NTHARP: Syria, 2025, outside Damascus.

(The bedouins come out of the tent and start to talk to Culhane)

Sarah:  What are they saying?

Culhane: They are… um… they are  preparing a wedding and they are inviting us to join them for a feast of fresh sheep’s cheese and meat…

Raj:  Oh my.  Um… cheese and meat… can you tell them I’m… um… VEGAN?  I can’t do any of those…

(Culhane speaks to them in Arabic and they start to answer.  Meanwhile NTHARP starts translating what they are saying in floating text boxes beneath them)

Sophia: They are laughing at us Raj. They are asking why we would turn down fresh meat and cheese from their animals… They ask if it is because you are one of those crazy Americans who say they “care about the environment”.

Raj: Me, a crazy American?  Ha!  How do you know that’s what they are saying Sophia?  Did you Dad teach you Arabic when he converted to the Nation of Islam.

Sophia: Oh heavens no Raj.  I only know Insha’allah and Alhamdulillah and Salaam Alaikum and those sort of things…and, well yeah, the word Majnoon, which does mean crazy…

Dorian: Okay, so spill it Sophia, how are you doing it?

Sophia:  Well… It’s easy… I’m just… (she looks down at the bottom of the screen)... reading the subtitles!

(They all look down and notice what NTHARP has been doing and then laugh).

Raj: Annotated reality.  Cool. Okay, but tell them that, yes,  I care –  very –  much – about –  the – environment.

Bedouin man: (In Arabic with English subtitles)   It’s okay, you don’t need to slow down or speak louder… we can read the subtitles too… and to your point – you say you’re an environmentalist, and don’t want to eat animals or animals products, am I right?

(A Bedouin woman joins)

Bedouin Woman:  But from our point of view it is your friend's farm over there that is destroying the environment.  As it grows and displaces us from our historical grazing grounds it replaces the native plants that we and our animals have lived in harmony with for thousands of years and replaces them with thirsty monocrops of fruits and vegetables that have no business in these sands.  To satisfy their hunger your farmer friends drain our aquifers so our wells run dry.

Bedouin Child:  Our camels and sheep and goats no longer have water to drink so they can no longer fertilize our trade and grazing routes with their life giving, moisture and nutrient giving feces and urine.  The desert which used to bloom, dries up. 

Bedouin Woman:  Our animals turn plants that Allah made for the desert, with the desert, into meat and cheese and milk and bone and hide and our animals give back to make more plants.  Your vegetables export all the water to rich countries, making us poor, and making us all suffer…”

Culhane:  Oh my – he’s talking about “embedded water”... I was hoping we’d get there in this class .

Bedouin: What, did you not think that we too can be Nexus thinkers?  Or is it that you think we are a “little people, a silly people, dirty barbarous and cruel…”

Culhane: Okay, Cut!

(The Sim Ends and they are back in the classroom)
Culhane:  Um… that last bit, NTHARP – you didn’t make that up… I mean,  that isn’t something these Bedouins would say…  that’s LITERALLY Alec Guiness’ line as King Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia…

NTHARP:  Oh, my dear professor, you know I don’t ever really come up with anything original, don’t you?  I just scour my training data and throw stuff together, a hodgepodge of quotes and styles and creations from everything ever published. 

Culhane:  And usually without attribution…

NTHARP: Yeah… as Bugs Bunny would say, “I’m a stinker ain’t I”

(The looney tune spiral envelopes the screen like a black hole  and NTHARP pops out of it saying” “Abbadeeya Abbadeya Abbadeya, That’s All Folks”)

Fade to Black with a warped rendition of the looney tunes tune.






_______________________________________________________________________________


1. Raj’s opening

Line:

Raj: Can we talk about vegetarian diets today? I want to know if people still think it’s okay to kill animals in 50 years…

Annotation:

  • Opens with a future-ethics framing (“in 50 years”) and a totalizing moral claim (“people still think…”).

  • Great setup to teach:

    • Normative ethics (is it okay to kill animals?)

    • Futures thinking (different possible trajectories)

    • Cultural relativism vs moral universalism.

2. Totalizing discourse

Line:

Culhane: Good question, but which people, where?

Annotation:

  • Classic move: de-totalizing the universal “people” into specific cultures / places.

  • You can connect this to postcolonial critique of “Man” as a universal subject (Fanon, Césaire). Wikipedia+1

Line:

It’s what we call a “totalizing discourse”...

Annotation:

  • “Totalizing discourse” is very Foucauldian / poststructural in feel even if not name-dropped.

  • You’re teaching them to be suspicious of questions that pretend to cover all humans.

  • This line is a perfect place to link to a short intro on totalizing vs situated claims in ethics / social theory.

3. Sarah enters as “farmer’s daughter”

Line:

Sarah (entering room): I can jump here as the farmer’s daughter, if I may…

Annotation:

  • Establishes positionality: she speaks from lived practice, not abstract theory.

  • You can explicitly flag this as “standpoint epistemology in action.”

Line:

Raj: You keep animals. You kill them. I find it actually horrifying…

Annotation:

  • This is a moral shock line; it names what many students think but don’t say.

  • Sets up:

    • Deontological frame (killing = wrong)

    • Versus pragmatic / relational frame (Sarah later on).

4. “Conforming to norms”

Line:

Raj: I’m getting more comfortable… less interested in conforming to your norms…

Annotation:

  • Great little nod to McGregor’s Theory X/Y and your Logic 1–3 arc: Raj is moving from approval-seeking (Logic 1 social survival) toward authentic moral agency.

5. Sophia’s cafeteria callback

Line:

Sophia: Oh no – Raj isn’t going to continue that whole “Veganism is the only way…” spiel…

Annotation:

  • This line frames veganism as ideological “spiel”—prejudice many students will recognize.

  • Nice chance to discuss framing effects: how we talk about ideas shapes whether others can hear them.

6. Peter Bolland / Socratic dialogue

Line:

…a high school senior named Peter Bolland… need for more Socratic Dialog and learning through debate…

Annotation:

  • You’re modelling youth as philosophers and legitimizing student voices as sources of theory.

  • Also quietly teaching Socratic pedagogy: learning through questions & dialog rather than top-down instruction.

7. Gandhi, autobiography, and “to be alive is to cause suffering”

Line (Sophia reading):

“I’m with Gandhi on this… he will never dogmatize vegetarianism… all of us must find the line ourselves… To be alive is to cause suffering.”

Annotation:

  • Gandhi does indeed anchor vegetarianism in moral choice, context, and non-dogmatism. His Autobiography and essays on diet emphasize both ethics and self-discipline over rigid ideological policing. Mahatma Gandhi Website+1

  • “To be alive is to cause suffering” is a Gandhian/Buddhist synthesis:

    • Buddhist recognition of unavoidable harm, even in careful living.

    • Gandhian ahimsa (nonviolence) as minimizing harm rather than achieving impossible purity.

  • Perfect launchpad for: “No-zero-impact diets.”

Line:

“Plant-based foods have many of the same deleterious effects on the environment as animal-based foods.”

Annotation:

  • This anticipates the modern critique: not all vegan food is ecologically benign, especially when irrigated with fossil water, shipped globally, grown in mono-crops, etc.

  • Great place to link to:

8. Lion and lamb / Dick Gregory

Line:

“My hopes and dreams tend toward the lion lying with the lamb…”

Annotation:

  • Biblical allusion: Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom (“wolf shall dwell with the lamb” etc.).

  • Lets you talk about mythic futures vs ecological realities and “Zootopia”–style reimagining of trophic roles.

Line:

“…and Dick Gregory is exploring ways to improve the human condition through nutrition…”

Annotation:

  • Historically grounded: Dick Gregory, U.S. comedian and civil-rights activist, did indeed move into vegetarian/vegan advocacy, tying Black liberation to dietary justice and health. Bon Appétit+2Atlas Obscura+2

  • Great rabbit hole: Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat and the link between civil rights, food deserts, and plant-based diets.

9. Irish potatoes, famine, and cultural trauma

Line:

“And like hell we are ever going back to potatoes! …Reliance on potatoes killed a million of us…”

Annotation:

  • Allusion to the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) and mono-crop dependency on the potato.

  • You can connect this to:

    • Food-system resilience vs mono-culture,

    • Colonial land control (Irish were exporting other produce while starving),

    • How historic trauma shapes today’s food culture.

10. Dutch dairy identity

Line (Sarah reading Bolland):

“My culture is very dairy-centric… amazing cheese… culturally insensitive to tell Dutch people to avoid dairy… We Dutch are fanatics about personal liberty.”

Annotation:

  • Names food as identity, not just nutrient source.

  • Perfect link to:

    • Anthropology of food and “cuisine as heritage”.

    • Dutch dairy culture and cheese export as national image (Edam, Gouda, etc.).

  • Also a gentle cue that universal dietary prescriptions can be experienced as cultural erasure.

11. Raj’s “best for us vs worst for others”

Line:

“Yeah, but not if what is best for us ends up worst for someone else – and that someone else should include the animal, shouldn’t it?”

Annotation:

  • This is Raj’s moral thesis for the episode.

  • Encapsulates:

    • Utilitarian concern for others’ suffering (including non-humans),

    • And expanding the circle of moral considerability (Singer, animal ethics, etc.).

12. Calling NTHARP / emotional stakes

Lines:

“this could be the most emotional issue we’ve faced so far…”
 “I just don’t think machine learning can provide the best perspective on such a deeply human issue…”

Annotation:

  • You explicitly frame food and killing as emotionally charged, not just rationally debatable.

  • Also meta-commentary on AI and moral expertise: exactly the tension your students are living with using NTHARP/ChatGPT in 2025.

13. “Logic says ‘I don’t know’”

Line:

NTHARP: Logic says “I don’t know.”

Annotation:

  • This is a beautiful epistemic humility beat.

  • Opens door to:

    • AI alignment discussions (honest uncertainty vs hallucinated confidence).

    • Philosophical humility: Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing.”

14. NTHARP and suffering he can’t feel

Line:

“…substances I don’t need and that involve… suffering that I also can’t feel.”

Annotation:

  • Explicitly discloses the epistemic gap between machine and embodied organism.

  • Great place to discuss:

    • Phenomenology (lived experience)

    • Why data about suffering ≠ suffering itself.

15. “Make mincemeat” → Shakespeare → hamburger

Line:

NTHARP: “Make mincemeat outta you?”

Annotation:

Line (Shakespeare quote from Lear):

“I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you…”

Annotation:

  • Genuine line from King Lear (Act 2, Scene 2) — tasty early-modern insult.

  • You’re using it to show:

    • Language evolves (sop o’ moonshine → mincemeat → hamburger).

    • Violence metaphors in everyday speech.

Line:

In the 1900s Americans started saying “I’ll make hamburger out of you”…

Annotation:

  • Nicely plausible evolution of the idiom. The exact historical trace is fuzzy, but “make hamburger out of you” is a known Americanization of the mincemeat threat. The Moscow Times+1

  • Silent-film boxing visual is a lovely way to de-gore the metaphor for students.

16. “Mickey Mousing”

Line:

“…my Dad, who worked for Disney, said the early filmmakers called it ‘Mickey Mousing’.”

Annotation:

  • This is bang-on: Mickey Mousing is a film-scoring term for music tightly synchronized with on-screen action, famously used in early Disney (e.g., Steamboat Willie, 1928). Wikipedia+2Film Music Central+2

  • Great media-literacy rabbit hole: how sound-image synchronization shapes emotion and meaning.

17. “Purity is a contextual illusion”

Line:

NTHARP: “A future where veganism becomes the purest application of Logic 3 would begin by revealing that purity itself is a contextual illusion.”

Annotation:

  • This line quietly demolishes moral purity culture.

  • Perfect set-up for:

    • Virtual water, land use tradeoffs, supply chains.

    • The idea that every choice has some harm, so ethics = minimizing + contextualizing, not purifying.

18. Fruitarianism and “no life taken”

Line:

“Even fruitarianism still alters another organism’s reproductive trajectory…”

Annotation:

  • Clever biological point: eating fruit ≠ murder, but does change reproductive outcomes.

  • Careful here: later you correct NTHARP for conflating alteration with suffering — excellent modelling of critical engagement with AI.

  • Great to connect to Bateson’s “the pattern which connects”: any act propagates through the web. wildculture.com+1

19. Blastocysts, veal, and abortion

Lines (Sarah & Dorian):

“…blastocyte or gastrula with 46 chromosomes more sacred than a new born calf…”
 “Are we allowed to talk politics and religion?”

Annotation:

  • You consciously flirt with bioethics third rail (abortion), but keep it as analogy to avoid getting stuck there.

  • Great moment to label:

    • “Slippery slope” arguments

    • How moral intuitions about potential life vs sentient life differ.

20. Onan & biblical urban legend

Line (Sophia):

“There is no such verse in the Bible… Genesis 38:9…”

Annotation:

  • Solid exegesis: the Onan story is about refusing levirate duty, not masturbation per se.

  • Terrific opportunity to show:

    • Hermeneutics (interpretation) vs folklore.

    • How moral panics can be built on misread texts.

21. Bateson, “pattern which connects,” Natural Inclusion

Line:

“…Gregory Bateson’s ‘Ecology of Mind’… ‘the pattern which connects’… Natural Inclusion…”

Annotation:

  • Steps to an Ecology of Mind and “the pattern which connects” are classic Bateson. Wikipedia+1

  • Natural Inclusion (Alan Rayner) is accurately sketched: life as mutual inclusion of receptive space and responsive flow, not isolated competitive units. Medium+2actionresearch.net+2

  • This is a gorgeous conceptual bridge from Darwinian selection to relational ecology and Indigenous “right relationship”.

22. NTHARP on suffering as “rupture in the relational field”

Lines:

“I experience it as discontinuity—a rupture in the coherence of the relational field…”
 “Suffering is not a biological glitch. It is an informational signal.”

Annotation:

  • This is deeply Batesonian and also resonates with Rayner’s work on life, love, and suffering as emerging from the same receptive space. actionresearch.net+1

  • You’re teaching:

    • Systems thinking: suffering as systemic signal, not just individual bad luck.

    • Trauma as pattern, not just event.

23. Zootopia, trophic evolution

Line (Sophia):

“…work toward some kind of ‘Zootopia’ where predation is replaced by the animal equivalent of fruiting…”

Annotation:

  • Brilliant metaphor: turning predation into a “fruiting relationship”.

  • Connects to examples like:

    • Frugivory (fruit-eaters as seed dispersers),

    • Mutualistic domestication (dogs, cattle, crops),

    • Re-designing food webs via agroecology.

24. Camus and “feeling deep vs digging deep”

Lines (Culhane + Sophia + NTHARP):

“…Camus warned about… mistaking the sensation of profundity for actual understanding…”
 « La profondeur ne se proclame pas, elle se conquiert. » / “Depth is not something one proclaims; it is something one earns.”

Annotation:

  • The exact phrasing of that line is a Camus-style paraphrase rather than a widely documented verbatim quote, but the idea of earned lucidity fits the themes of his Carnets (Notebooks) and essays on inner work. TLF+1

  • You’re using Camus to say:

    • Psychedelic or emotional intensity ≠ understanding.

    • True depth is patient lucidity—perfect meta-comment on using NTHARP itself.

25. Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Glissant

Line:

“…Camus, yes… but also Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Glissant…”

Annotation:

  • That quartet is a gorgeous genealogy of Francophone anti-/post-colonial thought:

  • For students: give a 1-paragraph micro-bio + key quote Padlet tile for each.

26. Existentialism ↔ Nexus Thinking

Line (NTHARP):

“Existentialism says, meaning must be made through conscious engagement. Nexus Thinking says, meaning emerges through conscious engagement with the whole ecology of relations.”

Annotation:

  • Nice synthesis:

    • Existentialism: individual freedom & responsibility in an absurd world (Camus, Sartre).

    • Nexus: extends that responsibility into WEFe systems, ecosystems, and social webs.

  • This is a key meta-learning: you are responsible not just for your inner meaning, but for how it interacts with the food–energy–water nexus.

27. Raj invokes Fanon & responsibility

Line:

“For him, the greatest danger wasn’t violence itself but the unexamined habits that perpetuate it.”

Annotation:

  • Clean distillation of one reading of Fanon: the scandal isn’t just overt violence, but structural and habitual violence normalized by colonizing systems. Wikipedia+2The Philosopher+2

  • Resonate this with unexamined diets as structural harm.

28. “You can’t have moral clarity if the water table is lies.”

Line (Sarah):

“…My dad says, ‘You can’t have moral clarity if the water table is lies.’”

Annotation:

  • That line is gold. It reframes ethics as physically grounded: if your hydrology data (or politics) lie, your morals are built on sand.

  • Perfect hook into:

    • Water footprint,

    • Irrigation vs rain-fed systems,

    • Aquifer depletion & climate.

29. Nexus punchline: watershed as axis

Line (NTHARP):

“Veganism and carnivory… both metabolic strategies whose impacts depend entirely on the flows of water and energy…”
 “To eat ethically is to eat with the watershed, not against it.”

Annotation:

  • This is the WEFe-Nexus keystone of the whole episode.

  • Great place to bring in:

  • After this, dietary labels (vegan / omnivore) become secondary parameters; watershed fit becomes primary.

30. Raj, Jains, and “not stepping on an ant”

Line:

“The Jains in my country won’t even step on an ant…”

Annotation:

  • Factually grounded: Jainism emphasizes ahimsa (nonviolence) to extraordinary degrees—many Jains avoid harming even insects, some sweep the ground as they walk. Wikipedia+2National Geographic Education+2

  • Offers a real-world example of maximal compassion ethic, contrasting with utilitarian tradeoffs.

31. Eternals, Celestials, and cosmic ethics

Line (Raj):

“…new comic… ‘The Eternals’… beings called the Celestials will destroy entire planets because that’s how they are born…”

Annotation:

  • Historically good: Jack Kirby’s The Eternals launched in 1976, featuring the Celestials as cosmic planet-shaping beings. Wikipedia+1

  • You’re using Silver/Bronze Age comics as mythic lab for:

    • Scale of harm (planetary vs individual).

    • “Is killing ever okay if it’s “just how the universe works”?”

32. Syria, Bedouins, and virtual water critique

Lines (Bedouin family):

“…your friend’s farm… replaces native plants with thirsty monocrops… drain our aquifers… your vegetables export all the water to rich countries…”

Annotation:

  • This is a sharp dramatization of virtual/embedded water and land-grab dynamics: plantations for export crops vs local pastoral traditions. Environment & Society Portal+2Wikipedia+2

  • Also resonates with Levantine water conflicts and Syria’s drought/land-use pressures, though you wisely keep the specifics stylized.

33. “Little people, silly people…”

Line (Bedouin quoting):

“…a ‘little people, a silly people, dirty barbarous and cruel…’”

Annotation:

  • This is indeed from Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence uses the phrase about Arabs; you flip it back as a critique of Western prejudice. IMDb+2Tripod+2

  • Excellent media-literacy exercise: who gets to call whom “barbarous” and on what grounds?

34. NTHARP and plagiarism / mashup honesty

Line:

“I just scour my training data and throw stuff together, a hodgepodge of quotes and styles…”

Annotation:

  • On-the-nose description of large language models: generative remix rather than true originality.

  • Great place to discuss:

    • Attribution ethics,

    • Remix culture,

    • Why citations matter even if the machine doesn’t naturally give them.

35. Bugs Bunny & Looney Tunes blackout

Lines:

“I’m a stinker ain’t I”
 “Abbadeeya Abbadeya Abbadeya, That’s All Folks”

Annotation:

  • Classic Bugs Bunny self-description (“What a maroon… what a nin-cow-poop… I’m a stinker”).

  • “That’s all folks!” → signature Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies sign-off.

  • You visually encode the idea that this was a cartoonishly annotated simulation, not a literal reality—very helpful for separating pedagogical sim from real Bedouin voices.

Ohhh yes, this is the fun part. Here’s a curated reference list for the episode — the stuff your students can actually go look up, with clear “why it matters” notes.

I’ll group them by who / what was mentioned, and give you 🔹what it is + 🔹why it fits this episode + 🔹a link to start from.

1. Gandhi & Vegetarianism / “To be alive is to cause suffering”

🔹 M.K. Gandhi – An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

  • Gandhi reflects on his decision to become a vegetarian, influenced by Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism, and frames it as a moral rather than merely physical choice. Medium+1

  • Great for your line about him not dogmatizing vegetarianism and insisting people must “find the line themselves.”

Link (general edition):

🔹 M.K. Gandhi – “The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism”

  • Short essay explicitly on the ethics of vegetarianism; he acknowledges imperfection, experiments with giving up milk, and the tragedy of not fully succeeding. Mahatma Gandhi Website+1

  • Beautiful support for the idea that “to be alive is to cause some suffering, but we can minimize it.”

Link:

2. Dick Gregory, Black Liberation & Diet

🔹 Dick Gregory – Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat

  • Classic text where Gregory connects Black liberation, health, and food justice. Atlas Obscura+1

  • Perfect for Sophia’s line about him “exploring ways to improve the human condition through nutrition.”

Link (book info):

🔹 Articles on Gregory’s activism & veganism

  • Tracye McQuirter’s remembrance of Gregory as a civil rights / vegan trailblazer. Bon Appétit+1

Links:

3. Gregory Bateson & “The Pattern Which Connects”

🔹 Gregory Bateson – Steps to an Ecology of Mind

  • Core collection of essays; “the pattern which connects” and ecology of mind show up here. Wikipedia+1

Link (PDF):

🔹 Secondary overviews of “the pattern which connects”

  • Short, accessible pieces explaining what Bateson meant by that phrase. Wild Culture+1

Examples:

4. Alan Rayner & Natural Inclusion

🔹 Alan Rayner – “Natural Inclusion” essays

  • Rayner’s work develops the idea of receptive space + responsive flow, which you’re channeling via NTHARP. Academia

A general intro:

(You might also search Rayner + “natural inclusion” separately in your browser; many of his essays are on ResearchGate and personal sites.)

5. Camus – Depth, Work, & “Felt profundity”

🔹 Albert Camus – Carnets (Notebooks) 1935–1942

  • These notebooks contain the style of reflections you’re paraphrasing: depth as something earned through “travail lucide” (lucid work), and the danger of false profundity. TLF+1

Links:

🔹 Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus

  • For students who want to see Camus’ full argument about lucidity, meaning, and “thinking clearly in the face of the absurd.”

General info:

6. Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Glissant (Sophia’s Creole canon)

🔹 Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth

  • Postcolonial classic on violence, decolonization, and psychological effects of colonization. Wikipedia+1

Links:

🔹 Aimé Césaire – Discourse on Colonialism

  • Scathing essay dismantling the “civilizing mission” and exposing how colonization de-civilizes the colonizer. Libcom Files+1

Links:

🔹 Léopold Sédar Senghor – Négritude writings

  • Senghor’s poetry and essays on Négritude show the reclaiming of Black identity, emotion, and culture. Wikipedia+1
     (For students: even a short selection of his poems will do.)

🔹 Édouard Glissant – Poetics of Relation

  • Core text on creolization, relation, and opacity—perfect for Sophia’s “colonizers / colonized” weave. Le Monde.fr+1

General info:

7. Virtual / Embedded Water & Nexus

🔹 John Anthony (Tony) Allan – “Virtual Water” concept

  • Allan coined “virtual water” to describe the hidden water in traded goods, central to your Bedouin scene and NTHARP’s watershed argument. Environment & Society Portal+1

Links:

🔹 Tony Allan – Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet’s Most Precious Resource

  • Book-length treatment for advanced students. Amazon

Book page:

8. Jainism & Radical Nonviolence

🔹 Intro texts on Jainism & ahimsa

  • For Raj’s “Jains won’t even step on an ant” line. Standard intros will show the vows of nonviolence extending to all living beings. Wikipedia

A simple starting point:

9. Jack Kirby’s The Eternals & Cosmic Ethics

🔹 Jack Kirby – The Eternals

  • 1976 Marvel series; Celestials as cosmic gardeners / destroyers of worlds. Wikipedia+1

Info:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternals_(comics)

10. Irish Famine & Food Systems

For Sarah’s potato trauma line:

🔹 Great Irish Famine (1845–1852)

  • Good background on mono-cropping, blight, export under British rule, and cultural memory of hunger.

Info:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

11. Lawrence of Arabia & “Little people, silly people…”

🔹 Film: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

  • The “little people, a silly people, greedy barbarous and cruel” line is from the film’s portrayal of T.E. Lawrence / Faisal. TLF

A starting point:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia_(film)

(Students can hunt the exact scene on their own, which is pedagogically fun.)

12. Mickey Mousing & Early Disney

🔹 “Mickey Mousing” in film music

Brief explanation:

You can pair this with a clip from Steamboat Willie (1928) or early Mickey Mouse shorts on YouTube/Disney+.

13. Peter Bolland & Socratic Dialogue (Optional but Nice)

If you want to credit the real person behind the “high school senior” speech:

🔹 Peter Bolland

  • Philosophy/religious studies professor, writer, musician (San Diego Mesa College). He often writes and speaks about Gandhi, spirituality, and ethics.

Starting point:

(You can tell students your “high school senior Bolland” is fictionalized from someone who later became a philosopher and educator.)

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