Olivia Strittmatter - Ecology of Eden Review

 Blog Post 12 - Class Readings 5

Week 12

       This blog post is going to be shorter than my others. I’m going to be writing a brief review on Ecology of Eden, and some of my thoughts on it overall. First of all, I really enjoyed listening to everyone’s presentations on their chapters. It was interesting to hear everyone’s opinions on what Eisenberg was saying. I’m not going to write a summary for the book, because we all read it and there was too much information to cover in a brief summary.

My favorite thing about this book was that it took the concept of Eden and applied it to ecological principles. I’m an organismal biology major, with a religious studies/philosophy minor, and I am accepted into the environmental science masters program that CNU offers, so the topics of this book were really interesting to me. I liked how Eisenberg worded most of his ideas. I also really enjoyed how he didn’t write as though myth and science are controversial, but rather how they’re similar and what the combination of myth and ecology do for people. I also really enjoyed how he intertwined ideas that we’re familiar with, like suburbs, with the more complex ideas that he explores throughout the book.  

My biggest problem with his writing was that he used a lot of metaphors, and long-winded explanations. Which I found a bit hard to follow. I also felt like he wrote the same thing multiple times. I know it’s good to repeat yourself to get a certain point across, but I felt like he wasn’t combining the topics together as well as they could have been. 

Overall, it was a really good book to read, and I found it really intriguing. I really enjoyed combining religion and ecology in this way, and it really solidified my idea that they aren’t two separate things, but rather one integrated concept.

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