“When I started out fifteen years ago, it was almost like finding a baby on the doorstep, or seeing a wounded animal or a wounded person,” local Nature Conservancy prairie and savanna restorer Steve Packard says in one chapter of the new book Green Means: Living Gently on the Planet. “It just called to me. It said, ‘I need help.’ And I started working on this and trying to figure out how to bring these things back.”
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“Having 16,000 mothers with teenage children go to work is a laudable goal,” according to a recent Public Welfare Coalition press release. “However, three common sense questions come to mind: 1. Where are 16,000 livable wage jobs for these individuals, so that they may support themselves and their teenage children adequately? 2. What will happen to the thousands of young teenagers who will now be left unsupervised?…3. Where is the experience and where are the resources necessary for the Illinois Department of Public Aid to become a ‘fast track’ job search and placement agency?”
“Chicago’s eminence had peaked by the mid-1890s,” writes Northwestern’s Carl Smith in his new book Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman. “The integration of the idea of disorder into the view of the city is so pervasive that it is now unremarkable. To say that the city is ‘a disaster’ is an offhand expression, as is the description of any of its elements, from public transportation to the quality of education, as ‘catastrophic.’ Such terminology expresses a view of urban experience in which the disorderly and even the disastrous are taken to be at a rising but somehow still always ‘normal’ level.”
The major episode of the film that ties all these notions together is the chase scene where two raptors trap the children in the park’s kitchen. Nowhere else in the film does the relationship between humankind and the animals it consumes become more apparent. In a room where sentient, nonhuman animals are transformed into inanimate objects for human consumption, the children (and the audience) experience the terror of the hunt from the hunted animal’s perspective. When the children are nearly transformed into food for the dinosaurs, death and food become synonymous, which was hinted at earlier by the devoured cow, the dismembered goat limb, and the consumed characters….It seems more than coincidence that the characters who do not survive represent industries that support humanity’s divine right to exploit the earth and other species.”
