AP Seminar: EOC B Practice #1

You see that, after a thing is dead, it dries up. It might take weeks or years, but eventually, if you touch the thing, it crumbles under your fingers. It goes back to dust. The soul of the thing has long since departed. With the plants and wild game the soul may have already been born back into bones and blood or thick green stalks and leaves. Nothing is wasted. What cannot be eaten by people or in some way used must then be left where other living creatures may benefit. What domestic animals or wild scavengers can’t eat will be fed to the plants. The plants feed on the dust of these few remains.... The dead become dust, and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Mother. The ancient Pueblo people called the earth the Mother Creator of all things in this world. Her sister, the Corn Mother, occasionally merges with her because all succulent green life rises out of the depths of the earth.

[A] group of artists organized various initiatives linked to the founding of the Dumpster Divers in 1992. This association took its name from the practice of rummaging through the garbage of private individuals and commercial enterprises in search of salvageable things: food, clothing, books, information. Dumpstering, along with curbing (salvaging furniture and appliances abandoned on the sidewalks of American cities), may be a spontaneous reaction to the sight of something useful in a garbage can. It may also be a radical rejection of consumer society, an act aimed at protecting the environment, or even a skill developed by individuals who have no other means of procuring food and clothing.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soireés and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not?

Though biomimicry has inspired human innovations for decades—one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes—better technology and more nuanced research have enabled increasingly complex adaptions. Design software created by German researcher Claus Mattheck—and used in Opel and Mercedes cars—reflects the ways trees and bones distribute strength and loads.