Southen's Photostream

link to the photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/southen/2184781085/in/photostream/

Respond to the content and affect:

This is an urban night shot taken on January 10, 2008 of downtown Detroit. The lower level is the downtown YMCA where you can see people doing gym with both simple and complex machines. In the background is the Book Cadillac Hotel, which was under the construction of renovation at the time the snapshot was taken. According to the picture, everything you see is produced from modern advanced technology. For example for physical education, there are machines that are built for multiple workouts. This can be a machine that is built to work with your chest, back, and arms. Based on the picture, it is unknown whether the back of the floor is the same as the view in the front. But, we can conclude that even the exterior is made out of glass. Glass comes from sand.
Why are these important? Yes, it is true that for the most part we do not need sand in our lives. But, animals, creature, and plants do. They are part of the ecosystem. For instance, when we take sand, we destroy habitats for some creatures like worms. These creatures can approach to the point where there will not be enough to produce more. We might say “Who cares about worms?” Well, worms in fact play a role in the growth of plants. Thus, we eat plants including celery and spinach.
In the background we see the Book Cadillac Hotel. This hotel was built by Detroit’s famous Book brothers, and was the tallest hotel in the world at its completion in 1924. This is important because nowadays, there are hotels equally the same heights or more as the Book Cadillac Hotel. We can conjecture that the materials used to build such extravagant hotel are extremely complex. Back in the days, there were only rectangular shaped buildings. This picture shows shapes that somehow can be explained as one shape of top of another shape. Products like steel and brick are used to build such tall buildings. This matters because when we use these materials, we define ourselves what William Catton will call as “overshoot.” To overshoot means to go too far, to go beyond limits accidentally-without intention (Overshoot 1). Sometimes, we build buildings for the purpose of its appearance and tourist attraction. Yes, we benefit from this because we make more profit. But, we do not benefit the earth. We can do the same jobs in a rectangular-shape formed building opposed to a sophisticated-looking building. As you can see that this picture does not only hold a serene view. There is a whole story behind it.