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For this week's blog posts, the main focus was Paul Kingsnorth discussion involving the nature of using humans as every character in our stories and avoiding using the land or Earth as a main character in our pieces of work. Collectively, I think many of us agree that characterization of land and the earth is difficult and left out of many stories for its challenging nature. It is difficult to personify the Earth in a non-human way that also captures the integrity of the land because land is "non-living" or "doesn't have any thoughts." This also proves challenging because writers may not know how to approach the land as a character rather than just a means of setting.

Frizzy-headed made a strong case for why land isn't seen as a character and that's because "We no longer know what it means when the land tries to talk to us because we don't know how to speak language anymore." This sentence emphasizes the arrogance of humans and the lack of effort shown to caring for the Earth. He/she also added a powerful thought of "If we listened to the land these days I don't think we'd like what it'd have to say to us." This captures the fact that many people and writers aren't paying attention to what the Earth is trying to tell us like a natural disaster being a call for help from mother nature because its the only way we will listen. This also leads me into my next point that as a class we often don't view land more than setting or a destructive entity because we are mainly paying attention to the bad that Earth offers like hurricanes, mudslides, and tsunamis and don't pay attention to a beautiful landscape and what that land thinks or feels in its most healthy, natural state.

In essence, as a group we collectively feel that land has not been characterized in literature because of the lack of attention humans divide towards the Earth among other relateable topics in writing. This is because it is challenging to find ways to personify land in a dehumanized because we are unable to relate in any other way regarding thoughts and feelings. It seems we are all curious to see how certain landmarks and natural places like the Nile River in Egypt or trees that are hundreds or thousands of years old think and act apart from what we observe. Further questions we could then elaborate on and use in literature are observations of mankind from the perspective of land or thoughts and feelings of land towards humans.