Reading Questions for Flight Maps  

Please answer these questions fully.  This assignment is in lieu of having to write a formal response to the book.  Each set will be graded, and the grade will go towards that portion of your grade devoted to book reviews and short writing assignments.   The questions are due on the date of the discussion for that chapter.  No late papers will be accepted – each set is worth 33% of the total Flight  Maps grade.

Set one:

        1.)  When Price calls Nature a “Place Apart,” (as she does on page  XIX,  among many other places), what does she mean?

2.)    Chapter One is called “Missed Connections.”  What connections were being missed, and what do passenger pigeons have to do with those missed connections? (see perhaps page 40, with the quotation: “The disconnections between meanings and natural history…” or page 54, “Our connections to nature…”)

3.)    In Chapter Two, how does Price link conservation of birds to societal definitions of feminity and masculinity? (Why do male hunters get viewed differently when killing pigeons, vs. killing birds for hats?)

4.)    What is the role of capitalism in Price’s tale of bird hats and conservation? 

Set Two:

5.)     What do yards tell us about Americans and Nature?

6.)    Price claims that the flamingo marks the boundary of Nature and Artifice (p. 161).  What does she mean? What is artifice, anyway? So what? Why does she care?  (p. 164: “The plastic pink flamingo is literally real and wholly natural.”) (p. 168, “the history of the pink flamingo…”)

7.)   Price says that the Nature company “sells meaning,” not nature (p. 180).  What does she mean, and why is that important?

8.)   Analyze this statement: “The ways I think I connect to nature are the ways I want to connect to nature but are not the ways I actually do.” (p. 190).How does Price think she connects, how does she want to, and how does she? (see also page 205, among others) 

9.)    Analyze: “We’ve used Nature to circumvent our own complicity in the serious modern problems we critique.” (p. 203)

 Set Three:

10.) How are Nature and the un-Real of TV linked? How does Price argue that they are the same? (“On TV, Nature is a construction.  Off TV, it is unassailable.” (p. 228).  “the problem with TV nature lies as much in critics’ expectations of what nature should mean…” (p. 212), look also at page 238, p. 249 (“achilles heel…”) among many others.)