When thinking about transformation, it is much like a journey where there is a mythical end, and a humbling beginning. The journey I speak of is my constant shifting perspective on what environmentalism means and entails. One can say that my journey started when I was a freshman in High School. In biology I learned about a very troubling phenomena where there was an alarming accumulation of plastics in the pacific. This was the result of plastics falling off ocean barges, landfills, etc. and ending up in ocean gyres and creating “plastic soups” the size of Texas. It was a problem I have never even heard of, and I immediately felt all the guilt of the world on my shoulders if I didn’t do anything about it. I then got involved with the Surfrider Foundation, and participated in monthly beach cleanups. With every piece of plastic trash that I collected, I saw them as small victories that gave me a sense that I was doing good, something positive for the “natural” world. All of this truly made me want to pursue a route in environmental studies, because I felt a calling to leave this world better than the way we found it.
I always searched for solutions, and that was what environmentalism in that time: “What is the problem? How can we fix it?” It wasn’t until I arrived at Lewis & Clark that I really questioned this train of thought. The transformation occurred when we looked at “big words” such as “environment,” “natural,” “sustainable,” and really critically asked: What do these words really mean? It wasn’t the fact that these words were bad, or wrong, it was that these words were not specific, and didn’t allow us to dig even deeper into issues we could not see on the surface of a specific environmental issue. Perhaps the biggest transformation occurred was when we were introduced to the concept of scale, where we would zoom in and out of a particular problem. We would look at local implications, national, and even international implications of a single issue. This idea shook my entire understanding of how to approach any sort of environmental problem, no longer were these problems cut and dry, they were much more complicated and connected to other actors and processes that one could not see at the surface. Questions evolved from “How can I fix this issue,” to “What is actually going on here? What are the social, political, biological, philosophical ramifications of a certain type of legislation or solution?” What’s more I ask, “What are possible impacts at individual, local, national and international scales of a potential solution?”. I have taken this notion of scale throughout all my years and journeys throughout my studies here at Lewis & Clark, whether that be traversing the historical and geological connections at Mt. Fuji, learning about the “Anthropocene” a controversial global epoch where human activity has perhaps dominated Earth climate systems, learning about global food systems, etc.
I have amassed so much knowledge and experiences here, and now I find myself in the last semester, my mythical end. The funny thing is that even after all this massive change and transformation, I find myself right where I began–plastics, and social movements. At the beginning I thought change could only happen if I was always involved in beach cleanups, purchasing the “right” type of products, always recycling, etc. I believed in the social movement, engaging the public to do the “right” thing. This came with the assumption that the social movement was the all-knowing truth, that could get things done. However, throughout my studies of social movements with regard to these issues, I found that the focus should be shifted from the plastic and the pollution, but rather on the people, the social movements themselves. What does it mean for a movement to be effective? Why are movements so ephemeral? Why do we focus on certain types of waste but not so much on others? What are the barriers? These are the current questions that I am still trying to answer, but I found that the true worth of my education here at Lewis & Clark was not trying to find the right solutions, but rather the right questions.