What do you mean I can’t use the word “environment” in environmental studies, Jim? Why does everything we produce have to maintain an hourglass figure (broad concept, narrow, and bring it back out again)? Situate, sorry, situ-what? Is that connected to the hourglass thing? Understanding these concepts is part major of the transformation process into becoming a full-blown environmental studies major.
I remember sitting in my first environmental studies core class, ENVS 160, and staring at our professor Jim Proctor. He kept spewing things that were going to be important through our entire environmental studies career and how each of us would have to produce something called a concentration. I remember thinking those concepts were simple but little did my naïve, freshman self-know that they were anything but simple. If I could summarize the complexities that you will learn in your environmental studies into three concepts they would be 1) big words 2) hourglass and 3) situate.
Instead of going into depth about each of these concepts, I thought I’d tell you about the first time I really felt like many of the concepts we had been taught finally click and were applicable in a real life situation. My junior year I decided to join the environmental studies club on campus, after all that is my major, right? The club was trying to come up with ideas for how to educate Lewis & Clark students about “environmental” related issues and how we could create change on campus. This one student said her and her peers wanted to educate people about animal cruelty, specifically slaughter houses. They planned to not eat for 12-24hrs because livestock aren’t fed for that period of time before being slaughtered. Their plan was to sit at the Bon, Lewis & Clark’s all you can eat cafeteria, with empty plates and signs explaining their protest and possibly Instagram their process.
As a result of my time as an ENVS student, I was able to see some of the flaws that this plan had. The irony is that in order to get into the Bon you have to pay. So regardless, the Bon Appetit is still making money plus whoever they buy their meat from. Not to mention, does the Bon Appetit even purchase their meat from such places? Also, this protest affects no one besides themselves; thus no impact is made, especially because we don’t know if anyone even saw the students fasting. It’s also done once and then completely forgotten about and now those individuals can feel good about the one time they didn’t eat for 12-24 hours. Plus these individuals are privileged enough to choose when their next meal is going to be. As I was thinking about how ineffective this protest would be, I found myself avoiding terminologies such as “ecosystems” and “natural” because what do they even mean without any situated context? This girl and her group of friends had yet to understand that and that’s perfectly fine because I realized, that I too came in ignorant and full of a vocabulary based on “bg words”. Lewis & Clark environmental studies program transformed me into the “big word” avoider, hourglass think and situater user that I am today.
Seeing the faults in this plan is an example of how the hourglass figure was a relevant way to look at this issue. The big concept is that slaughterhouses our cruel and that gaining attention from our student body could potentially force Bon Appetit from purchasing meat from slaughterhouses that don’t practice cruelty free harvesting. Narrowing in, it was easy to see why this protest wouldn’t work. No financial strain would be places on Bon Appetit, the student body wouldn’t be as exposed to the issue as they would like, and finally, it’s a one and done act. Without continuous effort, nothing will change. And the final step of the hourglass figure, is looking at the broader image…..