My favorite color is all of them, depends on the time of day. My favorite season is autumn, except for when it is summer, spring, or winter. Cats are the greatest creatures to grace the earth, but then again so are dogs and bluebirds. Similarly, if asked what I am passionate about, I find myself stuck silent or bursting with a list of contradictions and barely-related things. But if forced to distill it, I am passionate about connections.
Let me explain.
Reading Eva’s post about passion got me thinking. She talks about feeling disheartened to learn that so little of what we do when we “Do One Thing” makes much of a dent in the big bad beast of climate change and all the other wicked problems in the world. She talks about a threat to what she is most passionate about, what she thought was certain.
This groundshaking is a large part of Introduction to Environmental Studies, and a feeling I’m sure my peers writing theses in ENVS 400 can relate to. It was a critical turning point to read that even if everyone stopped driving cars, it would hardly make a blip of a difference. Or that recycling that one plastic bottle doesn’t really clean up the Pacific garbage patch.
So does that mean we shouldn’t do anything? After taking 160, I and many others felt jaded and cynical. We felt downtrodden and ineffective and questioned why we had to be taught in this way. I think this disillusionment was integral to finding a more complex, intersectional worldview, but it is a harsh reality to face. The ENVS program works really hard to reassure students and channel that confusion into productive energy, but while the goal is not to produce hardened cynics, how do you go about unlearning and rethinking without dwelling on the loss of a dear idea? I think we learn to be critical thinkers by exposing the contradictions of what is taken for granted. (My senior thesis deals with this idea in regards to nature in public education!)
Sam, I thought this post was about passions, or connections or something! I’m getting there.
Because the reality is we are not meaningless! Our presence on this planet has an impact (clearly!) and we have the capacity to change what that impact is. The key is that no one person can do it alone! Really, what monumental feats were ever accomplished alone?! Absolutely none. We all depend on support and community for everything always. Anyone who has ever done anything will tell you they had help, or else they are lying.
But this fact is not mutually exclusive from the fact that it doesn’t really matter what mode of transportation I use to get to school tomorrow. It does, but at the heart of it, it doesn’t. Pollution still exists and there will still be traffic on Terwilliger at 8:30am. Cultural changes are relevant and necessary, but cannot be the only solution. It has to be bigger and deeper than that. To change pollution from cars, it is not just that I should drive less (well, my housemates, I don’t have a car). Roads and highway interchanges need to be designed well to prevent traffic backup and expedite routes; cars should be made not only to be low-emissions but also produced using ever decreasing amounts of pollutants. Communities shouldn’t be uprooted and displaced to build highways that lock them into exhaust-filled neighborhoods. And it is not just about carbon–the issue is inextricable from labor, civil and human rights, and a complex political economy.
There are power and living systems at stake at all stages and layers of production and consumption, so in the end, does it really matter if I bike or walk or bus or drive or ride my horse or somersault to school? Not really, but does that mean I shouldn’t be concerned? Of course not! It means I need to find connections. It means that if I am truly passionate about something, my passion must be contagious and far reaching. If I want to make a difference, it must be within myself and within the systems that surround me.
Environmental Studies has been a whirlwind journey–it has taken me unexpected places and I have found immeasurable joy. It also got me where it hurt: right in the gut where my conceptions of nature and relation to the world dwell. But if I hadn’t let go of the persistent mentality of doing one thing all alone in my little space, I don’t know that I would be able to see the larger picture. Because I am only powerful in relation to you, and all of us in relation to each other. We mean more when we work together, when we are connected.
(See? It all connects in the end.)