Taking action. Making a stand for what I believe in. Not giving up. Pursuit of the things that I am passionate about. These are the all the things I want to do, and continue to do, in college. Coming here to the LLC I wanted to become a part of Environmental Action. Specifically what that entailed was, and continues to be, open ended.
I am grateful for the opportunity though to explore something that I want to “take action” about in my ENVS 160 course this semester. Being able to connect my passions to academics is one of the reasons I enjoy learning. In the 160 course we are specifically working on our solutions projects which are projects where we chose a “problem” and find the best way to solve it. This problem can range on any environmental topic, and can have a solution that is anything you see to be best fit.
I am working with Zayla, Marlene, and Eva. We have decided to tackle the problem of how the environment, specifically action for the environment, has become particularly whitewashed, and non inclusive to people from diverse backgrounds. We have been looking at this from a broad scale of the concept of how “supporting” the environment is communicated as a whole and then we are going to slowly narrow it down to Oregon, and then the Portland community.
The first step we took to find a way to“fix” this problem was to first break down the layers of the problem. For instance we asked an array of questions like, what exactly is going on and where is it occurring? Whose perspective is lost, and which ones are magnified? Has there been any aim to solve this problem before, and how may have those solutions been approached? By asking questions we were able to make connections on a very broad scale. This is currently where we are at with our solution. We are thinking of possibly writing an ethnography or an analytical paper to explore these ideas. Overall, we just want as many perspectives to be heard and understood as possible.
We will be writing hourglass posts about the broad spectrum of our project down to the specifics which I will link here if you want to find out any more information. (Once we have finished the post.)