With this being the final post of being part of this EALLC collective, and one of my last posts as a student at Lewis & Clark College has made me reflective…and a bit emotional. When people come up to me tell me that in 3 weeks until graduation, and ask if I’m excited, I respond, “I am excited, but…” This is usually followed by a plethora of worries about being an adult, finding my way out there in the big, big world. Instead of dwelling on this, I find myself thinking about all of my experiences and life lessons I have collected through my journey here at Lewis & Clark. My first year here as a PEAS (the old version of the EALLC) member really challenged my past assumptions about environmentalism, and even about lifestyles. Being from an island limited my exposure of crazy lifestyles of grassroots, social justice conscious eco-people, that are here on the “mainland” (what people from Hawaii call the North America United States). And with every year through the ENVS program I am continually faced with challenges whether that be looking at issues through an interdisciplinary lens, or even just increased work load and different to present data like through GIS mapping.
Going through this EALLC experience this semester has really made me appreciate the ENVS program more than ever, and most of all appreciate all the hard work all the bloggers have put into this initiative. I am so impressed with the first year bloggers, especially with the fast growth they have demonstrated from post to post. An example of this was Kristy’s first post about vegetarianism to her latest post where through tireless research and considering new perspectives that further complicate the issue of the meat industry and considering more factors that make solutions tough. The growth of how we process problems and build on ideas also stems from our personal growth to continue to expand our horizons and perspectives we have not delved into before.
It’s also interesting that I didn’t realize my own personal growth, until I looked at where the first years are currently at, and finding huge parallels to my own experience then. I firmly believed in the adage that real change stems from micro to macro, where grassroots campaigns spread awareness about a particular issue, and change everyone’s behavior which would in turn could be scaled up and be institutionalized. This was through my experience being apart of campaign by the Surfrider Foundation in Oahu for the Rise Above Plastics Campaign that aimed to ban plastic bags statewide. It turns out there are many actors and processes that need to be considered that make the big picture very complicated. I found this in my current capstone project where scaling up policies are terribly difficult if you do not understand the perspectives of actors who are operating on a completely different train of thought. I also learned that even though there may be success in small scale policies or management practices at lower scales, they may not translate at larger scales due to a different set of conditions that influence viability like funding, different management practices in different states/countries, etc. Even though I am fast approaching my final days here as a senior ENVS major, I find that I am still not the all-knowing person about environmentalism, or e-waste management. Ideas, concepts, life are always dynamic and changing and thus lay infinite opportunities to grow as a person.