By Natalie Casson
ENVS 160 this semester has proven to be a time of reflection and learning to question and reconsider my beliefs and thoughts about climate change. Prior to entering this this semester, I feel like I was ignorant towards the depth of each and every environmental issue our planet faces today. I was aware there were root causes to issues (like carbon emissions for example), and that those roots ran deep, but I was not truly aware of all the different converging ideas coming from different disciplines of study (like economics, politics, engineering, physical sciences, etc.) that are all connected to issues arising from climate change. I have always lived a deliberate and conscientious lifestyle with my actions and my ecological footprint. I always work to recycle, compost, ride my bike, take public transit, follow a strict vegan lifestyle, yet the roots of the issues run much deeper than my individual actions. I have learned we must take into account different views, approach climate issues from different ways and at different levels, and embrace new ideas and technology.
Before even thinking about how to tackle climate change issues, we must first acknowledge the variety of opinions. A person’s culture, religion, history, political beliefs, and socioeconomic class are all factors that can shape their personal beliefs on how we should tackle climate. How we connect to our environments can change our idealistic perspectives on how collectively humans can (or cannot) fight climate issues. This disagreement is explained can arise from how we expect different things from climate science, it is entangled in economics and politics, and we all perceive risks in many ways, so we all struggle to find common agreement on solutions. We have to acknowledge and work around the reasons we may all view climate change differently.
Climate issues are universal issues that are ingrained in many different areas of study: politics and economics for example. I still believe individual action is a necessity; institutional action—both implementation and compliment to regulations—require individual shifts in mindsets. People must individually feel a drive and want to make change to vote in favor of regulations in the first place or to implement them in a way where they feel compelled to follow them. However, civic environmentalism cannot be the only answer. We need to approach environmental issues in a wide variety of ways, and include more regulation centered approaches (state centered environmentalism) and more market based (market-centered environmentalism) as well. The idea of approaching climate issues at many levels and many institutions is known as clumsy solutions (Hulme, 2009). It is beneficial in that it encompasses many different little more feasible plans of action rather than tackling climate change as one overarching issue of humanity all at once.
Lastly, when we look towards finding these various solutions, it may in fact be beneficial to embrace new technology. Many people cling to the pure ideas of our planet and the ideal pristine nature we would read about in stories like Eden. In reality, our world is continuously shifting, and the likelihood we can just reverse all our developments and move back to a pristine untouched nature is a utopian concept. We may never be able to fully achieve relative dematerialization. Some countries may come close to reaching a dematerialized state, but so many have yet to reach their highest capacity of development making it globally unrealistic (Smil, 2003). Instead of fighting against this development and technological advance and taking a classical environmental stance, it may be beneficial to take a more contemporary stance. If we consider embracing new technologies, nuclear power for example, we may be able to utilize this technological movement to fight climate change. Many contemporary environmental texts argue for this embrace of technology; for example, you see this within the book Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.
My viewpoints have changed a lot so far since starting this class. Not changed as in shifted away from my previous ideas and personal ways of fighting climate change, but it’s more that my views have developed and shifted towards new and different ways of action. In tackling climate change, I now understand we must work to understand the disagreements within controversial climate change issues, and from there we will learn how to combat climate change on many levels and through many institutions—climate is not restrained to one area. Lastly we must embrace new technology and ideas that coincide with our modern world as technology improves and we continue to develop.
References
Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus, eds. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Breakthrough Institute, 2011. http://www.amazon.com/Love-Your-Monsters-Postenvironmentalism-ebook/dp/B006FKUJY6.
Smil, Vaclav. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley, 2014.
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.