Cora Layman
When coming into this course, I knew we would be discussing climate change. It is essentially impossible to go into an environmental studies course and not hear the term climate change and all the problems it has created across the globe in the last half century. This was one of my main reasons for wanting to take ENVS 160; I wanted to know what exactly a changing global climate meant for the fate of the world, and I wanted to know the exact solution needed to stop climate change, and then I wanted to proceed with that solution and leave the whole issue behind me.
I realized fairly quickly upon reading Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme that this was not nearly as easy as I had previously envisioned. This text discusses the many, many ways of interpreting the big word climate change within individuals (egalitarian, fatalist, individual, hierarchical), and institutions (different governments, scientific panels like IPCC, and corporations) and the vastly differing perspectives within these people or organizations on the biggest climate change event in Earth’s known history. Along with acknowledging the seemingly never-ending perspectives on climate change, discussing problems that come with a warming of the Earth’s surface such as the ozone layer hole, rising sea levels, and the current mass extinction event, requires a discussion of the solutions to the problems while acknowledging the many faceted perspectives as well. This is where I learned a key lesson that climate change can only ever be considered a “wicked problem” (Hulme 2009, 334). A wicked problem, according to Mike Hulme, is defined as a problem that upon attempting to solve with only one linear solution creates only more issues from the original one (Hulme 2009, 336). This term instantly crushed my hopes of ever completely halting climate change and reversing its effects.Wicked problems absolutely require as many perspectives and as many varying solutions as possible to even begin to tackle them. As a global society, we have learned that although single solutions can in many cases help single problems (the ozone hole shrinkage due to government consensus and regulation via Montreal Protocol (Hulme 209, 64)), it cannot by any means address a problem as rapidly expanding and infiltrative as climate change. Climate change creates many problems that require many solutions from many perspectives, thus making it a wicked problem.
I also, before this class, believed that not only is there one surefire solution to climate change, but that the solution will be able to simultaneously help past and future generations. I figured that because climate change is affecting the environment now and would just get worse in the future (as far as I knew before the class), then solving climate change would obviously benefit present and future people. Once again, I was disappointed to learn that this was not necessarily the case. It seems, although there have been efforts to simultaneously aid those of the present and future, that climate change requires one-or-the-other solutions. Either we can look out for our current people, specifically those in poverty, and put our resources and technologies towards developing sustainable governments, technologies, medicines, and resources to bring those in poverty and poor health around the world up at the expense of the environment, or we can look out for the future generation(s) of people by putting the technologies and solutions forth that would most quickly combat the more serious impending climate change and environmental threats, even if those solutions hinder the efforts of people to rise out of poverty or receive better healthcare, etc (Hulme 2009, 119). By placing global efforts fully into present or future issues, we are leaving behind either the present or future people. This has been a hot issue in climate change debates since we have first tried to come together as a global society to combat climate change. I did not previously understand the ethical issues behind climate change solutions, and the negative connotations environmental regulations for future benefits have towards many people alive today.
Finally, along with my ideas of one solution to solve all climate change problems for people of the past and the future, I was also under the impression that this solution would be able to reach across the entire globe quite easily and seep into all places. My understanding of place before this class was quite limited, and a third key lesson I learned in this course, actually fairly recently, was the idea that places are extremely complicated. Different regions are owned by different people, governments, and corporations, and the different regulations that these institutions or individuals enforce within their place have a rippling effect outward that affects both the original location and other regions. Differing regulations among differing regions can have a universal impact on certain organisms, such as how the migration of Cerulean Warblers are negatively affected by each region they cross from South America to North America, and the different regulations such as the unshaded coffee industry in Columbia and the political uprisings in Mexico have led to endangerment of these migratory birds (Steinberg 2015, ch. 4). Differing regulations among differing regions can also explain how global societal regulations and rules have a hard time lasting for long. For example, the attempt at combating climate change by reducing corporate pollution via cap and trade method was attempted on a global scale, but had a hard time being particularly successful in non-capitalist/non-market based regions (Steinberg 2015, 111). The Paris Trade Agreement is perhaps one of the few cases where different regions come together to attempt to develop a global consensus on climate change solutions, but even then, nations do not agree, and powerful nations such as the U.S. discard the Paris Trade Agreement under different government leaders with different ideas for climate regulation. This goes to show that because places and their regulations are so varied and vast, it would be nearly impossible for a solution to climate change or other environmental issues to impact each region of the world in the same beneficial way, or even take effect in that region in the first place.
References
Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Steinberg, Paul. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planets and Our Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.