Having lived in a household for many years in which many of my parental figures and family friends are career conservationists and environmentalists, I surprisingly did not realize the broadness that environmental thought encompasses when speaking about both classic and contemporary environmental thought. This was especially true for myself in relation to the viable options and concepts coming from both sides of environmental thought as to how to tackle climate change and the degradation of ecosystems globally. I had not been cognoscente of the fact that much of what I had learned over the years, before attending Lewis & Clark and ENVS 160, namely from my step-father John Davis at conversations around the dinner table, regarding wilderness and the natural environment, was that of classical environmental thought. Without knowing it I had adopted many of the same stances on environmental issues as my step-father and his colleagues without ever challenging many of the concepts I understood from classic environmental thought such as Degrowth, simply because I did not see other viable options to the problems at hand. This has been both a blessing and somewhat of a curse for myself for I have had to continually revisit where I stand in terms of environmental thought throughout the semester, and I am still not sure. What I am sure of however at this point is that concepts from both contemporary and classic environmental thought hold possible viable solutions for how we might as humans live in better harmony with the natural environment and its ecosystems. Therefore in my opinion neither school of thought should be thrown out entirely or viewed through an inherently negative lens by the individual, as I had done for so long without the proper knowledge to back my stance. For, as I have learned in ENVS 160, the cultural theory of risk, referred to simply as Cultural theory, plays a large role in deciding what we as individuals believe in, whether that be in classic or contemporary environmental thought, or in neither of these schools of thought at all, in the case of the “climate denier”.
Through reading Why We Disagree About Climate Change, and our discussions in class regarding Cultural Theory, I began to understand exactly why we as individuals are so divided on the subject of climate change. By utilizing Cultural Theory, or grid-group theory, and dividing our perception of nature into four categories and thereby dividing the way we understand Grid (a desire to follow the rules) and Group (a desire for solidarity), we can begin to dissect why we disagree about environmental issues. These four categories that exist in relation to our perception of nature, are as follows: Hierarchists believe that nature is sensitive yet tolerant of the actions of humans, while Egalitarians believe that any human impact on the natural world is inherently negative and harm causing. Fatalists then believe nature to be out of the control of humans entirely, while Individualists believe nature to be resilient and not in need of delicate care on the part of humans (Hulme, 2009). Thinking about our perception of nature in this way allows us to see the different priorities held by each group in relation to Group and Grid, as well as can illuminate the pros and cons of thinking in each way given an environmental issue.
To go along with my misconstrued understanding of environmental thought pre ENVS 160, I had been a large proponent of individual action versus institutional action, in terms of scale, in combatting climate change and the degradation of ecosystems. What I have since realized is that institutional action is perhaps much more important than I had previously thought, especially after reading much of Who Rules the Earth, by Paul Steinberg. One thing that has become clear is that while individual action may work if a vast amount of people take responsibility and action, individual action does not have much of an impact if it is only carried out by a few individuals. People tend to trust individual action because they can hold themselves accountable, however this becomes a problem because these individuals may only hold themselves or maybe their family members accountable. Conversely with action on the institutional scale it is possible to implement policies which everyone must legally follow. This is not to say that action on the institutional scale is the only way, or that it is easy to implement by any means. Certainly, things like recycling and riding your bike to work are fairly-easy for individuals to participate in compared to writing environmental policy or acting on the institutional scale, however the latter of this work I think is necessary if we are to move in a direction in which we live more harmoniously with the natural world collectively as nations and peoples, not simply as scattered individuals.
Citation
Hulme, Mike. 2015. Why we disagree about climate change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.