Ever since I was a little girl, I was known as “the animal lover”. All I wanted in life was to be able to purchase every single animal on this planet and call them my own. As I grew older, I realized that my dream of becoming the world’s biggest animal freak was impossible. My next thought was, why not become a veterinarian? All I have to do is weigh cute little animals and make sure that they are healthy. Little did I know that I had to perform operations and give animals injections, which I would not be able to do due to my weak immune system and the inability to handle blood. In a blink of an eye, high school came around and the college search process was well on its way. My 10th grade history class debate made me realize that I love to argue, which opened my eyes to the world of Law. After doing loads of research, I came across Lewis & Clark’s Law School and to my surprise, there is such thing as Animal Law, which works hand in hand with Environmental Law. There is no other occupation that could possibly be a better fit for me. Being completely honest, the only reason why I took AP Environmental during my senior year was because I heard it was an “easy” science class and at the time, I believed it. Coming into college my views of the environment were based off of the Once-ler’s story and the messages portrayed in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. In this ENVS 160 class, I discovered that there are endless amounts of theories and ideas to consider when it comes to climate change like religion, politics and economy from reading books like Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme. I also learned that something so reliable and intelligent like science cannot determine what justifies a problem and even moreover, solve it. Lastly, as ambiguous as this is, I was slapped with the reality that nobody has come up with one perfect solution towards bettering the environment and quite frankly, I’m not sure if anyone ever will.
In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme explains that science is not always consistent. He shows that even though science is beneficial in decision-making about how to solve climate change or other environmental problems, it is not going to lead us to the perfect solution. Hulme says, “this story about the idea of climate change is not a simple one of science progressing purposefully in a straight line from blissful ignorance to a state of confident knowledge” (Hulme 2009, 68). From this section of the book, I learned that science is so ambiguous, therefore it is unreliable and doubtful, so solutions to climate change and other environmental issues are difficult to be solved.
Just as the transformation of the world’s physical climates is now inescapable, so too is commitment with the idea of climate change now unavoidable. It is an idea circulating in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy. It is an idea circulating with power in the worlds of knowledge and invention, of development and welfare, and of religion and ethics. It is an idea circulating creatively in the worlds of art, of cinema, of literature, of music and of sport. From different vantage points like religion, politics, and economics, it becomes possible to see that the idea of climate change carries quite different meanings and seems to imply quite different courses of action depending on whom one is and where one lives. Science may be solving the mysteries of climate, but it is not helping us discover the meaning of climate change. Indeed, climate change means so many different things to different people. These meanings cannot be read from the pages of the scientific assessments made by the IPCC, nor can they be extracted from the results of the computer models that simulate global climate and tentatively predict its future path.
Finally, from this class and all the readings, I learned that nobody has come up with one perfect solution towards bettering the environment and quite frankly, I’m not sure if anyone ever will. In Paul F. Steinberg’s Who Rules the Earth, he alerts readers to something vitally important hiding in plain sight: Nations, regions, local administrations and society itself create and change the formal and informal rules that protect or exploit the Earth. These rules and regulations affect natural resources, deforestation, polluting emissions, pesticides, recycling, water rights, and much more. Such rules don’t appear spontaneously. Organizations, people and coalitions debate and fight for them fiercely. Many rules seem difficult and most citizens believe they can’t do anything to change them. But they can. Rules are mutable and, Steinberg says, people must work to change them in order to save the planet. According to Mike Hulme, climate change, rather than being a problem to be solved, is an idea which reveals different individual and collective beliefs, values and attitudes about ways of living in the world. These are just two of the many, many sources about topics and viewpoints related to Environmental Studies that exist in this world. As overwhelming as it is, I wonder if there will ever be one perfect solution to the issues related to the environment.
Bibliography
Hulme, M. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Steinberg, Paul F. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015.