I transferred from Middlebury College where I was also interested in pursuing environmental studies. I came this year, irritated that Lewis and Clark did not accept my intro environmental studies class I took two years prior. My irritation grew as the works I was reading in this course felt broad, loose and far reaching. I, like many of the other students in the class, was eager to solve environmental problems and the philosophies read in class felt hindering to my desire. We wanted something tangible. We thought, “teach me the problems, let’s figure out the solutions.” But, I found both of my levels of irritation were misguided. This class is beyond the soil types I learned in my other intro class and the readings have laid the foundation to solve by way of understanding and problematizing. This brings me to the three lessons I have learned in this course. First, Mike Hulme taught me we truly need to get to the underbelly of different environmental backgrounds and philosophies in order to truly address change. Second, to complicate and get comfortable with challenging my own environmental philosophies. For example, through Leigh Phillips challenging the idea of acting locally. And thirdly, in conjunction with acting locally, I learned to further my idea of acting individually and juxtaposing it with institutional change.
One moment that has stuck out to me the most when looking back over the course of our class are a few words spoken by Mike Hulme in our Skype session. He said that during a board meeting, they were trying to grapple with an environmental issue and getting nowhere near a solution. He looked around, puzzled and thinking to himself the room of people did not see something he saw clearly, that they were all coming from completely different backgrounds of interpreting environmental issues. From that moment of him telling that story, I realized the importance of understanding the backgrounds we each come to environmental studies and issues with. His example gave me a tangible way to view the readings. We are eager to solve issues, but without realizing the different beliefs, philosophies and attachments people have, we will never be able to get to a solution.
Just as I learned to expand my understandings that we all do not have the same interpretation of climate change, I learned to have my views challenged. My parents started selling at our local farmers’ market when I was about seven years old and every Saturday for eleven years I woke before the sun rose to help my parents work the stall. The market has not only my blood family, but the family of farmers and artisans I have known since my elementary days. There, I learned a lot of my environmental philosophy, such as to act local. In Leigh Phillips book Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts, he challenges the local movement by noting “when we do look at life cycle assessment (LCA), for some products, it turns out that yes, indeed, it does make sense to relocalise production, but for many, many other items, the economies of scale involved make the amount of energy employed and thus greenhouse-gas emissions per item far less than an item that is locally produced, despite the thousands of ‘food miles’. (Phillips, 2015, 119). I acknowledge this is very true, that local is not always the most environmentally sound, but I also find that he dismisses many ideologies associated with the local movement within food, which is to also act and eat seasonally. I accept his challenging of the local movement, but he needs to nuisance his argument against it as well.
Associated with the notion of acting locally versus globally is to act individually or institutionally. The individual or institutional debate is a vibrate one in the environmental community and one we have touched on many times in class. In our course, I have learned my tendencies are to lean towards a more individual spectrum. But, individual actions are not always the most effective, which can be seen through issues such as cap and trade with emissions. How would my individual actions help this? Even after days of thinking about it, I still struggle with answering that question. There are times and places for each individual and institutional movements and it is important to know both are important.
In summary, I came into this class ardent in my views, eager to grapple with hard hitting problems, but I learned the grappling comes before. Our understandings and perspectives are there to be not only understood, but also problematized. I learned to step back and before I jump in.
Phillips, Leigh. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts : A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2015.