By Jack Kamysz
What are three ideas or concepts I have learned up to this point in ENVS 160?
Institutionalism
Throughout my entire high school career and especially in my environmental science course, individual action was the one way that we were going to combat climate change. It was not until this spring semester of my first year of college where I would learn about another approach to combating climate change. This would be institutionalism. Looking at my personalized ecotype scores, I realized how much I was thinking in the individual sense. Within the scale column of my report, I was at a -25 on individualism. This mindset of mine would immediately switch far right on the scale to institutionalism after reading Who Rules the Earth. Paul F. Steinberg changed my opinion with his ideas and examples of social rules. Originally I thought that big institutions and governments were only in the business for the profit, not caring for the Earth or the human beings who inhabit it. I learned quickly though, that institutions create rules to protect a desired pattern of social interaction into the future. For example banning the use of ozone depleting solvents in the dry cleaning industry. Institutionalism, I did not realize can have an even stronger and more universal effect on how societies and individuals live their lives to be more sustainable.
Place
Isms, isms, isms. Did you know that PLACE is an ism. I for sure didn’t. The fact that place is an ism is interesting enough. The idea is that there is more to a place than meets the eye. Place is made up of three things, nature, social relations, and meaning. Nature consists of the physical aspects of a place. Rivers, trees, mountains, landscape, ores, natural resources, etc. Social relations pertain to how nature and those resources are used to benefit society. Will a place be used to mine ores, or will it be used for lumber by cutting down trees. Lastly, meaning is the reason why either the individual or society cares about the place. What specific thing do they like about the place. When thinking of place, I tend to reference a team assignment for the situating minerals post. In that post we discussed and described the use of Arsenic in our worldwide society. In that post we also needed to talk about the PLACES they were mined and used. Arsenic mining was one of those things that goes unknown in how it affects the place. A simple river valley in northern Africa on the surface looks like a hotbed for communities to live, but can also be viewed as a place for economic gain from mining arsenic.
Language
I never gave much thought to how language, the way we portray specific environmental issues, affects the way the everyday person views approaches to issues. Why We Disagree About Climate Change opened up my eyes to this part of environmental studies that I did not know existed. The question that came up in the book was about why scientists and politicians openly confuse the language of fear. I did not know that the way words and phrases such as catastrophe, global warming, and climate change, all have different meanings and usages to portray different things. With the word catastrophe, Hulme argues that the word shouldn’t be used to instill fear because there is already enough evidence of it within the scientific data. Risbey, on the other hand, says that it is our civic duty to constantly instill catastrophe and chaos in language. This motivates people to take action, an apocalyptic view. I also did not realize that in English, the term used early on was the ‘greenhouse effect’, but has been replaced recently with ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. The idea is that by using climate change and global warming there will be more urgency to take action. Language use in environmental studies opened my mind to new possibilities in how we look at the way we portray scientific findings to the public.
Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. London: Kings College, 2010.
Steinberg, Paul F. Who Rules the Earth: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University, 2015.