It was fall of 2015, sunny San Francisco, California, the campus was alive and humming with an excited buzz. It was on this early September day that I would begin taking classes that would significantly impact my life. At the time I was studying at the University of San Francisco where both the Environmental Studies and Environmental Science major existed and were accordingly abbreviated as ENVA (Studies) and ENVS (Science). I was fresh out of high school, had spent my summer restoring mangrove habitats on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, and was ready to fully immerse myself into the academic world of environmentalism. I took Environment and Society which reshaped my view of the known world. I was learning about social justice, sustainable agriculture, ecofeminism, environmental policy, and more; things I hadn’t heard about in my AP Environmental class in high school. I was reading texts by authors like Rachel Carson, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and Derrick Jensen. I was beginning to think critically, to look at the root cause of major environmental problems.
Last year I took an Intro to Environmental Science class along with, Environmental Methods, and Ecology; it was these classes that deeply inspired to me to make not only individual lifestyle changes but to go boldly into the world and create institutional change.
After my first year of college I transferred to Lewis & Clark College. It was as if I was starting completely over. Even though all of my credits transferred, I was still required to take ENVS 160. So I began my ENVS career again this time coming in with an existing understanding of the extensive pieces that go into environmental thought.
To be completely honest, this class has been challenging for me. I have been frustrated with the lack of motivation and passion for the subject that was once so present in my life. I think the most challenging aspect of this class has been the lack of real world application. We have focused on such a broad spectrum of types of environmentalism and different environmental philosophies, yet have done very little in the sense of environmental action; something I find crucial to an introductory class.
This general frustration is not to say I haven’t learned anything. One main concept that has positively impacted me is the lessening of my usage of large words and scare quotes. I’ve learned that it doesn’t do any good to spend five pages talking about the importance of humans “getting back to nature” when “nature” is such an ambiguous word. It also doesn’t do any good to place the word nature into scare quotes as I’ve done in the previous sentence. The quotes don’t make the word any less vague, it’s simply a cop out of specificity, and leaves it up to interpretation as Hulme describes in “Why We Disagree About Climate”, which is exactly why we disagree about climate in the first place.
One recurring theme of 160 is capitalism. In my first year of college, the ENVA program mentioned capitalism but it was not discussed as deeply as it has been in this class. Capitalism seems to be the common root of all of our environmental problems– think ocean acidification, glacial melting, storm intensification, etc.– In “Austerity Ecology” Leigh Phillips speaks of the economic ramifications of environmental policies. He highlights that because the main goal of capitalism is to gain a profit, as long as we are existing within a capitalist economic system, environmental degradation will continue due to the lack of monetary value the greater environment has, as seen by corporations.
Social justice is the final ENVS lesson that I find particularly important. Climate change will impact the poor first. I believe it is our collective responsibility to provide for those less fortunate than us. I am a socialist to core in that respect. It is truly shameful that the biggest polluters will never feel the impacts of their pollution. Often times the poor are left out of the decision process which is why the people should be in charge of their own environment, because it’s the one we’ve collectively built to exist in.