Before taking Environmental Studies 160, my views towards environmental issues and anything dealing with climate change were mainly based on the knowledge that I had obtained in a prior class that I took in high school. Usually, the basics of what was going on in the world were explained and what my teacher at the time believed were important issues, such as the sea level rising due to the polar ice caps melting and collapsing into the water. Thus, causing the water level to increase since the water is warming in temperatures due to intake of large quantities of carbon dioxide and the heat being trapped within the atmosphere. Issues such as those were presented in several ways but there was no depthness to what we learned. However, after taking Environmental Studies not only did my knowledge of the issues that are occurring changing but also my opinions towards certain issues and towards what we should do to solve these issues.
Previously, the concept of how we should approach these issues came in a positive manner and should be viewed in an optimistic way of when I first of what the concept of climate change was. However, after reading and taking the class of Environmental Studies 160, I have come to realize that although we can be optimistic, it is better to showcase a more realistic sense when speaking of these issues. Climate change should be approached with a very realistic view, however even though it should be approached like that it does not mean that it is impossible to improve the conditions of what is already occurring. In most of the books that we have read especially in Why we Disagree About Climate Change, the tone and approach that the author takes is a bit of a pessimistic stance when speaking of these issues and for that reason explains his main argument of the different factors of why there are different ideologies within the context of climate change. With this in mind, having an optimistic way of thinking is not necessarily a way that one would want to rely on with the idea that realistically the solution is not plausible.
The stance of anthropogenic being a fundamental reason as to why climate change is occurring and why more problems occur is a stance that many environmentalists believe in even though the controversy of how important it is, is debatable. To many, the importance of anthropocentrism as the main reason as to why most of these issues are occurring is debatable and can be refuted with the fact that others believe that capitalism and population growth are the most important reasons. With anthropogenic values however, brings in a way to evaluate most of the anthropocentric ideals or statements that environmentalists believe to withhold the idea that anthropocentrism is the main source to our issues. Some of the ways to categorize anthropocentric ideals is through descriptive, explanatory, evaluative, and instrumental questions. Descriptive questions involve the ideas of what occured while explanatory is more of why did that happen. Evaluative questions involve the ideas of which parts were good or bad, if any, while instrumental involves the ideas of what should be done about them. Having these ideas in your mind while thinking of issues in general is useful since it is a good way to rationalize and think realistically of how to approach these issues with solutions that are not impractical and can potentially help in one way or another.
Thinking about environmental issues in the modern era has revived a classical way of thinking which includes a lot of classical movements that are often referred to “ism movements”. These “ism movements” bring in a lot of different ideologies that mix fundamental ideas with contemporary ideas that are very prominent with society as of now. Examples of this include ecofeminism or enviro justice. Ideological movements such as those mentioned bring in a broader scope of ideas and different people into the environmental community.