I was able to find a few connections and common themes between the books that we read this semester in our ENVS 160 course. Although they did not jump out at me right away, with a careful analytical eye, I was able to recognize the similarities between Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Leigh Phillips’ Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World, and Paul F. Steinberg’s Who Rules the Earth. These connections had to deal with general anthropocentric mentality, governmental influence and political strategy within issues such as resource management and climate change, and the application of life-cycle assessments in daily life.
Leigh Phillips and Vaclav Smil both explore the realm of an anthropocentric mentality and its role in the consumption of resources and opposition to a pure nature perspective. In Austerity Ecology, Phillips introduced the anthropocentric ideals as he discussed concerns about biodiversity. When explaining the logic behind human grief loss or extinction of a species, he argues that we should care because, “…a loss of species means a decline in the effectiveness of the services that living systems provide to humans, such as the filtering of air and water, fixing of nitrogen, cycling of carbon…” (Phillips, 2015). This is a great example of the perspective of an individual with anthropocentric motivations, and how they view species and resources as materials for human use. Phillips sums up his point, “We care about nature because we care about ourselves and our desires,” (Phillips, 2015). One large example of the anthropocentric mentality is found on every page of Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World. Smil rifles through resource after resource, natural commodity after natural commodity being imported, exported, exploited, and transported around the globe for human use. Smil, through the explanation of materialization and dematerialization, provides many instances of negative impacts that harm the earth as a result of our manufacturing and transporting of goods
In Who Rules the Earth? and Austerity Ecology, we can see a common concept of governmental agendas and political strategy that stall environmental action. Paul F. Steinberg, author of Who Rules the Earth, describes the difficulty in organizing action in response to increased carbon emissions or the diminishing of resources for example. He states, “Environmental problems…meander across political borders and agency jurisdictions, challenging our ability to launch a coordinated response,” (Steinberg, 2015). Steinberg also suggests that “…multiple levels of political organization…” (Steinberg, 2015) are needed to solve these problems. Leftist, science journalist Leigh Phillips seems to agree with the idea of increased governmental planning in order to find solutions. He too identified the political stonewall when it comes to action: “The UNFCCC’s post-democratic, consensus based structure is one of the reasons why climate negotiations are perennially stalled,” (Phillips, 2015). Both Steinberg and Phillips explain the role political intervention on problematic issues such as climate change and decreases in natural resources in countries like Costa Rica. My only concern is that action might be obstructed for too long before any action is made.
After reading Making the Modern World and Austerity Ecology, I was able to fully understand the importance of life-cycle assessments. Smil defines life-cycle assessments as a, “…part of international environmental management standards that are routinely used to evaluate the various burdens imposed by production, use and disposal (or reuse) of products, and by the performance of services,” (Smil, 2014). Phillips agrees, explaining that to make environmentally-conscious decisions as consumers and to fully gage the atmospheric harm done by carbon emission for a particular consumer purchase, we must compare, “…different products and their component inputs, transport, storage requirements, and packaging,” (Phillips, 2015), in other words, we must examine its life-cycle assessment. Both Smil and Phillips have broken down the idea of LCA’s and have made convincing arguments about the importance of referencing these assessments in order to embody a truly green style of living.