One of the powerful things about ENVS 160 this semester was the intricate way the readings tied together that both overlapped, but also introduced new ideas, such that I never felt redundancies between texts. Below I describe my three key connections between the big ideas of each text.
Images for the Future: Why We Disagree vs. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts
“Tell me what sort of world you want to live in, and I can adjust the carrying capacity numbers for you accordingly” (Phillips 2015, 63).
I feel that this quote concisely combines the overarching concept from Why We Disagree About Climate Change with the carrying capacity dilemma touched on in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defense Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff. The carrying capacity model delineates how many humans the Earth can sustain, but as Phillips points out, how do we define ‘sustain’? Everyone’s world is subjective to how they understand and interpret their personal role. For example, the number of humans the Earth can support differs if those humans choose to utilize public forests for agriculture. At the end of the day, Earth’s carrying capacity is subject to what we want our homes to look like, and how crowded we can still call ‘supporting’ (Phillips 2015). Similarly, Hulme’s book is entirely on the topic of what causes us to disagree on climate change. Each of his points relates to how we are interpreting our own world. Essentially, we have different visions of how the future should look because we have different visions of the present: who is in charge, who is responsible for handling the situation, how much action should major organizations take, how much action is the individual responsible for, and how grave the situation actually is (Hulme 2009).
Effects of Governmental Discrepancies: Why We Disagree vs. Who Rules the Earth
Governments play an important role in climate action, whether they mean to or not. One concept introduced in Who Rules the Earth is the idea of acting locally but affecting globally. Schnieder uses the Cerulean Warbler as a vehicle for this concept, whose migration pattern spans South and North America. The warbler demonstrates how one species whose habitat conditions in Colombia affect birdwatchers in Ohio. The Columbian government has decided to place high productivity emphasis, resulting in the deforestation of Cerulean Warbler habitat to meet the global caffeine demands. The effect is that birdwatchers in Ohio see Cerulean Warblers less and less (Steinberg 2015). Columbia is acting seemingly locally — their plantations aren’t transgressing physical borders. However, the effects of their policies have a global impact in unexpected ways, such as the ultimate endangering of a species. On a similar parallel, Why We Disagree About Climate Change introduces the idea of external actors which in essence attempt to govern climate policies around the world. These entities, such as the IPCC, the UN Framework Convention, and others have a distinguishable effect on countries’ policies because they deliberately employ global governance tactics, producing a large-scale effect generated by large-scale collaboration. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is one instance of an organization that nation-states collaborated through to create policies for all member countries (Hulme 2009). However, the problem with the Kyoto Protocol is that it relies on an honors system and deters groups like Individualists or Egalitarians, who don’t feel that constrictive regulations from major global organizations are the key to climate solutions (Hulme 2009).
Is ‘Progress’ Forward Or Back? Making the Modern World vs. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts
Finally, there is a parallel between Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World and Phillips’ question of the necessity of modernity. Smil’s text is one massive calculation, and one of the outputs is that on a global level, accounting for all usages, we are not dematerializing. Humans continue to consume more, and with the growing population, that’s not likely to stop (Smil 2014). Phillips, on a related but less analytical note, spends a portion of his text wondering when the switch from pro-modernity to anti-modernity happened, and why that was. At one point, as Phillips points out, progressive idealists embraced the technological race, however, recently, the ‘green liberal’ idea has turned the opposite direction, promoting a regression back to simpler times, with small, local farms where a couple free-range cows lead wonderful lives before they are humanely slaughtered and served to the local public. Phillips argues that this is not a feasible solution to the planet’s growing population and demands. Moreover, there is no way that we as a globe will convince people to stop consuming as much, especially while billions of people still lack access to the luxuries of developed nations (Phillips 2015). Smil’s analysis of the inescapable reality of our inability to dematerialize goes hand in hand with Phillips’ argument that we don’t necessarily need to dematerialize because we can find a way to adapt our environment to meet our needs as we have always done in the past.
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