This course has many interconnected concepts that tie throughout the different texts and units we have studied and observed. Each different idea is demonstrated from multiple different points of view, from different authors. The three connections I chose were mentioned in the above title of the post: Lights, Camera, and Action, Lights regarding religion and spirituality when discussing climate change and environmentalism, Camera discussing the communication to the public, and Action demonstrating some different points of view on thinking globally or locally when planning for environmental action in response to climate change.
Lights: Religion and Spirituality
The first similarity I noticed is the impact of religion and spirituality in the Why We Disagree About Climate Change unit and classic v contemporary unit. Why We Disagree About Climate Change exemplifies the many ways in which religious institutions interpret environmental issues such as climate change (Hulme 2009). Hulme describes the different conventions that have taken place to attempt to bring religion into the discussion when it comes to climate change. Proctor (2009) also demonstrates one of the ways in which spirituality plays into environmental issues, discussing the concept that American environmentalism is both a religion and a science. He also makes the important point that taking spirituality into account while creating policy is extremely difficult. The idea of taking religion into account is very interesting to me, as it had never occurred to me before this course that religion and spirituality could coexist with the ideas of climate change and environmentalism.. The idea of ecospirituality is also demonstrated in the example of Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975).
Camera: Environmental Communication to the Public
The second similarity I found is scientific communication to the public. This is presented in the first and third units: Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Hulme 2009) and the classic and contemporary unit. Why We Disagree About Climate Change demonstrates many ways in which environmentalism can be portrayed to the public. Hulme gives the defecit, framing, and dilogic models, describing the ways in which these models inform the public about environmental issues (2009). In the classic v contemporary unit, one piece that stood out to me about the communication of environmental issues to the public was Kennedy and Ho (2015). They discussed the importance of environmental studies in education, and how enforcing critical thinking is an extremely important aspect in order to truly understand environmental issues. The perspective this piece takes is extremely important, as it focuses on communicating these issues to college students. I find that this is extremely different than the take that Hulme took in his text, where he focused more on the media and their take on communicating environmental news to a larger audience. While this would be at a much larger scale, it is very important for college students to understand the varied, intertwined mess that is environmental studies, as we are the ones who have to be the ones to change the environmental disasters the generations before us caused, whether on accident or not.
Action: Thinking Globally or Locally for Climate Change Solutions
The third similarity I noticed is the difference and importance of the difference between thinking globally or locally when discussing action for climate change. This was seen in the Classic and Contemporary unit and in the Who Rules the Earth? Unit. Maniates, in the classic v contemporary environmentalism unit described the concept of individualization of responsibility (Maniates 2001), relating it to The Lorax as an example of individual action. In Who Rules the Earth, Steinberg combats this perspective by enforcing the idea of ‘thinking vertically’ rather than the older concept of ‘think globally, act locally,’ (Steinberg 2015). This is enforcing the idea of moving (or scaling) upwards, trying to control the multiple layers of production and environmental issues. This is extremely interesting, as I had heard much more of the idea of “think globally act locally” in my life, and this text provided a defense as to why it is a far too simplified solution to an extremely complex problem. Thinking “vertically” incorporates a much more complex range of importance on the entire process rather on simply each person doing small things that make little impact on the entirety of the issue of climate change, much like Maniates’ example of the Lorax.
All in all, this course has provided a deep interconnected web of information and ideas. It gave many perspectives on each issue, such as the three presented above, and helped me to form my own opinions about each subject and debate.
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