While it’s often easy to look at what we learn in ENVS 160 under the lens of a microscope, it is also easily as important to pull away and view specific argument and beliefs in conjunction with each other. This allows for a greater understanding of the texts as a whole, and can often create greater reflection and understanding of where to go with these often novel ideas. Much of the ideas we learned are quite new to me, and pulling away and creating connections between the different texts is incredibly helpful with my greater understanding and knowledge of the topics we touched upon. What follows are three such connections.
Austerity Politics: Who should govern Who?
As mentioned in my first blog, I have been focusing a lot on austerity politics and whether or not it has a place in the dialogue about climate change. A big part of the question about austerity politics is who has a right to govern who. This idea is originally brought up in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, where the idea of the UN debating the appropriate response to climate change for every country was criticized, as many members of the UN had little idea of the proper way to govern countries that they had little knowledge about (Hulme 2009, chapter 9). These criticisms are strongly echoed in Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts, which has a focus almost entirely based on the rejection of austerity and the issues brought up by large developed countries implementing punishing measures on smaller developing countries who have a right to modernize (Phillips 2015, chapter 2).
Institution vs. Individual vs. Is Climate Change Even “Solvable”
Like many students entering Lewis and Clark and the Environmental Studies program, I started off with an inflated view about the importance of individual action. Like many things, individual action has its place and can be incredibly beneficial, but as brought up in Who Rules the Earth, it offers very little when compared with what needs to be done to combat climate change. While people try their best to solve climate change individually, “scientists tell us that one out of every five mammal species in the world is threatened with extinction” (Steinberg 2015, page 6). Obviously, the scale of individual action is grossly out of proportion with consequences so wide spread and damaging like these. A similar idea is mentioned in Why We Disagree, in which Hulme believes that the world has gone too far in regards to climate change to allow for small actions on the individual scale to be useful. However, Hulme goes even further by claiming that even after all the environmental summits and protocols very little has changed and no turning point has been found in the fight against climate change. Because of this, he believes that there will never be a time when the turning point is found (Hulme 2009, Sect. 10.2). However, he does claim that climate change should be “approached as an imaginative idea, an idea that we develop and employ to fulfill a variety of tasks for us” (Loc. 5996). Developing this new idea of climate change can lead to more impactful institutional actions to better our future and either solve climate change or live with it in the best way possible.
Abandoning Is Rarely the Right Answer
When looking at the widespread effects of climate change, it’s easy to blame the spread of technology for many of the problems. And why not? Technology often requires rare material that must be extracted at expense of the environment, and most simply, technology creates more stuff. However, the idea that technology is the root of our problems is one that is refuted throughout many of our readings. Frequently throughout Austerity Ecology, Phillips defends technology and the creation of stuff. Technology like turbines and computers all damage the environment during their creation and potentially their use, however this same technology can have an even greater effect helping the environment, from reduce the need for dirty energy to spreading pre-environmental ideals through the internet (Phillips 2015, page 87). This belief is echoed in Love Your Monsters, Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, which equates the abandoning of our technology with the abandoning of Frankenstein’s monster. If technology were to be continually improved upon and more efficient, many technologies that are thought of today as dirty or dangerous could instead be driving forces in the fight for the environment. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, technology was not created evil in relation to the environment. It was only through abandonment that many technologies have become thought of as “evil” (Shellenberger, Nordhaus 2011).
These three ideas are ideas that are inundated throughout much of the books read in Environmental Science, and are key factors moving forward both in further ENVS classes but out into the world itself.