As much as they seem separate, two things such as Making the Modern World, which is about physical materials and the usage of said materials, and the comparisons of contemporary and classic environmental thought, which is, as the name suggests, focuses on the ideas, are actually connected. How? you may ask. Well, there is the dangerous and obvious connection, they both pertain to the ‘environment’, and we studied both in this class, but that connection and relation are not interesting. There is another connection in the form of one of the schools of though, materialism. The overall concept of materialism is placing value on every natural resource, a concept that connects an environmental idea and physical materials.
The other two sections of the class surround the books Why We Disagree About Climate Change, and our current book, Who Rules the Earth. These two connect to each other in the fact that they both deal heavily with social relations and how society as a whole interacts with the various environments. The most recent portion of Who Rules the Earth that I read, chapter 7, is about scaling up, and it used the EU as an example since the EU is so unique in terms of international politics. Since the EU is compromised of different nations, they each have their own viewpoint of the climate, and there are bound to be disagreements, as mentioned in chapter 9 of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, which tackles how different countries govern in relations to the climate.
While verifying the information for this post’s citations, I noticed that Making the Modern World and Who Rules the Earth were beeing sold as a bundle on Amazon which got me thinking. It can’t just be a coincidence that they were sold together. This connection makes sense though since they both examine broader environmental concepts, and also tying them to tangible things in the real world.
Works Cited