Yesterday I found myself holding a plastic cup, empty, looking for a recycling bin in a house I was not familiar with. I didn’t want to burden the owners and ask for a recycling bin when the trash can was right in front of me. I threw my red plastic cup in the garbage bin, my inner conflict boiling. My friend Hannah called me out for it the moment the plastic hit the other trash, and I thought back to my time in Intro to Environmental Studies and said to her “well this one cup won’t make a difference!”. She was appalled by my lack of so-called “awareness” or “carelessness”. As much as I try to be good to the environment and do my part (I typically recycle, I am a vegetarian, I turn off the lights when I’m not in the room), I have learned in ENVS 160 about the sort of impact little things like that actually make, which aren’t very big ones. I think by taking personal action, it reminds us to be conscious about the world in which we are living, which is to me a key part of doing these small things. Small things are important to me, personally because they remind me that there is more work to be done. I explain to Hannah what I’ve learned in ENVS 160, “Hannah if this is what grinds your gears, seeing people not throw plastic in the recycling, you should really look into taking institutional action”.
Personal Practices
In my personal life, the biggest thing I’m taking away from this class was the difference between individual and institutional action. I learned the most effective way to make a difference is to get everyone to take action through putting rules in place. I’ve written about this concept in several of my blog posts because it seems very relevant and is something I think a lot now that the semester is coming to a close. I keep asking myself questions like: “How can I make a difference?”, which is a question I’ve always asked myself but now I think of it in a different light. The question now becomes “How can I make a difference through institutions?”. I think it’s much easier to assume that turning off the lights and throwing that red plastic cup in the recycling is making a difference because it’s easier than spending time and effort trying to change an institution. Let’s be honest, I have no idea how to go about changing an institution, I don’t even know which changes I would suggest making. I think about it a lot more often now, though, with the intentions of eventually working up the effort when I’m not so busy with school work and all.
Scholarly Practices
In my scholarly life, ENVS has taught me multiple basic scholarly rules in terms of writing style, thought processing, reading techniques, and so on. A big thing I learned though, through a lot of the books we read, was to not make assumptions based on reading only one material. A lot of the materials that I’ve read on the topic of climate change have so many different opinions. This class taught me to take a look at multiple different opinions and then decide where your opinions falls in the context of all of those. Maybe your opinion is a combination of many scholarly opinions, or maybe you strongly agree with one of the materials you read and disagree fully with another. In terms of climate change and what to do about it, there are so many different opinions. This class has taught me how to create my own opinion by examining different arguments, see how they’ve evolved, and keep in mind the classic opinions but grow off of them.