I excitedly signed up for environmental science this semester with the expectation that I would learn how I could personally make a difference our world. I quickly discovered that wasn’t the case. I learned that my efforts on an individual scale meant virtually nothing and that the only hope for a brighter future was through many large scale changes. By reading the books by Mike Hulme, Vaclav Smil and Paul Steinberg, I now have a completely new perspective on environmental science.
The very first assigned reading this semester hit me hard and left me to believe that there was absolutely no hope for the future. Mike Hulme taught me in his book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, that there is no one solution to this very broad issue of climate change. Hulme explains that it takes a combination of large scale actions to leave an impact and then goes on to explain the difficulty of agreeing on what actions to take. (Hulme 2009) I first noticed the Hulme almost disregarded individual efforts with the belief that they don’t really make a difference. All my excitement was diminished and by the end of the book I remember thinking that there was no way that I could make a difference as a poor college student with no authority. I was then struck by the thought that no one can really make a difference because of the wide disagreement upon which actions to take when trying to reverse the effects of climate change. There seemed to be no hope and our next reading wasn’t going to raise my spirits on the matter.
Following our first reading, I eagerly awaited our next text looking for something more hopeful and maybe inspiring that would help me learn how I could make a difference. We began reading Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World, which focused mainly on materialization. This book was a little overwhelming with so many numbers and statistics to wrap my mind around that I had headaches after reading. One idea that stood out to me was the idea of dematerialization through absolute dematerialization and relative dematerialization. At first I was hopeful that there were alternative technologies which would save our planet but then we were soon introduced to the idea of Jevons paradox which described how dematerialization leads to an increase in consumption making no changes to the planet. (Smil 2014) Just when I started to gain a sliver of hope, reality came crashing down. Even improvements in technology wouldn’t be enough to save our planet.
By the time we began our last book, Who Rules the World, by Paul Steinberg, I had never been so pessimistic toward something in my life as I currently was towards our planets future. Steinberg had a different outlook on things describing how it is possible to make changes and how to go about it. Steinberg proposed the idea of creating new rules while getting rid of the old ones while educating the public on the importance of these new rules. Steinberg explains that these large scale changes which get the entire population to take action as opposed to a few individuals here and there would actually make a difference. As long as new beneficial rules are always being made, Steinberg believes that only progress can be made.(Steinberg 2015) Finally something hopeful! Steinbergs book was a perfect way to cap off the environmental science course by instilling some hope back into me. After reading this book I believe that although change is difficult, it is not impossible and is necessary to save our planet.
Changing the planet is not as easy as I expected when entering this course as I learned through all three texts mentioned above, but change is not impossible. Using Steinbergs approach to rule making, maybe Smils idea of dematerializing isn’t entirely impossible and maybe we can come to some agreement on which actions to take and what rules to apply. There is still hope for our planet but we must start making changes now.
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press