Let me be honest with you, this class is not going to be easy. ENVS 160 is basically an extreme crash course into the multidisciplinary aspects of Environmental Studies. The materials in this class are extremely insightful and interesting, but they are not going to give you much use if you do not put in the extra effort to think them over critically. This is not because the contents are hard to decipher, but the fact that there are so many ideas coming from so many different aspects of life might make you feel completely disoriented in the course. But here to give you a rough idea of what you will encounter in this course, I will summarize for you the rough path through ENVS 160.
Our first text Why We Disagree about Climate Change (Hulme, 2009) is your perfect “Environmentalism for Dummies”. This book will give you the overview of all the different perspectives on environmentalism from different aspects of life including science, economic, religions, politics, etc. Essentially, this book explains how disagreements on the nature and the approach to environmentalism have resulted in its complexity and thus the struggle to solve environmental problems. If you think that such disagreements on climate change can not possibly exist, since of course climate change is a “fact”, well think again once you see the survey results of Portlanders’ real opinion on climate change. Spoiler, there were more than a couple of climate change deniers in this “Green city”.
The next section of the course is Making the Modern World (Smil, 2014). In my opinion, this book is your encyclopedia for all the materials humans have used in building our modern civilization. This book itself is extremely dense and heavily focused on the quantitative history of the natural resources than we use. However, the main takeaway of this book is not how the use of certain materials have changed over time, but the reasons for those changes, the changes in needs and situation of civilization. Through these stories, you will come to understand that every material is situated, meaning its used is specific to the place, the people and the social context surrounding that place. To apply the concepts of “situating materials”, our class did a group project on situating minerals where my group explored the use of Cobalt. This group assignment had helped me a great deal in understanding the connection between these seemingly physical processes of manufacturing Cobalt and the social processes that drive and sustain them.
The third section of class is all about the -Isms. In this section of the class, we explored the differences between classical and contemporary environmentalism. This was where we delved into the conceptual realm, unfolding all the different beliefs and ideals regarding nature and subsequently environmentalism. This is the section of the class where I started to question all of my preconceptions of environmentalism and realize a slow shift in my own opinion and belief. Through reading the various contemporary and classical environmentalism papers, I realized how I had been identifying myself as a classical thinker without fully understand what it meant. At the end of the section, we got to do another group project on “Interrogating -isms” where our group worked on “postcolonialism”. This project truly helped me expand my understanding of contemporary environmentalism in the context of postcolonialism which was something that was also near to my heart coming from a former colony.
As a conclusion to the course, I wrote a reflection on the three key lessons I have learned from the course which also serves as a great lead into our final text Who Rules the Earth (Steinberg, 2015) which in my opinion also serves as an optimistic conclusion to all environmental studies students out there, suggesting to us that our efforts are not fruitless, if they are channeled correctly. Subsequently, I wrote another reflection linking the materials between three different texts during the course as an exercise to draw out for myself the bigger picture and the main takeaway for the course. As we finished the last text, I wrote my third reflection on the lesson of the text, which I undoubtedly think it is the best text in the course, as well as a final reflection on how I would apply the concepts I have learned from this course to my scholarly and personal life.
Overall, I have struggled many times during this course dealing with the amount of information that we got from all the texts. However, I would certainly say it has been an interesting journey, but one that is only worthwhile if you can be completely honest and critical with yourself. Therefore, trust your judgement, and trust your compass, it might lead you to a completely different direction in the end.
Works Cited
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. 4th Edition edition. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. 1 edition. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. 1 edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.