Through the weaving in and out of ENVS 160, there are lots of things, perhaps too many things, that must be covered in a small amount of time. The best way to comprehend the workload is to make sure you are thinking about and comprehending what you read and what you learn. There are classes where you can skip the readings and get a general sense of what you are learning, and that is all you need to know to do well on quizzes and tests. But in ENVS 160, it is important that you also think logically, since that will get you farthest in this class. The quizzes are in place to help you logically understand the material, while the class itself is set up for you to form your own opinions about each matter and give you alternative viewpoints on how to approach environmental issues. To try and unpack the main points of this class, I will divide it into the four sections of this class, starting with Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme.
Why We Disagree
In Why We Disagree About Climate Change; Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, Mike Hulme attempts to do exactly that, and attributes our differing opinions and perspectives to how we view the world, and how climate change is an idea and its effects are not immediately apparent to someone who was just recently learning about climate change. There are also other aspects that are controversial, like whether it would be beneficial to assign economic value or to have government or technology involved with climate change. There is also a debate over whether the climate science in justified, and there are also a lot of people who see the causes of our environmental problems manifest in different ways. For example, on page 156, Hulme uses the example of a survey by Donner, who surveyed Americans about the cause of hurricane Katrina, of which “23 per cent believed that the hurricane was a deliberate act of God, as opposed to 39 per cent who attributed it to human emissions of greenhouse gases” (Hulme 2009, 156). This example only emphasizes the disagreement in ideals that humans hold concerning the worldly problems that we face everyday, and how the beliefs and morals that we have be raised with is one of the major factors that determines how we approach climate change. To better understand and get a feel for ourselves a fraction of what Hulme had to consider while writing this book, we were assigned to take a survey for ourselves and analyze the results. In this post we ultimately we came to the conclusion that “this assignment helped us realize the complexities of analyzing data surrounding climate change and individuals opinion on it. The debate over climate change spans far greater than whether climate change is ‘real’ or ‘fake’ .” Although we did not come up with a complete solution for the issues that Hulme addresses in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, he does come up with some sort of a solution, which is that action needs to be taken, but there is no need for it to be well planned out, and we can allow for “clumsy solutions” to try and address all the problems, after we get everyone to agree with one another on the causes and solutions concerning climate change. After all of this talk of ideas, let us move on to the physical and material aspect of our changing social, political, and environmental economy with Vaclav Smil.
Making the Modern World
Vaclav Smil approaches our changing environment from a different perspective, through the material consumption of wood, stone, metals, and silicon and how they are used in different circumstances. The economic value of the different materials we use also place a significant part in what we use to further ourselves as a “first-world country” or a “third-world country” and how the use of materials translates into energy. Smil uses a lot of hard numbers, and in chapter four, elaborates on the importance of recycling and how much energy it saves us. “Recycled paper can be made with 40% less energy while generating 45% less waste water and 50% less solid waste” (Smil 2014, 112). If we are to continue on to grow, as our respective countries, economically while keeping dwindling materials to be utilized in mind, we have to learn to create the most energy with as little material in mind. In order to do this, we must take into account economic incentive and utilize the market, as the more efficient we are at recycling and creating energy, the cheaper it is to make clean and useable energy. In order to better understand the possibility of dematerialization, we must understand a material’s implications, where it is mined, what it is used for, and how valuable it is in order to gauge if it is efficient to continue using. We did this through recognizing the uses and importance of nickel, in which me and three other classmates determined whether or not nickel is a valuable and useful enough material to continue to use in the future. We found that although it is used in many products we use daily, like cell phones, nickel does extensive damage to the environment as well as to the health of the people who mine the nickel. This means that if we want to continue to use nickel, we must either find a more efficient way to mine or recycle it, or choose a different material as an alternative. Smil’s solution for our environmental and economic wellbeing is that we must adapt to our current situation and continue on by keeping in mind our dwindling supply of materials and assess whether or not it is economically and environmentally viable to use and (hopefully) reuse the energy we obtain from certain materials.
Classic and Contemporary Thought
There were many, many articles that we had to read in the Classic vs Contemporary section, and we also make our way back to the more idealistic perspectives comparing the classic thought of environmentalism versus the more contemporary. The classic thought is that we must take individual action, incremental action will be beneficial in the long run, and that we must trust exactly what scientists have concluded. It is the idea that we learn our facts about environmental degradation and take action based on those facts. It is the idea that nature is pure and technology is not the solution. The contemporary viewpoint is a lot more open-minded, and presents the idea that technology is an option towards a future that has the chance to be restored. Perhaps not to its past glory, but to a new kind that is sustainable. In Love Your Monsters, Bruno Latour argues from a contemporary standpoint that humans play a large role in the future of our earth, and uses the example of Dr. Frankenstein, whose “crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself” (Latour 2011, 271-273). This means that the role of humans in the Anthropocene is that we must care for and guide the things we create, because otherwise they will become disastrous because everything has the potential to be really beneficial or really bad for the environment. To better understand contemporary thought, we looked at the ideology “political ecology.” In the post we wrote called “Through the Lens of a Political Ecologist,” we analyzed Tim Forsyth, a political ecologist, who wrote a book critiquing other political ecologists. He emphasized that it is important that we combine politics and science so that they may work side by side, rather than separate the two, because that way we can pass policies that help us socially with environmental issues in mind. These reading presented the solutions that we must comprehend classic and contemporary though to come up with our own solutions for problems we need to address.
Who Rules the Earth
In the reading, Who Rules the Earth by Paul F. Steinberg, the author combines the ideas and the solutions to try and achieve a sustainable future, which I most effectively address in this post. Steinberg talks about the different ways in which we can solve the problems that we have created by taking the blame and taking precautions so that the negative impacts are lessened on the environment. That means doing things like effectively disposing of waste rather than dumping in the ocean. He also talks about the rules that are set up that guide our actions, but in order to place effective rules that can be changed easily if we find out new and contradicting information about an environmental issue, we must first all have the same understanding and mindset of how the world works. Here are a few of the most important lessons that I have learned throughout this class that have only been exemplified by Steinberg’s work, that I hope you will come to understand as well. I have struggled with my own understanding of what solutions can be implemented in order to benefit our future and make it sustainable, and I have more effectively understood my own ideas and how everything connects in post no. 3, in which I compare the various readings that this class has required from me. It has allowed me to tie together all the seemingly unrelated and a lot of the time contradictory works, which I have come to understand is all so that I can become a more open-minded individual while still maintaining my own opinions. This is ultimately the goal that I believe Steinberg wants his readers to achieve, and I hope that you can too. There are many things that you, as an individual, can achieve and act upon in order to help classmates and other friends understand the real effect you can have on people, which I have had to explore and elaborate upon in this final post.
There are a lot of things you can do to succeed in ENVS 160, but I believe the most important lesson is to be able to think logically and rationally in terms of quizzes, be skeptical but open when reading the material, and be able to state your opinion and back up your claims in discussions to allow for furthering of the discussion and a learning experience for you and your peers.
Works Cited
Hulme, Mike (2009-04-30). Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (p. 156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
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.
Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus, eds. 2011. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute. http://www.amazon.com/Love-Your-Monsters-Postenvironmentalism-ebook/dp/B006FKUJY6.