For incoming students that already invest time and interest in environmental issues, I would recommend ENVS 160. I’ve found myself asking many questions during my time studying with James Proctor. Namely, what lessons have I learned from this class? Moreover, how do these lessons connect? I hope to convey a full diagram of this course through this essay.
Section One: Why We Disagree
Opening the first book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme, was an exciting experience. “Here I go,” I thought, “I finally get to learn how to change the world!” boy was I wrong. My yearning for an answer to how we can finally change the detrimental habits of our species was unfortunately not answered until the last few weeks of school. I actually felt as though we were getting further and further away from the topic the more that we dove into readings about disagreeing, materials, and classic thought. However, this book took me on a ride through culture, history, and policy to describe why environmental issues are approached in many ways. I learned that cultures view nature as entirely different entities causing universal conversation about the topic to be ambiguous and difficult. I learned that informing the public in a completely honest way is difficult due to the way data and results can be interpreted too simply by the public. I also learned that before we solve a crisis that involves the entire world, we must first view that world as a unit of one people: borders don’t belong in an open minded and constructive environment that is to tackle a wide issue (Hulme 2009).
To understand the phenomenon of dispute among culture, we took to the streets of portland to learn about the local disagreement about climate change. We created a survey as a class with the purpose of asking the public what climate change meant to them, and how concerned they are for our environment. I was in a group with three amazingly intelligent colleagues, and with them I compiled and compared the results of all the class’ data. To read the post, click here! We found that certain age groups were the most polarized on these opinions. The gender or (perceived) nationality of the interviewees didn’t seem to make all that much difference. We agreed among our group that the sample size of around 100 surveyees was not enough to draw definite patterns between opinion and status. We also recognize that we live in a bubble in portland. The northwest attracts many people of the same type; those who love the natural world around them and appreciate our effects on this beauty. Therefore, the results may have also been influenced by bias.
Section Two: Why Materials Matter
Making the Modern World, by Vaclav Smil challenged the way I thought about environmental issues and resources. I always pictured seagulls covered in oil, or massive factories pumping out sludge into the sky and ocean. I pictured big cars consuming gas, and drills pumping out resources of a nice farmer’s back yard. I realized through reading this book, that I had always been thinking too broadly. Many issues exist in resource consumption. Through the sharing of mass amounts of data, Smil illustrates the consumption rates of resources by country. The data is hard to follow, but James Proctor does a great job of guiding the class through the difficult reading. His biggest point is that we have not yet reached dematerialization, and will struggle as a culture to do so. He also explicitly states the paradox that occurs as a product becomes more efficient, it becomes used more. Therefore the resource consumption of that product doesn’t actually go down with efficiency.
Additionally, Smil describes the consumption of resources involved with all the processes of creating products. Extraction of resources uses energy and fuel. Transportation of that resource to the factory uses fuel. The process of combining that resource with others uses energy, fuel, water, money, and time. Each product that I use on a day to day basis is composed of materials that have come from all across the world, but I merely think of them as what they are to my purpose; A backpack, a water bottle, a computer, a staircase. Smil challenged my ability to perceive environmental issues as broad topics and to focus on more realistic solutions framed by resource depletion. The true issue resides in consumption and mindfulness of how much of this world we exploit to fulfill our day to day purposes (Smil 2013).
In order to form a full understanding of how much the extraction of materials affects small cultures, environments, and local areas, we investigated material extraction for silver. We found that historically, silver has been considered a precious metal and is used in jewelry, cutlery, mirrors, and as monetary value. Because silver is a fairly expensive mineral and is used to make luxury goods, its primary consumers are people in affluent countries, however, the affected countries of its extraction include China, Chile, and Bolivia. The mining of silver can have very consequential environmental and health impacts. For instance, the mined area suffers from air and noise pollution, soil degradation and contamination, deforestation, potential loss of biodiversity, and water pollution and depletion. Though these effects seem to be very negative, it is important to understand that in most cases the nearby civilizations and local people do not experience these negative impacts on a daily basis. To read the full impacts of silver extraction, click here!
Section Three: Classic & Contemporary Environmental Thought
The classic and contemporary readings emphasized the academic portion of environmental science. We read about a dozen readings spanning the subjects of classic and contemporary environmental thought. The general lesson from this section was the difference between classic and environmental thought when it comes to environmentalism. Classic environmentalism views nature as pure and has an apocalyptic view of the future. Technophobia is also an included attribute to classic thought. Contemporary thought welcomes technology as a probable solution to environmental issues. Additionally, contemporary thought focuses on the future instead of the past (Proctor 2017). Contemporary thought helped frame these issues in a positive light, while classic felt dooming. The context of these readings was accompanied by a team assignment where we interrogated “isms”. “Isms” are a broad category of ideologies, e.g. environmentalism, ecofeminism, or anarchism. Our post investigated ecofeminism, which was revealed to be as much a distinction between contemporary and classic as environmentalism. To read about it, follow this link. This assignment synthesized my ability to research and collaborate with my friends on an interesting topic! The team assignments are a great way to expand on the lessons of the class, as well as learn the dynamic of college group projects.
Section Four: Implementation & Piecing it all Together
The final section of the class regarded the book Who Rules The Earth, by Paul Steinberg, which finally combined my curiosity with implementation. This book crossed the reality of disagreement, consumption, and traditions to illustrate how implementation of environmental policy would actually take place. I learned that it is imperative to inform the public honestly and properly about environmental issues because the voice up the public is much more influential than we allow it to be through traditions. Steinberg also pushes the point that the reason we have so many detrimental habits to the environment is because they’ve existed in tradition for years, and we have not considered their impact during the formation of these habits. Some examples of these habits would be mandatory green lawns in California, or using styrofoam boxes at restaurants as takeout containers. Once policy is in place allowing these traditions to take place, new policy has to be introduced on an institutional level to make change. Individual action can raise awareness, but will never change these policies. If you chose to stop taking your food home in styrofoam, those that find it convenient will still implement this habit in their lives. But challenging the institutions use of this material can cause them to openly accept the habit as detrimental and make change (Steinberg 2015 Chapter 11).
During this section of the class, I spent many hours cranking through individual assignments in the library. My first post reflected back to the beginning of the year on the book Why We Disagree. I noticed the theme of barriers and broke down the ways in which disagreements get in the way of implementing policy (Hulme 2009). My next post was probably the most difficult. This connected three lessons of ENVS 160 I related Smil’s theory on using efficient materials with Mike Hulmes depictions of HDI and Naess’ value of diversity in nature. This post helped map out the readings and how they relate to each other. My third post related directly to Who Rules the Earth. I wrote about how traditions get in the way of implementing change, and the importance of institutional change. Finally, my last post linked together the pieces of the course. I outlined each section, much like in this post, and shared my value of each section. This post helped me appreciate the course, and allowed me to reflect on what I’ve learned this year.
An amazing thing happened when I wrote these past two posts reflecting on ENVS 160. I have gone through an unreal amount of processing. One of the largest challenges in this class is the amount of information thrown into a whirlwind of readings, posts, and reflections. Sometimes it is hard to pick out the important parts of each section. This manifests as the biggest stress of this class, but don’t worry, all will make sense in the end.