Overview
As I navigate the post-ENVS world, I want to take what I’ve learned and integrate it into both my scholarly and personal life. I plan to focus on the scholarly throughout my school-career at Lewis and Clark but also extend this learning beyond college and Portland. I believe that as I graduate and move forward in my career the paths of my scholarly and personal lives will begin to intertwine.
Scholarly
As an ENVS minor, I have had the opportunity of experiencing an interdisciplinary field within Environmental Studies as well as through my Asian Studies major. Before entering into the ENVS program, I felt as though I was prepared to tackle the field with the knowledge I had acquired on my own. Once I started the 160 class, I began to realize how biased my personal learning had been. Although I had been integrating practices and knowledge into my daily life, only learning about topics that I was interested in, wasn’t as beneficial as I had initially thought.
When we began tackling the readings, I truly realized what the word, interdisciplinary meant within the context of Environmental Studies. Interdisciplinary means not just learning what interests you but learning how you can connect to other subjects and people through intersections within seemingly separate disciplines. Although it was easy to learn about things that interested me within the Environmental Studies field on my own time, it was limiting me from expanding my knowledge and from who I would be able to interact with on a deeper basis in the future.
Now that I have experienced the 160 class, it has motivated me to integrate more interdisciplinary aspects into my scholarly future. I want to be able to integrate Asian Studies and Environmental Studies together and I believe because of this class I will be able to. The integration will take learning about subjects that may not appear interesting to me at the start but will create a better understanding of these two fields interact. Taking classes such as Environmental history through which I can get an understanding of the intersection between other countries histories and the environment will give insight into how to proceed moving forward with integrating my major and minor into a career.
Personal Life
A huge component of ENVS has been the emphasis on incrementalism not being a viable long-term solution. It was disheartening to hear that individual action is unable to make any real dent in the issues the world is facing but deep down this was something I already knew was true. The parts of my life where I do focus on better environmental practices haven’t become less important since talking about this in class, I feel as though ENVS 160 embedded an awareness surrounding each practice. I know in my heart that biking to school, recycling and composting, and picking up trash on the street doesn’t make a difference in the scope of the world when we zoom out but I’ve continued these practices because they bring me joy.
As I previously stated in a former post, social change is bigger than the I and therefore needs to be focused on in a larger scale. The small actions I plan to continue doing within my personal life however they are actions that are for me. Through Environmental Studies, I’ve realized I need to be looking at the bigger picture and ways to get involved. Although it is difficult to have power and agency as just one citizen, joining with other individuals to make a collective is key. I plan to begin writing letters to politicians who have the agency to create change and urge them to push bills that have a positive impact on the earth. I also want to participate in larger scale action projects such as working with a conservation organization or focusing my career into environmental policy. Through integrating the interdisciplinary aspect and working with more people rather than on my own as an individual, I believe changes, though they may be small, will begin to occur.