My advice to you as a freshman in ENVS 160 is to come into this class with no expectations and an open mind. When I first came into this class I didn’t really know what to expect but I thought that it was going to be something very different than what it was. There was not a lot of hard science involved so I had some trouble fully understanding all the pieces of the puzzle. But hopefully now that you know to come with no expectations you will have an easier time putting it all together. This class changed my preconceptions about the way we as individuals and students perceive the many problems associated with the environment and how to go about finding a solution. It took me awhile to get to this point but hopefully this guide will help you put the puzzle together.
The class is split up into four sections. In the first section we read Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009) and explored the many reasons why we can’t find a simple solution to climate change. The second section dove into many numbers and facts about the materials we use in the world. For this section we read Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil (2014). In the third section we investigated different classic and contemporary environmental perspectives. This section allowed us to reflect on our own perspectives to see if we are more classic or contemporary environmentalists. Finally in the last section we read Paul Steinberg’s Who Rules the Earth? (2015) and learned about the more specific ways that we as individuals can create change in our societies. These four sections individually were tricky to understand but when they all came together they changed how I perceive the earth’s problems and its solutions.
Why We Disagree
In Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), Hulme discusses the many reasons why we can’t find and agree on a simple solution to combat climate change. Each chapter points out a different reason why we disagree. One chapter that really stood out to me was the chapter that explained how a person’s upbringing and religious affiliations influence how they value climate change. This was really eye-opening for me because I was able to see how much my experiences in the outdoors affected my view on climate change. The other chapters explore how people place different value on climate change; this happens because climate change is communicated differently in different places across the world, because we perceive risks differently, and because it’s combined with tricky questions of governance, to name a few. Our assignment for this section was to gather information on how the people of Portland viewed climate change. My group and I went into downtown Portland to survey various people about their various opinions on climate change. You can find our report here. In this section I learned just how diverse people’s views are on climate change and that we all place different value on things based on our beliefs and the communities we surround ourself by.
Making the Modern World
The second section of the class was very number-oriented as we read Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World (2014) which delves into the facts about all the “stuff” we use in our daily lives. Smil lays out the history and facts of how much and what materials we use. The numbers are staggering and really show us how much unnecessary waste we produce. While he shows us the numbers and calculations, he also makes the argument to achieve relative dematerialization through efficiency and substituting materials (Smil 2014). To further understand this section, my group investigated the impact of the mineral silicon on various processing plants around the world. We investigated places like Oslo, Norway, Tokyo, Japan, Munich, Germany, Burnsville, Mississippi, and Cape Flattery, Australia. This project taught us how a material and its production impacts communities in very different ways. Based on the country’s economic standing and its reliance on raw minerals, silicon was either very important to the place and the community there or it was just another small source of income for the country.
Classic versus Contemporary Environmental Thought
For the third section we investigated many different texts to distinguish the difference between classic and contemporary environmental thought. Before doing this I had always thought that I was more of a contemporary environmentalist just because many of my other values are more modern but then I realized that I am very split between classic and contemporary environmental thought. To start our research for classic thought, we read Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) and Meadow’s Limits to Growth (1974) to gain an understanding of the earth’s material limits. These texts specifically laid out the argument that if we continue to act as we do and not care about our continual growth then we will reach earth’s carrying capacity. The second part of the classics investigation focused on our assumptions in regard to nature and religion/spirituality. This lead to our contemporary conversation which included Leigh Philips’ Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts (2015). In this text we learned about the ways that technology should be included in defending and combating environmental problems like climate change. In order to connect the classic and contemporary thinking to our lives, we took an ecotypes survey which mapped our values on technology, future, time, nature, science, scale, domain, spirituality, and society axes. To conclude this section, my group researched ecocriticism in an attempt to understand the connection between nature and literature.
Who Rules the Earth?
The final section taught us about institutional versus individual action in Paul Steinberg’s Who Rules the Earth? (2015). This is book that greatly changed my perspective on solving modern environmental problems. I had always thought that the only thing I could do for the earth is small individual actions like recycling and such. But the main point from Steinberg’s book changed my perspective. Steinberg argues that the only way to achieve true change is through social rules enacted by institutions (Steinberg 2015). This is because the social rules are the rules and social norms that inherently govern our lives. If we follow these rules set in place by the institutions then it is possible to create change. I learned that individual actions won’t do any good because they are simply too small for the size and gravity of the problem. You may be thinking what I thought when I learned this; if only institutional actions create change then what am I supposed to do? I learned by the end of the book that we can still take individual action, and we should because “it is a matter of balance, complementing these everyday acts of individual conscience with larger actions that promote social change” (Steinberg 2015, 278). But we should take individual action with the goal of implementing institutional action. I only fully grasped this concept once I completed four individual posts which reflected and synthesized all the sections. They are Evolving My Environmental Thought, Connecting the Concepts, Rules Will Always Reign, and Before and After.
All in all, this class was not at all what I expected but has changed how I perceive environmental problems and their solutions. I feel that although I have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle put together, I don’t have it completely finished. I hope that this guide will prepare you for this class.
Works Cited
- Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–48. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.
- Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1974. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.
- Phillips, Leigh. 2015. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse‐Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley.
- Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.