Strap in. You’re in for a bumpy ride.
ENVS 160 will challenge all your beliefs and expectations about the environment. It will not be a lecture-based class with endless note-taking and Powerpoints. Nor will it be endless streams of facts about the environment systems and the reasons behind climate change. It will challenge all your beliefs and approaches to the environment and all of the problems and solutions that come with it. Be prepared to read. The readings can be challenging and frustrating; they weave a web of interdisciplinary concepts from scientific to economic to political which help you understand the ways in which we interact with and form a relationship with our environment. This course is split into four separate sections, with each section concentrating on a particular topic or reading.
WHY WE DISAGREE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
Mike Hulme, a geographer and fellow Brit wrote this book (literally the whole book) on why people disagree about climate change. Hulme examines this in detail, from economic reasons, to political, to ideological to even spiritual. The book can be slightly disheartening for those of you who are ardent environmentalists, looking for solutions to the impending doom of climate change and the destruction of our environment, you won’t find them here in this book. Hulme concludes that climate change is a “wicked problem” with no single, easy solution. This book was my favourite book we studied by far (not just because Hulme is British) but because it was the first time I had even begin to consider the idea of climate meaning something completely different things for different people and that some people even have a bias in seeing climate change continue.
This section of the course requires a post to be submitted looking at the differing views of climate change within our own backyard of Portland. As someone who adored Geography all throughout high school, the fieldwork that was required in completing this post was right up my street. Using a Google form we had to interview members of the public (which means breaking free of the LC bubble) and looking at the correlations on a larger-scale outside the greater area of Portland. As a team you’ll write a post and reflection of your fieldwork and results.
MAKING THE MODERN WORLD
Okay. So if you don’t like numbers or text which is smaller than newspaper print, brace yourself. This challenging book is written by Vaclav Smil who examines the history and current trend of global materialization and human development throughout time. Smil takes you on a journey of stuff-literally from the very dawn of time, when really the only thing around were rocks to the dizzying mounds of endless amounts of things are what is at the very epicentre of our civilization’s growth. The main thing to take away from this book is not necessarily the precise figures behind our consumption. Rather it is the idea that we need to somehow strike a balance between growth and development, in order to decrease environmental impact, which requires decreasing our consumption levels without grossly impacting on our standard of living.
You will be assigned a post: “Situating Minerals” in which you and your team select a mineral to study in closer detail. Each member of the team selects a geographic location to explore the social, economic and cultural relationship between the mineral and that place. My group examined steel, looking at three different locations in which steel is produced and manufactured. The main focus and perhaps the most interesting part of this assignment is trying to establish a sense of what it is like to live in that particular place and how the mineral in that location impacts them. What I took away from this project was that environmental concern is somewhat of a luxury. For many, like those who live in areas where steel is manufactured, making a living and improving their standard of living is more important than environmental concern. It is here that Vaclav Smil’s main argument comes into play-where do we draw the boundary between development and environmental concern.
CLASSIC VS. CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTALISM
This section of the course involves older and perhaps more traditional readings than other sections of the course. Many of you (apparently if you took AP Env. Science) might have read, or at least heard of The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968). I initially struggled with grasping the differences between classic and contemporary environmentalism from just the readings but as we got further into the course and discussed these in a wider context, they became clearer. Hardin’s text is probably the most important theory as you continue on during the ENVS 160 course. Classic environmentalism is much more apocalyptic about the future and in my personal opinion is slightly more old-fashioned and overly tentative in its views of environmental mitigation and adaptation. Many people in my class seemed to class themselves as classic environmentalists before this course but during the course of this semester found that they embraced contemporary ideals much more. I found contemporary environmentalism to be much more modern and realistic about the ways in which we can develop in light of environmental degradation and climate change.
The assignment that is twinned with this section of this course is the “Interrogating Isms” post. In teams you are required to examine both classic and contemporary environmental movements through the medium of one specific environmental movement. My group selected Apocalyptism: environmentalists who believe that the level of environmental degradation has already reached a catastrophic level and the end of the world is imminent. This section of the course and this assignment will help you to understand classic and contemporary environmentalism and how your views and beliefs fit within a larger environmental movement. It was helpful for me to begin to understand and contextualize my relationship with the environment and compare it to my peers.
WHO RULES THE EARTH
At the beginning of the semester I probably would have answered with a sarcastic: “The Americans.” Steinberg’s Who Rules The Earth challenges the concept of individual environmental action and forces you to think broader than small, simple differences that we make on a daily basis. While he doesn’t simply dismiss these individual actions, he pushes for institutional action through influencing policy makers and large economic players like transnational corporations.
For this section of ENVS 160 you will be required to write four individual posts. The first is simply a reflection post, where you will describe three key lessons you have learnt. The second is a synthesis post in which you will write about three connections between all the texts you have read over the semester. The third post is concentrated purely on Who Rules the Earth and discussing the author’s main argument. The fourth and final post (by which point you will be a pro) will ask you how you will carry what you’ve learnt from ENVS 160 in the future.
IT’S NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
ENVS 160 is a little overwhelming. There’s a lot of reading, with a lot of new information and ideas. Halfway through the course I was frustrated and tired and was just to resigned to the fact that we disagree about climate change so finding a solution is at the least problematic, if not impossible. Now, at the end of the semester (and pretty happy about it) I can understand why this course is structured the way it is. My advice is to keep up with the readings and just kind of go with the flow-don’t try to over think every concept or assignment. It’s only now that I am beginning to understand how my opinions fit in the complicated jigsaw of environmentalism. Each and every person has a different relationship with the environment and views on how we should adapt to climate change. During the semester I felt like I was on a completely different playing field to many LC students; we seemed to have completely polar opposite opinions. The course content has made me more comfortable with my beliefs because as you will soon see everyone (and I mean everyone) disagrees about climate change. But as Hulme writes “disagreement is a form of learning.” (Hulme, 2009, xxiv)
Works Cited
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge University Press.
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.
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–48. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.