Environmental studies is an amazing opportunity to challenge yourself, and to begin to understand what interdisciplinarity truly means. So far in my first year in college, Environmental Studies challenged me the most and made me think outside of the box the most. Although definitely daunting at times, the course is worth it and I hope this helps you navigate your own way through ENVS 160.
What Makes Us Disagree About Climate Change?
In the first part of this course, our class (and yours too) will explore the book Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme. In this book, we explored all the ways for why people disagree about climate change, breaking down into discrepancies in what people fear, believe, and what climate means to different social groups. In each chapter, Hulme addresses a new reason why people disagree about climate change. Especially with climate, Hulme addresses how it is a constructed idea and isn’t as constant as some people think, including myself at the beginning of the course. Breaking climate down, he separates it into the scientific, which can be quantified and is observable, and the cultural, which depends entirely on what culture or society a person is from. As well as this, Hulme breaks up people, societies, and social groups into being in one of four different categories: fatalists, hierarchists, individualists, and egalitarians. These groups all express different feelings about what nature means, varying from being benign, to it being a lottery, to it being tolerant if treated in the right manner (2009).
A team assignment that we did on this post can be found here. Within this project, we surveyed the people of Portland to try and understand what people of different age groups, genders, ethnicities, and where people live to understand how people’s opinions vary.
Making the Modern World Through Materials
The next book that we read was by Vaclav Smil, and is called Making the Modern World. This book revolves around all of the different materials that have been used throughout the history of humans, showing the changes as we progressed through the middle ages, through the industrial revolution, until our place in time now. I, as well as other classmates found this to be a difficult book to read as it relied heavily on data with a lot of units and numbers. However, as our Professor Jim Proctor talked about, Bill Gates has described as one of the smartest people in the world, and so it is definitely worth the time to really explore.
After reading this book, we completed another team assignment that followed specific minerals throughout the world, and what the economic, social, political, etc. factors of that mineral mean to the region. You can see my team’s post here.
Thinking Classically and Contemporarily
After finishing Smil’s Making the Modern World, we began our part of the class on classical versus contemporary environmental thought. Overall, classical environmental thought has a high emphasis on needing to separate humans from the natural world, as well as forecasting an apocalyptic future for the earth. However, the contemporary philosophy believes that we will be able to reverse the effects of climate change through developing technologies, as well as nature being a hybrid with humans. The easiest way to separate the two is that classic predicts doom and contemporary is more hopeful.
For this section of the course, we worked on a team assignment to research and write a summary of a chosen ism. The ism that my group chose was modernism and can be found here.
Who Rules the Earth, or really WHAT
The final section of the course revolved around reading a book called Who Rules the Earth by Mike Hulme. This was by far my favorite reading of the class as it expressed most concretely how and what action is possible. This book revolves chiefly around institutional action and how rules rule our world and interactions between people. In order “to bring about lasting change requires modifying the very rules that societies live by” (Steinberg 2015, 11). This ended the course on a high note, and gave hope for actually being able to create change in a world that can be pretty daunting and hard to navigate.
We wrote a couple of posts on this, and you can find mine here, here, here, and here.
Overall, ENVS 160 is not an easy course but is definitely rewarding. If you’re taking the class, you most likely feel strongly about the earth and want to make a difference. Although it is only the first step, I definitely feel like I’ve grown in the class and have really changed how I feel about a lot of environmental issues. If I can give one piece of advice, it is to really involve yourself in the course by involving yourself in classroom discussions, talking to your professor if you are confused about anything, and really investing yourself as much as you can! It’ll be hard, but you’ll definitely feel fulfilled after.
Works Cited:
Steinberg, Paul F. Who Rules the Earth? 1st Edition. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Smil, Vaclav. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley, 2014.
Hulme, Mike. 2009 Why We Disagree About Climate Change. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press