ENVS 160 has a strong point: its required readings are well chosen. Moreover, they are insightful and properly challenge the conventional frameworks and assumptions popularized by trendy, crunchy liberalism that manifest themselves from the merits of organic acai bowls to the virtuosity of buying local. Going deeper, they raise important questions about the methods of […]
Individual Posts
Modalities of Thought in 160
Environmental Studies 160 has taught me that my perspective entering the class and the way I interpret material we learn in class is sometimes uniquely discrepant form others and that I am just one in the diverse pool of thought. It was the distribution in Ecotype beliefs that exposed this reality to me. The survey […]
Why Science Won’t Save Us
As a major in the natural sciences, I entered this course with the mindset that the people who don’t believe in climate change must simply not understand the science behind it. I always thought that maybe, if there was a way to get enough ‘science’ out there, we could convince everyone that climate change was […]
Environmentalism: A White Man’s Ism
Environmental studies, a politically liberal field, has shown itself to be much less intersectional than I previously imagined. As a movement that requires extensive scientific knowledge about many different process in the world as well as the same amount of knowledge about social issues, environmentalism is and has historically been available to those with access […]
Embrace the Discomfort!
ENVS 160 has helped me to better articulate my own beliefs while knowing that they will inevitably change as I collect new knowledge about myself and the world I inhabit. I would like to share some of the lessons I have taken so far from this course. An essential lesson from ENVS 160 is that context and […]
Three Key Lessons from ENVS 160
Environmental studies has changed the way I view the world. Many people claim that environmental studies is a soft science and prior to this class I shared the same belief. However, my understanding of environmental studies has changed over the course of this semester and I have come to realize that environmental studies is anything […]
Environmental Studies: Learning to love its monsters and my own
Regardless of personal opinions on the environment most people agree it is complex and messy. People are complex and so is the environment. To approach the inherent diversity of ideas and realities that come together to form what we now refer to as the environment an interdisciplinary context is required. Coming into Environmental Studies as […]
Which Argument is the Most Valid?
Throughout my time in high school, I consistently questioned what I would end up majoring in when I graduate from college. I first started out wanting to be a computer science major, but when I took AP Psychology, I felt psychology might be the major for me. However, I have always been very interested in […]
One Class. Three Lessons Learned: A Synthesis of Environmental Understanding.
In this semester of Environmental Studies 160, I’ve realized that the problem of climate change in its entire concept is a much more convoluted problem than I ever imagined. The word Climate Change is so broad, it’s hard to understand what it even means, and I feel like that is a point of our first […]
The Making of an ENVS Star
The Making of an ENVS Star by: Robert Nakihei Growing up in Hawaii I was surrounded by lush tropical forests, majestic mountains, exotic wild animals, endangered species, and the Pacific Ocean. The thought of my home and all it has to offer vanishing because of an environmental catastrophe has never came to my mind until […]
And When I Snap my Fingers, You Will Forget Everything You Think You Know
Having attended a fairly academically-rigorous high school, I thought that I was pretty well-prepared for college. I also expected to be prepared for ENVS 160, as I took an AP Environmental Science during my senior year. HOWEVER, I was wrong…. Extremely wrong. So wrong that it’s not even funny. Thankfully, in just one semester, I […]
Riveting Realizations: Connections and Changing Conceptions
Part of the reason I decided to take ENVS160 was due to the interdisciplinarity I heard so much about. Connections between concepts have always intrigued me. When reflecting on the key ideas I’ve learned thus far, it was difficult to narrow it down to three ideas, as all the small things I’ve learned somehow connect to […]
Words As Ideas? Or Ideas As Words…
Environmental thought, I thought, could not have possibly been so vast. I came to ENVS 160 assuming I would be looking at different graphs, images, systems, and global wind patterns. I did not realize how in depth we would be considering the many different styles of thinking available to humans under an environmental studies lens. […]
How Walking With a Stranger Changed Me
Before this course, I had limited knowledge of the environmental issues plaguing the world today. I have always been deemed an outdoorsy person, playing outside, enjoying natural gifts that are free of charge. But this was all a foreign land to me, and exploration of different lands lead to many changes in my thought, which is […]
Breaking Through the Boundaries of my Past
While sitting down to reflected on this past semester in Environmental Studies, a few ideas stuck out to me more than many others. Many of these were fairly bubble shattering for me, and greatly affected what core concepts about environmentalism I believe in and gave me even further background to expand on those beliefs. Of these […]
How Much Do We REALLY Know?
Ever since I was a little girl, I was known as “the animal lover”. All I wanted in life was to be able to purchase every single animal on this planet and call them my own. As I grew older, I realized that my dream of becoming the world’s biggest animal freak was impossible. […]
Changing Times, Changing Minds
I entered into ENVS 160 not exactly sure what to expect. It seemed like with every reading this semester, my own environmental thought was tested. This became a constant challenge in that I didn’t always know what to think about issues such as climate change, and I found that my opinion continued to flip flop the […]
Connections across ENVS 160 and beyond
As we have explored different issues in ENVS 160, connectivity is a predominant theme that I have noticed among many of our studies. Identifying connections between ideas is a way to bring about solutions and to think about issues at a larger scale and how they affect problems we are facing. The connectivity of topics […]
Post #1
Like many other people, intro to environmental studies has made me dramatically question my core beliefs. One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with was the idea that multiple, contradicting truths can exist in one debate. One example of this used in class was the energy efficiency of purchasing the New […]
A Ridiculous Number of Sides to Every Argument
My introduction to the world of environmental studies came at an exceedingly young age. Growing up in Salt Lake City, I watched every winter as a dense cloud of smog settled over the city. These inversions sparked my constant worry for the health of the people in my city and I immediately jumped into learning […]
Powerful Distinctions
Looking back, my past environmental education was very straightforward, possibly the most clear cut the subject could potentially be. Small moments of uncertainty, confusion and frustration were outweighed by fact and concrete answers that rarely gave insight into divergent ways of thinking about environmental issues, solutions, and concepts. In ENVS 160 this framework, was immediately […]
WARNING: ENVS 160 Will Squash the Hopes of Vegetarians Everywhere
Like many other free-range grass-fed liberals, I applied to Lewis & Clark College for the Environmental Studies major. I am, after all, the poster child for environmental studies: a privileged young hippie from an outdoorsy city (for me it is Seattle!) who spent her childhood playing in the nearby ocean and mountains, and who, after […]
Complicated Simplicity
I came into ENVS 160 a blank slate, not having any background in Environmental Science or Studies courses in high school. My misunderstanding of 160 as an intro class into the diverse sciences of ecology, geology and resource management was quickly corrected on the first day. Being an enthusiast for such subjects and a perspective biology […]
Mapping Out Wisdom: Lessons Learned in ENVS 160
When enrolling in ENVS 160, I had a minuscule if not nonexistent idea of what this course would be about and how it would challenge me as a freshly formed college student. I approached the class with what I thought was a pretty definitive idea of what environmentalism was and what it had to offer. […]
Three Tricks to be Instantly Intellectual!
Throughout the semester of ENVS 160 I have learned a vast amount of knowledge and gained new insights into environmental thought. Previously I have studied environmental science, but that was especially focused on specific mechanisms of species and how biological processes work. Rather, environmental studies is the investigation of how political, religious, and economic institutions […]