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 […]
Individual Posts
It’s not the Destination, Man, it’s the Journey
I’ll be honest here. I really struggled through ENVS 160… but I didn’t have to! And guess what! NEITHER. DO. YOU. My problem stemmed from my lack of belief in myself. Right off the bat, I felt that I wasn’t smart enough to be successful in ENVS 160. This was largely due to the […]
Oh The Things That You’ll Do: Moving Forward with New Knowledge
Learn I have learned a lot in ENVS 160 this semester from basic concepts to contexts to theories. However, I feel nowhere near “full”. We have been given a wonderful foundation to the basic framework surrounding the vast and complex multi-disciplined field of Environmental Studies; however, now that we have been grounded in the material, we need […]
Final Thoughts
In my scholarly life I will carry the new writing skills I learned in ENVS 160. The way we have learned to write has already helped me a lot in my Exploration and Discovery class and my art history class. Being able to write in an interesting as well as scholarly way has improved […]
On the Road Again
Start Here Coming into Introduction to Environmental Studies the scope of the subject may seem daunting, and what I have found is that this overwhelming feeling may not go away in one short semester. ENVS 160 will clarify and expand specific lessons and aspects of the subject through readings, projects, discussion, and reflection. I have found […]
The Future Is… Hopeful?
I have a much richer understanding of environmental thought now that I have taken ENVS 160, however putting what I have learned into practice, even hypothetically, seems like a daunting and difficult task. I think this is due to the immense scope with which we have discussed environmental issues and thought. It has become clear […]
Hold my Compost, I’ve Got This…
Sending a Left Foot in the Right Direction Already “Deriving benefit” from the time spent bent over computer screens and book pages presents a complicated answer, especially with the consideration that Environmental Studies 160 served as a harsh reality check for many students. I know that it did for me, although what I have learned […]
Moving Foward
Before attending Lewis and Clark, I had never taken an environmental studies class before. Because of my interests about our planet and issues such as pollution, I was pretty confident that environmental studies would easily make sense to me and possibly be my major. After taking this class, however, I have seen our planet and […]
Where To Go From Here
By Natalie Casson I’ll admit it, my ego has taken a beating this semester. Not my personal mentality on life and myself, but my egotistically sense and attitudes towards the environment. Prior to coming into ENVS 160, the environment was something I could control to a certain degree if I recycled, reused, ate vegan, […]
Looking to the Future
In ENVS 160 the texts we read and projects we’ve done not only served to teach us the base of environmental thought but also gave us ways to approach our personal and scholarly life. Many of the works we have read have both implicitly and explicitly have given ways to live one’s life and change […]
Fitting The Pieces Together: ENVS 160
Here I am in the library on the second to last day of ENVS 160. As I evaluated the course, I began to frame my mind towards the question: What have I taken from this class. What do I value now, that I didn’t value at the beginning of the year? Moreover, how will this […]
Practicing What You Preach
How will you practice, in your scholarly and personal life, what you have learned in ENVS 160? ENVS 16o has definitely been a turning point for me in my college education. Taking the class in conjunction with Psychology 100 has allowed me to discover why pursuing an Environmental Studies would not be right for me. […]
“Siri, may I please get directions for ENVS 160?”
Last semester I was told that ENVS 160 would be relatively easy because it was a “soft” science – ENVS 160 was anything but easy. Unlike most traditional science courses, ENVS 160 incorporates both the natural and social sciences in order to better understand the complexity of current environmental issues. I transferred to Lewis & […]
Final Thoughts
Before ENVS 160 I was terribly misinformed about how to go about solving major issues such as climate change. Like many other individuals, I held a single belief that my individual efforts would somehow lead to a more sustainable environment. However, ENVS 160 helped me to realize how far from the truth I actually was. […]
And Now for Something Completely Different
In Summation Beginning with Why We Disagree we were exposed to cultural theory as a method of simplifying the entire human race into one graph among the other tantalizing bits of opinion that Mike Hulme had to offer (Hulme 2009). In all honesty his analysis was colorful and even funny at times but it was […]
New Thoughts, New Feelings: What I Took Away From Environmental Studies
The morning that I first started my ENVS 160 course, I woke up and took a 45 second shower. I ate my breakfast of yogurt, then washed and recycled the container. I got ready quickly, and turned off all my lights before leaving my room. On my way out the door, I passed the bike […]
Implementing New Approaches
Reforming Environmental Studies ENVS 160 has lead me to rethink aspects of our physical planet and human society including Climate change, material consumption, environmentalism, influence, and power. While each of the readings in the course belonged to specified sections they all relate to one another to create more dynamic lessons of Environmental thought, connections […]
Swimming up my own stream
This weekend I participated in the March for Science in downtown Portland, to celebrate science in the US and stand up to policies that aim to discredit and defund it. As we followed giant cardboard and foam salmon down the stream of people filling the road I thought of the power of people to create institutional […]
Why are recycle bins optimistic? Because they’re full of cans
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 […]
Open Expectations
Upon beginning ENVS 160, I made sure to keep my expectations open since I’d heard so many varying accounts of what the class would hold. From the first moment of the first class, I knew that we would be going in a very different direction than any environmental science class I’d taken before. Instead of […]
A Shallow Glance into a Deep Pond: A Summary of the Complexities of ENVS 160
This course has a deep and varied basis of information. The purpose of the course is to provide the frameworks on which to build upon with more and more information. It is also to develop a deeper knowledge into what to expect in ENVS, specifically in regard to its interdisciplinary basis. ENVS 160 gave me […]
Why We Disagree About Who Rules the Earth
It’s difficult to summarize the ways this class will impact my future, as there have been many different aspects the course that have altered the basis of thought on which I built new concepts and opinions. My first three posts (1, 2, and 3) summarized some of the things I have learned throughout the course, […]
Jumping Into ENVS 160
You’re new here, so allow me to fill you in on some of the basics of ENVS 160. We don’t spend much of the class really focused in any one discipline. At first, this may seem frustrating. You will find yourself either thinking, “man, that was cool, I hope we stay on this for […]
Before and After
Coming into ENVS 160, I expected to learn about the problems facing the environment and then explore various solutions to either change or reverse the problems. Having learned about climate change and the precarious state of the earth, I mistakenly thought that there would be clear steps to solve the various environmental problems facing our […]
Looking Forward
After taking a class that makes you second-guess the future and everything you have thought about it, it is especially crucial at this time to readjust the way that you approach problems, the future, and the things that you learn. I think that the lesson I learned from ENVS 160 that was the most influential […]