Coming into ENVS 160, I did not know what to expect. I had always found issues of the environment to be fascinating because of their provocative and widespread effects, yet I had no idea what to do about these issues. After this class, I still don’t know what to do, these issues are bigger than I ever imagined, but though our discussions on perspectives, I have a better understanding of how one could approach environmental problems.
Something that surprised me initially was our discussion on foie gras and values. I had not expected a discussion on values to take equal importance to our discussions on scientific method and politics, and the issue of force feeding ducks seemed completely separate from environmental concerns. How could the rights of a minimal amount of ducks and geese be on the same level as our discussions on GMOs and Keystone XL? Yet people were clearly passionate about the issue. However, it finally clicked after reading and discussing Christine Walley’s article “Where there is no nature” where she explores the western construction of the idea of nature. Environmental Studies wasn’t just about protecting and conserving ‘nature’; it is about solving problems, many of which originate from this idea that there is something pure called nature to put on a pedestal.
Not only did this make the foie gras debate make more sense, it also completely challenged my recently articulated views on ecospirtuality. In my synthesis post on ecospirituality I had outlined a separation between things with biological vs. technological origins, but after Walley’s article, I now see that we are all in the same boat we call ‘the environment’. We are living in the anthropocene and we need to save our planet, but we also need to save ourselves.
We spent the rest of this course discussing how this can be done through different perspectives and showing how they are used with different hybrid objects. I think this part of the course can be best summed up through our discussion on ‘wicked problems’ and ‘clumsy solutions’. No one perspective could really solve any problem by itself. All of the issues we discussed throughout this course show how complex issues of the environment really are. Besides ecological and scientific concerns, there are also social, political, and economic concerns that play into every issue, creating a complex web of major players and related concerns for every topic we covered.
Feeling more insignificant than ever, ‘clumsy solutions’ provide some semblance for hope in these wicked problems. While we may not be able to solve everything, we can improve the situation. By using a specific perspective, changes can be made that do not fix the problem, but do nevertheless make a difference. While we can’t solve everything, I think we can learn from Shellenberger & Nordhaus’s essay “Evolve” which demonstrates how worse problems, such as famine, can be turned into better problems, such as obesity. Moving forward with ENVS, I hope to synthesize the perspectives I have leaned to figure out how to provide solutions and make a difference.
That’s awesome that you feel clearer and more focused about how to tackle these huge problems. I almost found that the more I learned, the more questions I had and the more cynical I became.
I like this comparison to clumsy solutions because it underscores an important point: not everyone even agrees that the things we are discussing are issues. At L&C we are surrounded by people with our same perspectives, especially in ENVS 160, but out in the real world, this is not the case. And there are plenty of people who don’t care about tuna or trees.
To me, this paragraph seems to encompass the purpose of this course (it’s an intro course after all). Throughout this course, I’ve found that the most important quality of a good approach to an issue is the holistic quality. In other words, it’s important to be aware of as many relevant things as possible when considering a solution to an environmental problem. This course has helped in showing us the kind of approaches that need to be taken and the general perspectives that need to be delved into when examining intimidating environmental problems.