In the fall of 2012, I walked into ENVS 220 with virtually no idea what I wanted my concentration to be. Imagine my surprise (and dismay) when the very first week, Jessica had us define our interests. I had happened to read something about sense of place a few days prior, so I scribbled that down as an answer to her overwhelming question. Come Monday, I was paired up with Ben Small and Justin Ketzler to develop a “theme” that would guide each of us toward our individual concentrations. The middle ground between our stated interests ended up being “causes and consequences of suburban development.” Through our studies of American suburbia, I became broadly interested in environmental history and geography, as well as the slippery concept of sustainability.
This is all to say that it was somewhat haphazardly that I stumbled into my concentration, “Perceptions of Nature in the American Cultural Landscape.” The questions I asked there had to do with (1) how past ideas about the natural world have become embodied in particular landscapes, and (2) how different environmental discourses propose we modify our current landscape to achieve future sustainability. I still think these are compelling questions, and they address a number of themes I’m actively pursuing (ie: utopianism, urbanism and the Anthropocene). However, for a number of reasons I’ve shifted the primary focus of my studies.
The first reason is that in the spring of 2013, I took two classes (Constructing the American Landscape and Environmental Histories of Science and Technology) that addressed my concentration questions quite explicitly. These classes pretty well satisfied my desire to learn about the perceptions of nature that underpin the American built environment, and I became more interested in issues of social justice and urban political economics.
These interests were further cultivated during my semester abroad in the Dominican Republic. It was the first time I’d travelled outside the U.S for any significant amount of time, and needless to say, my perspective on the world in general, and the built environment in particular were profoundly altered. The time I spent in Haiti was especially affective. I became captivated with trying to understand the historic processes and policies that had led to the uneven impoverishment and geographic development in Port au Prince. Studying Haitian history gave me a strong push toward the disciplines critical geography and international political economics. It was also during this semester that I was introduced to structural adjustment policies —and prompted to figure out why my dominican professor couldn’t say Fundio Monetario Internacional without it sounding like a dirty word.
Returning to Lewis & Clark in the spring of 2014, I spent my semester studying la Via Campesina—a transnational peasant’s movement that proposes food sovereignty as an alternative to neoliberal globalization. This semester, a class in economic development and another in green capitalism have furthered my academic preoccupation with neoliberalization and structural adjustment.
And so here I am, in the fall of my senior year trying to tie together neoliberal structural adjustment, urban/rural dynamics, sustainable development, campesinos sin tierra, critical utopianism, and a whole bunch else. I’ve certainly developed a stronger political perspective since my sophomore year, and that has inevitably creeped into my studies (though by no means do I intend to let it to dominate them). But for all the turns my academic trajectory has taken, I think one thing that has remained constant is a fascination with how human ideologies and values—whether regarding nature or neoliberalism—become physically incarnate in the built environment. I’m still figuring out what precisely I want to look at for my senior capstone, but here are the questions that I’ve been spending my last weeks thinking about:
- What have been the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies on rural/agrarian landscapes in Latin America?
- How are (neoliberal) ideologies altered through their articulation onto particular socio-natural landscapes?
- How have various actants shown resistance (both actively and organically) to neoliberal policies?
- What alternative strategies are being employed to achieve (sustainable) economic development in Latin America? To what success?