It’s always difficult to make the transition from summertime adventures back to the university routine. A few weeks ago, I made my annual migration northwest, driving the Columbia River Gorge towards Portland. Everyone is back, learning about new technologies and remembering more than we thought we would from last year.
We began our semester of Environmental Analysis by recalling the general trajectory of our ENVS 160 intro class last spring. We reminisced about classic and contemporary environmental thought, particularly how contemporary thought critiqued the classics for being apocalyptic, essentialist, and reductionist. This response to the classics bred a flurry of rethinking and reframing “the environment” and “environmental issues.” Notions of limits and the terror of technology were challenged by environmentalists like Shellenberger, Nordhaus and Ellis. The contemporaries criticized the classics for ignoring nuances and neglecting to acknowledge the complexity of different scales. The problems remained wicked and incomprehensible, but the solutions became more tangible in contemporary thought, certainly clumsy and conflicting, but there emerged a greater faith in human power to innovate its way out of environmental challenges.
In the second part of last semester, we opened our textbooks and delved into the interdisciplinary world of “environmental studies.” We read and discussed broad topics like political economy, institutions, markets, risks, ethics, and scarcity and how gender and power are inherent in all aspects of humans in our “enivironment.” With these concepts in mind, we examined various hybrid objects, such as wolves, tuna, lawns, and trees in order to see how the different actors interact when situated.
Out of this approach, we conducted our own individual situated research on hybrid objects of our choice. My project focused on the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River Gorge in the years around its construction and the historical perceptions of the project.
ENVS 160 exposed me to a lot of new material and new concepts, but not to all lot of concrete answers. The legacy of 160 seems to be a chorus of questions and uncertainty about how to answer them and what to do with these answers. Thus far in 220, we have come together and co-created some community wikis to incorporate some of our questions into the broader conversation utilizing the technology that we have been instructed to love. This broader conversation appears to be enriching and exciting!