“Sustainability” as a buzzword devoid of meaning has been one of the prime critiques of mainstream environmentalism in our semesters of environmental studies. This week, we engaged in a panel on sustainability with several experts to shed light on the possible courses we have for the future. Its easy to be overwhelmed by the insurmountable dilemmas that we grapple with as students of environmental studies. It terrifying to think that the forces that allow me to fly on an airplane home for Thanksgiving or that illuminate the screen on my computer are the same forces that pollute the air in Wyoming and give rise to notions and fears about Gilding-esque “Great Disruption.” The panel on Tuesday approached these very real questions about energy and the contest between fossil fuels, renewable energy, “clean” energy, and the developing world. Two themes stood out to me that describe the next steps in a critical time of action. The first is changing mindsets. We need to communicate, persuade, convince (perhaps using language and literature??) decision-makers that our mindsets are toxic, are harmful, are short-sighted. Change needs to happen on the ground, but first change needs to happen in the minds (and hearts) of the people who may be following in the footsteps of the USA and Europe only to find them dripping with oil. Secondly, the change that is needed is political. Its economic. It might start in kindergarten classrooms where students color recycling signs green, but its the political leaders who need clear-cut, economic convincing to instigate real, political, policy change. These are fine details. This is fundamental.
We have gotten a taste of exactly how fine these details may be. In the progression of our project on Lights Out Portland, we have moved towards the “extensive data” to understand Portland’s role in the context of bird migration and crime rates, or broadly, bird and human safety. We looked online for the datasets that we would then be able to plug into GIS and examine spatially. I finally connected the dots between data and GIS, and my worries that I would be manually entering in 61,000 data points into an Excel document vanished with the discovery of Civic Apps, and the automatic download of Portland Crime 2013. We furthered our understanding of GIS by mapping the crime rates and migration routes of the Pacific Flyway and Portland, learning the specific, gritty details of the program slowly but surely.
If this much detail-heavy, intense, concentrated manpower goes in to just the descriptive and explanatory analysis of one initiative isolated to Portland, Oregon, its clear that there is a LOT of work to do in order to solve some of the most pressing, dangerously real, perhaps even apocalyptic threats that we grapple with in environmental studies.