This week we tackled some broad ethical perspectives in the history environmentalism. For instance, consequentialism is where the ends justify the means and the goal to maximize the “good” for the greatest number. This approach is concerned with outcomes. For an extreme example, if the goal was to slow population growth, then very gruesome means […]

Our textbook is called Environment and Society almost as if the environment and society are different things to be studied. I’m not sure if the environment can be separated from this thing we call “society.” Society is our environment– we are surrounded and interconnected with society and in many ways, we as people, as individuals […]

On Friday, the ENVS 400 students, the thesis-writing seniors came and visited our class. We discussed Love Your Monsters kind of, but mostly we just talked about “the environment” and “environmentalism” and the Environmental Studies program at Lewis & Clark. Their comments and advice was both very interesting and informative, as well as very hopeful. […]

When we first attempted to define “environment” and when we watched Darwin’s Nightmare, we confronted the notion of “purity,”  this notion that things can be purely good or purely bad, purely economic or purely scientific, purely biological or purely cultural. I believe that purity is a gross reduction of the complex and interconnected world we […]

Capital “R” Romantic metaphors abound in the collection of essays Love Your Monsters, named for Bruno Latour’s allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr Frankenstein, obsessed with the acquisition of knowledge and the power of technology created a wretched being, which became an evil creature once it was abandoned by its creator. Likewise, humans have advanced […]