Over the past week in ENVS, we have had a midterm, started projects based on objects situated in Portland, and talked about “sustainability.” Our midterm was unlike most tests, with the focus really being on bringing together our work in ENVS220 so far to reflect on environmental analysis. It furthered our portfolio work, and added a concrete dimension to the ideas which can sometimes be vague. Having a set of issues to return to was helpful in my midterm essay, though I did spend far more time talking about the conceptual underpinnings of environmental analysis than about the French dam. In particular, I noted how connected the ideas of interdisciplinarity and a situated context are. To more fully understand an issue, you have to draw in a variety of disciplines, but this variety becomes impossibly broad if you don’t focus on a situated context. Questions and the tools we have looked at in 220 are the ways to understand this context.
After the midterm, we chose our objects for the final ENVS220 projects. My lab partner, Perri, and I are doing our project on the Portland Urban Growth Boundary, focusing on land values and the perception land values in relation to the urban growth boundary. I’ve had some prior exposure to debates over urban growth boundaries and I’m definitely interested in probing the data to find the fundamental information which lies behind ideological and evaluative understandings of urban growth boundary planning. The fact that we have to finish our data collection for the final project within two weeks is a little daunting, but I feel pretty good about our group’s state vis-a-vis the questions we have posed so far. While we will probably tweak the focus question as needed throughout the course of our research, it provides a solid base from which we can examine the descriptive and explanatory side of the Portland Urban Growth Boundary.
Additionally, in preparation for the “Sustainability: Spin to Substance” initiative, we looked at a publication by AASHE on sustainability, as well as several critiques of the current use of the term, from a radical and a conservative standpoint, and on the basis of the insularity of “campus sustainability.” In an informal narrative analysis in class, we noted how AASHE focuses on the “stories” statistics rather than real outcomes, and how prevalent the “carrot and solar panels” images are. I found the AASHE publication ridiculously broad; my weeklong experience canvassing for Environment Washington has definitely biased me against such glossy, buzzword and picture filled publications about progressive issues.