After a long summer full of Environmental Studies in Japan, it was exciting to get back to school with a fresh perspective and a new appreciation for what we’ve learned. To refresh our memories, we created a mind map detailing the main topics we dealt with last semester in ENVS 160. After splitting into groups that focused on “classic,” “contemporary,” “explanations,” and “connections,” we shared with the group what we came up with. Generally, we realized that contemporary thought questioned the big classic themes such as reductionism, essentialism, apocalypticism, and ecospirituality. We discussed environmental ethics, risks/hazards, markets/commodities, and nature as a social construction as some explanations, then used ideas like greenwashing, an interdisciplinary approach, and situated objects to connect everything back together.
We also discussed the goals of the Environmental Studies program after reading the syllabus. I had a special connection to the interdisciplinary and situated approach to the program since I just came back from studying abroad in Japan. I can now attest to the importance and value of situated research after experiencing the many facets of Mount Fuji first hand.
Since many of us will be proposing concentrations this semester, we began looking at certain questions we should be asking in order to create a meaningful project. Reading about the descriptive (What is happening?), explanatory (Why is this happening?), evaluative (To what extent is this a problem?), and instrumental (What can be done?) questions reminded me a lot of field research I performed last fall in Bio 141. In order to get comfortable with these questions, we each read a few articles from the RSS feed on the ENVS main page, split into different “issue” groups, and helped to edit some of the “wiki” pages on the Environmental Studies site. It was interesting to note what kinds of topics were being tackled; many of the newspaper articles were smaller, more situated and specific issues while the journal articles attempted to report on larger scale problems. Overall, we noticed that the media often asks the same kinds of questions over and over, and often they are too broad to answer. In order to obtain a clear, meaningful understanding of an issue, we need to zoom in, or situate ourselves.
Our first lab consisted of revamping our ENVS websites that we will maintain throughout our career as LC ENVS students. Hopefully if you got to this post it means the website is functioning enough to navigate!