My final environmental studies synthesis comes as I am writing this on the last day of classes for the fall semester of 2018. I am writing this synthesis as a reflection of my time in environmental studies 220 and relating it to the first synthesis post I wrote for the class, which can be read here (synthesis-1-10-7-18.html). Environmental studies 220 met every Monday and Wednesday from 3pm-4:30 pm with a three hour lab from 10am-1pm on Thursdays. Class time was primarily organized in a way that during most class periods we spent around half the time listening to a lecture and the other half working on whatever project we were doing during that time. Starting with our concentrations and moving into our situated research projects. I felt that this hands off approach was very beneficial for a couple of reasons. The first being, it allowed us to work and formulate our own ideas with the help of our peers without being steered towards what the professor wants us to do. The second being, this kind of approach demonstrates a great amount of respect for the students in the class. Letting us craft our own projects and ideas, while still being readily available for assistance and guidance, showed that we were trusted to work under our own motivation and get assignments done without enforcing harsh penalties for doing so. The majority of the class was made up of students who were 20+ years old and allowing us to work so independently showed that we were being acknowledged as adults.
The projects that we did in lab or in class time were structured in a way that we were being prepared for entering the workforce. With our labs involving ArcGis we were told that the software was used by many companies and already I have applied for an internship that utilizes ArcGis software. That being said this internship is run through the history department of Lewis and Clark College but if anything this just speaks to the importance of interdisciplinary studies especially within the context of environmental studies. The importance of interdisciplinary studies was another thing that was stressed to us. As a history major it was stressed onto me that with my concentration and situated research project that I need to incorporate my academic interest of history with my academic interest of environmental studies. For my peers, with most others being single or double majors, their minors or other majors also were integral parts in their work for environmental studies. This is important because in the workplace you’re never going to be only doing work in your area of study. Everything you do is interdisciplinary in some aspect which also preaches to the importance of a liberal arts education. In summary, upon completing this course I plan to continue to explore my education in environmental studies, even as a minor, because the environment is of great importance to me. As an outdoor educator protecting the natural world is of crucial importance to me because I have had some of my most formative experiences in the wilderness. I now work to foster those same formative experiences for children who may not have otherwise ventured into the great unknown. This kind of job in and of itself speaks to the values of my environmental studies education by bridging across differences to empathize with people from different walks of life.
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This is my penultimate synthesis post for ENVS 220 and will serve as a brief overview of Rose and I’s situated project. Rose and myself are investigating what we call the “anglocene,” which we define as the influence of Judeo-Christian based religions and Anglo Saxon influences on environmental crises, through the lens of Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Our situated study is centered in South Korea, which does not have a prominent Anglo Saxon population, but nearly a third of South Korea’s population identifies as being of a Judeo-Christian faith. The question that encompasses our research is “how did South Korea, a country without a prominent Anglo Saxon population, develop such a large community devoted to Anglo Saxon theologies?” At face value this situating question seems to be quite detached from environmental philosophy but, it begs the question that if Anglo Saxon theology can be established in a non-Anglo Saxon nation what other philosophies were brought along with it? The main structure for our situated research is a two pronged investigation into one, the effects of Judeo-Christian theologies on the kind of environmental crises that Lynn White outlines, and two, how Judeo-Christian theologies historically gained strength in South Korea. When we combine these investigative ideas we will be able to craft a relationship between Judeo-Christian theologies in South Korea and how they may have influenced the environmental crises of South Korea. We will also be looking at a number of separate texts that relate to Judeo-Christian theologies in South Korea specifically as they relate to environmental crises. Using Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” as our guiding text we were able to determine that one of White’s primary arguments is that ecologic crisis and Judeo-Christian theologies first existed separately. When this article was published, technology progressed to a point where humans were able to take from the earth at rates that were far greater than resources were able to be replenished. This level of exploitation of resources can cause significant issues on a human scale causing crises such as famine, scarcity of potable water, and reduction in arable land. When looking at such crises, many of them could not be applied to South Korea, because it is a high income country (World Bank, 2015). However, while percent of arable land has been steadily increasing on a worldwide scale, South Korea’s arable land has suffered an almost ten percent decrease since its peak in 1967 (World Bank, 2015). This data lead us to question who is suffering when this type of change occurs? Taking this framing question to the next step, we determined the steps to bring us into the context of South Korea. We have accumulated three relevant datasets from the World Bank which is the percentage of: urban population to total population, arable land to total land, as well as agriculture, forestry, and fishing inputs to overall GDP. Between these three graphs we noticed a trend showing that percentage of arable land decreased as well as agriculture, forestry, and fishing percentage of the nation’s GDP. This correlating relationship shows that the decreasing amount of arable land has directly affected agricultural and rural communities. However, while arable land and agriculture industry are decreasing, urban population grows at an exponential rate. This supports our assumption that White’s argument is accurate and is the cause of the decrease of arable land in South Korea. To focus our study, we have decided to ask how these Judeo-Christian western influences perpetuated themselves in South Korea specifically within agrarian practices. By answering this question through a series of analyses we hope to uncover exactly how Judeo-Christian theology has affected Korea’s arable land. This post concludes our investigation into the possibility of the existence of the capitalocene as the definition of the new epoch following the angelocene. The transition from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene proposes the idea of leaving the age of man in favor of the age of capital. The global superpowers exhibit late stage capitalist tendencies and the Capitalocene implies that humans themselves are no longer the major players in the health of the global environment. Rather it is the specter of capitalism that has the most influence. The existence of the capitalocene depends on the strength of the relationship between the amount of capital a country has and its environmental performance. Using the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) in (capitalocene-lab-1-10-22-18.html) we were able to see that countries classified by the World Bank as high income had a better EPI than countries classified as upper middle. Upper middle countries performed better than middle income countries and so on and so forth. The existence of this relationships works to support the existence of the capitalocene.
But proving the existence of the capitalocene is not a simply as the relationship between EPI and World Bank income classification. The World Values Survey (WVS) provides new ways to look into the capitalocene (capitalocene-lab-3-11-5-18.html). The main way being that it surveyed a large number of citizens about their opinions relating to their environmental ideologies. This allows us to look at the capitalocene from a bottom up perspective rather than the top down perspective we have taken in the past. Using the WVS we looked at one low income country, a middle income country, and a high income country (using the World Bank classifications). These countries being Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and the United States respectively. We looked at the question that asked whether individuals prioritized protecting the environment or economic growth. We hypothesized that our low income country would prioritize economic growth, middle income would be somewhere in the middle and high income would prioritize the environment the most. We found that our high income country prioritize the environment the most and out middle income prioritized the environment the least, with our low income somewhere in the middle. This did not fit with our hypothesis. In conclusion the existence of the capitalocene is much more of a multifaceted issue than we originally thought. While there is a general relationship between the amount of capital a country has and its environmental performance the EPI tends to generalize for the income groups. Our WVS data supports that. Looking at the data from the top down it appears that the capitalocene must exist because of how strong the relationship looks but using the WVS data to investigate form the bottom up the environmental preferences based on income the relationship is not that simple. Drawing upon all the evidence we gathered during our capitalocene labs the evidence shows to be inconclusive. The capitalocene as an idea is far too complex to be assessed over the course of a month or so. In order to have a more conclusive answer more data must be collected and assessed. Group
Rose Mayer & Mason Kirkpatrick Background Rose and myself are investigating what we call the “anglocene,” which we define as the influence of Judeo-Christian based religions and Anglo Saxon influences on environmental philosophy, through the lens of Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Our situated study is centered in South Korea, which does not have a prominent Anglo Saxon population, but nearly a third of South Korea’s population identifies as being of a Judeo-Christian faith. The question that encompasses our research is “how did South Korea, a country without a prominent Anglo Saxon population, develop such a large community devoted to Anglo Saxon theologies?” At face value this situating question seems to be quite detached from environmental philosophy but, it begs the question that if Anglo Saxon theology can be established in a non-Anglo Saxon nation what other philosophies were brought along with it? Procedure In order to support our project, we needed articles to understand the Christian presence in Korea as well as investigate White's claim of environmental degradation linking with Christian belief. To do this, we used Google Scholar to research the history of Korea's religious affiliation as well as the relationship between ecological health and Christianity. To research Korea's religious history we used keywords such as "missionary presence", "religion", "religious colonization", and "christianity" in relation to Korea to discover writing that situates our project. To research White's argument we searched with keywords like "ecology and religion", "religion and development", "religion and nature", as well as review pieces of White's writing. After we had found pieces that effectively frame and situate the subject of our project we used the Zotero plugin to add the material to our own group dedicated to the project. After uploading our documents onto Zotero we added the abstracts, some of which were supplied by the author, as well as an annotation on how these pieces were related to our project. Finally, we organized our pieces by adding tags that quickly identify whether the piece was situating or framing. Our Zotero library can be found below. www.zotero.org/groups/2255227/mason_and_rose_situation_research Discussion Finding these resources made me feel incredibly confident about our project since it solidified our hypothesis on the connection between religion and ecological health. I have grown to realize the extent to which religious colonization has shaped Korea as a nation through history and how it has affected Korea as we know it today. The bibliography lab has given us an abundance of context that is useful for the coming steps of this project like the situating and framing questions. By understanding the religious history of Korea alongside the environmental history of religion we have created a solid foundation for further research. Our next steps in this project is to find a way to adequately and informatively connect these two concepts in a way that accurately depicts the geological epoch Group
Mason Kirkpatrick Background As the final instalment of our investigation into the capitalocene we looked at air toxin concentration in the Portland area through the lens of environmental justice. More specifically looking at air toxin concentration as it relates to income levels throughout neighborhoods in Portland. Environmental justice, in general, is the concept of assessing how certain environmental factors threaten groups of people, most specifically the poor. Environmental justice acts as a force by which to rectify the injustices that primarily target the poor and people of color. By combining our investigations of the capitalocene with environmental justice we could possibly derive a relationship between economic standing and air toxin risk. Procedure First we read and discussed the PATS summary which details the air pollutants in the greater portland area. We then read the environmental justice analysis to see how it corresponds with the PATS summary when it comes to air toxins. Next, we uploaded the ACS census data into ArcGis as well as the DEQ PATS data so we could have all of the information needed displayed on one map. We then uploaded both the PATS polygonal and point shapefiles and decided that we want to look at households who made less than 50,000 dollars a year vs. households who make more than 50,000 dollars a year and their relationship to air toxin concentration. We created a two new fields, being income > 50,000 and income < 50,000 respectively. We then displayed them on our map with the heat map of all air toxins over it so that we could see where the toxins were concentrated relative to the income of that area. Results From our map there seem to be no direct relationships between the income level being greater or less than 50,000 a year and proximity to air toxin concentrations. Outside of the urban area, where there is a higher concentration over high income households, there is a much lesser concentration of air toxins. This is less likely to be tied to environmental justice than it is to the fact that these wealthy neighborhoods are further outside the city were the air toxins are. In the heart of the city there is more diversity when it comes to income but each of these income groups are in areas of high concentrated air toxins. The 21st annual Environmental Affairs Symposium was themed around crossing boundaries in order to facilitate a progressive and productive dialog between groups that traditionally do not get along. The keynote speaker for this event was Daryl Davis. Davis is a Grammy award winning pianist but is most recently in the news for befriending members of the Klu Klux Klan. As an African American, Davis believes that most members of the KKK hold the beliefs that they do because they have little to no experience with members of the African American community. Davis befriends members of the KKK and has successfully converted around 200 members of the KKK to leave the Klan. While he has had great success with his efforts to convert Klan members, he still receives a large amount of criticism for his action. The main idea behind the criticism that Davis faces is that many feel that Davis should not be providing these kinds of people platforms to spread their ideologies because they are so outlandishly disgusting. Davis feels that while this criticism is valid the only way to effectively change the way these kinds of people feel is to open a healthy and productive dialog with them.
This can be linked to what we do in ENVS 220 because it goes to show how effective crossing boundaries can be. After hearing Davis speak, reaching across the aisle to engage with those who hold different views about the environment than myself seems much more reasonable. I definitely believe that this feeling was the desired result for getting Davis to speak at the Symposium. If Davis can find common ground with members of the Klan and work with them to respectfully challenge their beliefs and understandings in such an effective manner then I feel like I could use that lesson to better communicate in disagreements about the environment. Another key aspect that Davis referenced in his talk that I found important was the idea of having a mutual respect for the person you are trying to. Davis asserted that if you don’t approach these types of situations from a place of respect for the other party then your ability to have a healthy discussion will be largely impaired. Additionally, the lack of respect for the other party inhibits your ability to fully empathize with your opposition. If you approach a situation or conversation in a confrontational or aggressive manner the other person is much less likely to want to engage with you or even engage at all. The main takeaways that I got from Daryl Davis’ speech at the Symposium were that preaching to the choir is not an effective method of engagement and does little to nothing to generate dialog or change. Also, approaching conversations or interactions with individuals of opposing viewpoints must be done in a respectful manner as not to invoke a fight or flight response. Lastly, one must go out of their comfort zone in order to actively facilitate change and change peoples minds about issues. It is not the easiest thing to do but it must be done to create change and move forward as a society. Group Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background This lab continues to build off the themes of exploring the possibility of the capitalocene that we have looked at in the first two labs. This being said, the World Values Survey (WVS) does provide new ways to look into the capitalocene. The main way being that it surveyed a large number of citizens about their opinions relating to their environmental ideologies. This allows us to look at the capitalocene from a bottom up perspective rather than the top down perspective we have taken in the past. Procedure The first thing we did was we selected three different countries that varied by income group. We chose Ukraine for our low income, Azerbaijan for our middle income, and the United States for our high income. We then moved the responses of these countries from the main WVS sheet onto a new one so that we could have them more readily available. From there we were able to create a histogram of the variable that we chose, being whether individuals prioritize the environment or economic growth. Next we calculated the mean and mean standard deviation for each countries responses, making sure that we excluded responses that were outside of the binary. From there we graphed each to compare how each country we looked at felt about this issue. Finally we performed T-Tests to assess the statistical significance of the difference between the means of each country and since the p was so small we were able to determine our results were statistically significant. Results Before we began we hypothesized that as we moved up the income groups countries would began to prioritize the environment over economic growth. After looking at our completed graphs we were able to see that this was not totally the case. While they do not disprove our hypothesis, the fact that Azerbaijan, a middle income country, favors economic growth more than Ukraine, a low income country, contradicts our hypothesis. That being said, the United States, a high income country, favors environmental protection more than the other two so that supports our initial hypothesis. When confronted by these results we were curious as to why a country like Azerbaijan would be so interested in economic growth when it was already in fair economic standing. After a little research we noticed that Azerbaijan was a very small oil rich nation, so their prioritization of economic growth may be tied to their ability to use their natural resources for large scale financial gain. Discussion
The WVS data that we observed allowed us to view evidence of the capitalocene on a personal basis rather than on a governmental scale. Looking at these issues on a personal scale lets us see how the populations of different countries feel about certain issues. The data we have looked at in the past capitalocene labs were much more all encompassing and generalized based on governmental factors rather than the personal opinions of the populations these governments look after. When comparing countries as a method of assessing the capitalocene it seems that only using either World Bank Data or WVS data to assess it would fail to provide the necessary amount of context or information. The best way to do this would be to look at both sources of information and data to most accurately come to a conclusion relating to the existence of the capitalocene. Group
Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background (See Capitalocene Lab #1capitalocene-lab-1-10-22-18.html) The two new capitalocene indicators that I chose were percent urban population and percent forest cover. I chose these indicators specifically because the percent of a countries urban population goes hand in hand with the migration of people moving to urban centers for industrial jobs. I also chose percent forest cover because it directly ties into my concentration because when related to urban growth it demonstrates the relationship between change of habitat and need for more infrastructure. Procedure. First we cleaned our spreadsheets to make sure the data was clear and ordered properly and so that uploading our spreadsheet as a csv to Gis would work. Then we downloaded our new capitalocene indicators from the world bank database. From there we uploaded them as new sheets and merged them with our main sheet so our new data was included in the csv file. We merged another sheet with the two digit ISO codes to our main sheet as well. Additionally, I found the percent change for both of my new indicators over the past decade by subtracting the old value from the current value so I could view the trend. From there we downloaded our sheet as a csv then uploaded it to a map on ArcGis. On ArcGis we were able to display the data comparatively by country on one map. Results When viewing these maps you can see that the global trends for these new indicators. For urban population you can see that on a global area most countries are becoming more urban than before. For forest cover you can see that there is a global decrease in forest cover. View my ArcGis map here (https://arcg.is/1WvO8e) Discussion On very obvious level you can see that countries that experienced a decrease of the past ten years had a worse environmental performance because of the way that deforestation is calculated into ecosystem vitality.. The relationship between urban population growth and ecosystem vitality is rather ambiguous in the sense that there is no direct correlation between the two. On one hand, if more people are moving to urban centers than their impact on the ecosystem vitality could be decreased but they are adding to the whole impact on the city. On the other, urban population growth symbolized an increased industrial demand for labor which in unregulated areas can pollute local ecosystems. The larger implications of the existence of these relationships, or lack thereof, support the idea that the capitalocene is the dictating force and has taken over from the anthropocene. While the argument could be made that these factors support the capitalocene because they are driven by anthropocentric action and thus support the anthropocene. The same argument could be made in favor of the capitalocene by arguing that these human actions are driven by the desire for capital. In conclusion these factors represent and support the capitalocene because they are symbolic of the desire for capital. Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background The transition from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene proposes the idea of leaving the age of man in favor of the age of capital. The global superpowers exhibit late stage capitalist tendencies and the Capitalocene implies that humans themselves are no longer the major players in the health of the global environment. Rather it is the specter of capitalism that has the most influence. While measuring the Capitalocene can provide rather useful information, it also provides some challenges. First, countries that aren’t capitalist or don’t display capitalist tendencies are measured in the same manner as late stage capitalist countries. Additionally, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is used to quantifiably measure the performance of a government's environmental policies. This allows wealthier countries to have a greater EPI because they can afford more environmental policies than developing nations. Procedure The first thing that we needed to do for this lab was to merge all of our data onto one sheet which we did by downloading an add on. We made sure that all the data lined up correctly based on region and income group. Once our data was lined up properly we were tasked with calculating the mean and standard deviation for the three main EPI indicators for which we used a pivot table. From there we were able to graph the mean and standard deviation of the EPI indicators by the World Bank income groups and regions. From there we were able to analyze our results. Results
As it has become abundantly clear, as you increase the level of income of the country and region the Environmental Performance of that area increases as well. When looking at the region, areas with a greater environmental performance are classically viewed as wealthier areas were other regions with lesser environmental performance are viewed as less wealthy. The most significant result is viewing the relationship of the wealth of a country or region with its respective environmental performance and seeing that wealth directly correlates with environmental performance. Discussion The larger implications of what we discovered is that if any global measures were put in place to incentivize nations or regions to increase their environmental performance, then it would heavily favor wealthier nations. This would act counter intuitively to the purpose of raising the global environmental performance because wealthier nations would advance further ahead while less wealthy nations would keep falling behind. Additionally, countries with lower environmental performances are focusing on more specific issues like drinking water and general health and wellbeing of its citizens rather than their global impact on the environment. In my prior post I caught you up to speed on the happenings of my ENVS 220 class as we concluded our investigation into land use and cover change in the area surrounding Lewis and Clark’s Campus. From there we spent week six workshopping both our draft concentration proposals as well as our draft proposals. We eventually submitted our draft concentration proposals. My proposal was titled “Boundaries: Man-made structures influence migratory patterns and habitat sizes of native wildlife” which will serve as an investigation into how man made structure, whether they’re physical or invisible affect migratory patterns and habitat sizes of the animals that interact with them. There is an important distinction between the physical boundaries, which take the form of highways, dams, and other forms of infrastructure, and the invisible boundaries that take the form of legislation. It is also important to note that I need to tie in the concentration to my current major, which is history, so I will be looking at these structures through a historical lens. This is important to me specifically because in ENVS 160 I studied the effects dams have on native salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest for my final project. The information that I found was quite startling and I wished to pursue this idea further. The scope of that project was far too narrow to be an ENVS concentration so I expanded the scope to more more encompassing as well as making it more applicable on a larger scale. By doing so the scope of my research in the future will no longer be limited to just the Pacific Northwest which will free up a lot of sources for me to use because they take place outside of the Pacific Northwest.
Additionally for my concentration, we had to select a number of classes that we could take at Lewis and Clark to supplement our concentration. For these I chose History 239- Constructing The American Landscape because the creation of the landscape and how it had changed historically is important to note when looking at the american landscape in the present. The next class I chose was HIST 261- Global Environmental History because again, I'm looking at this issue through a historical lens and by taking this class I would be able to cover historical areas that history 239 would not cover. The third class is SOAN 305- Environmental Sociology because another aspect of my concentration is looking into how humans create boundaries for themselves within the context of a society so I feel that this class specifically would help cover this. The last class I chose was ENVS- 350 because it is the highest level ENVS course that I need to take for my minor requirements and would provide me with the tools to explore my concentration more thoroughly. Following our draft proposals we went on fall break and in the most recent class we began our introduction to the Capitalocene which we will be exploring for the foreseeable future. |
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