Monday January 11th, 2016
This is my first personal journal entry in years! I used to keep a diary intermittently throughout elementary school; it was mostly about what boys I found cute and how many extra cookies I snuck without my parents knowing. Other than that, I have always tried to keep a journal when I travel. I always put in a few entries before getting distracted, resulting in an incomplete log.
For two classes I have kept natural history field journals. The point of these journals was to record my observations in different environments and to try to hypothesize why certain aspects of the environment were there. I liked doing these journals although I found the sketches challenging.
I am looking forward to keeping a journal for this class, though I’m worried that I won’t keep up with it. Keeping a personal journal has always been something that I know I should do but never find myself doing. Everyone I know who keeps a journal loves it. It helps you unwind, process your day, and looking back on your past journal entries can show you how much you’ve changed and helps you to avoiding romanticizing the past. Also, journaling regularly justifies buying beautiful notebooks, a weakness of mine.
So, although this journal is supposed to be focused primarily on my climate politics class, I would like to share my personal thoughts here as well. I hope that I can do a journal entry at least every other day. Perhaps if I get into the practice of doing this, I will continue to journal even after class ends.
Anyway, to the class itself! I am really looking forward to this class. This is the third class I’ve taken with Professor Karen Litfin, but this is the smallest class. I’m excited by the prospect of great discussions we’re going to have. Some of the course material looks like it may be some my previous courses (shadow ecologies for example), but hopefully this will just help my understand the new material more deeply. In any case, there are students in this class from other departments with perspectives that I have never encountered before, or at least not been able to interact with fully. Their new ideas are sure to spark debate as well as a more thorough understanding of my own positions.
I believe that this class will be very important to my future career. No matter where I end up in the environmental/political field, I am sure that an understanding of climate politics and the age of the Anthropocene will be essential.
Saturday January 16th, 2016
Because I was raised an environmentalist (thanks Mom and Dad) solving environmental problems has always been high on my list of priorities, so much so that I am frustrated by the lack of action on behalf of governments, corporations, and individuals in both acknowledging and addressing such problems.
Personally, I believe that environmental health is the number one national interest, or at least that it should be. Some argue tat education, gun control, women’s rights, employment, and, of course, national security are the leading issues. To these people I counter: would we still care about these issues if we ran out of water to drink, food to eat, and air to breathe? Probably not. In fact, when we are faced with such shortages environmental health does become a top national priority (consider hurricane Katrina and the 2007 world food crisis).
Unfortunately, we only seem to acknowledge the environment’s health when its at its worst. When the environment appears to be functioning as it should we don’t think twice about it. The problem is that the environment isn’t functioning at its highest capacity anymore but we in the United States and in over developed nations around the world are to insolated from changes in the environment that we have failed to notice. We are not panicked by the dangers that we do not see, but panic is just what we need!
I know most people try to avoid panic in their lives and “panic” is often seen as a hindrance to progress in a society, but I believe that we as a society need to be more panicked about the state of the environment if we are to do anything about it before its too late! I’ve had this conversation in some of my other classes. Some of my fellow environmentalists fear that world governments won’t make environmental health a priority until something catastrophic happens resulting in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of citizens from developed countries. (An argument could be made that hundreds of thousands of citizens from developing countries have already died as a result of the Anthropocene, and the developed world simply doesn’t care enough to change its ways unless their own citizens are dying by the boatload.)
That being said, I don’t feel like a sadist when I feel happy to know that the U.S. Department of Defense has listed climate change as a threat to national security. In fact, I think this is one of the top environment successes of the decade. Finally the U.S. government is recognizing how important the environment is! What could be more important than human lives, and we’re finally realizing that human life is unequivocally tied to the health of the environment. I predict that as more and more people become aware of this fact, more and more will be done to mitigate environmental problems. With any luck (and a lot of hard work) we can avoid a catastrophic event the kills hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.