How ENST has shifted my view on the environment

I have metamorphized in so many ways since I first became an environmental studies student. I could have never dreamed of how ENST could drastically change my perspective in the way that it has. As Dr. Sarah Ray states in Affective Ecocriticism Manuscript, “the ENST degree is [in some ways] some kind of 12-step program, with its own arc of affects, moving in stages from idealism, lost innocence, shame, denial, grief, apathy, optimism, and then, I can only hope, agency to work against diminution.” (Ray 1).

     As I approach my last two semesters as an undergraduate student, I can’t help but notice that I’ve gone through many of these stages. Being an ENST student is perhaps the most emotionally taxing major there is. A lot of people assume that it is an “easier” version of environmental science, but I’d argue that in some ways it’s much more difficult. Dr. Ray explains this when she writes, “students who choose ES because they think it will be safe, feel-good, and easy are upset when they learn that addressing environmental problems will require uncomfortable self-reflection, not just learning how to argue better from established normative positions.” (Ray 5). This certainly held true for me.

     As Dr. Ray has pointed out, being aware of the social aspects of environmental knowledge deeply challenges one’s belief systems. I had never heard of the term, “environmental racism” until these past few years. I used to believe environmentalists were most always aligned with human rights activists, and it crushed me to find out about the many controversies associated with environmentalism. The concept of conservation refugees outraged me. I was heartbroken when I learned that environmentalists kicked indigenous peoples out of their lands for the sake of conservation areas, despite the fact that they were protecting their land on their own.

     I used to think that all we needed to do to “save the environment” was to participate in beach clean ups, recycle, eat vegetarian, and perform simple daily tasks that help reduce our impact on the planet. While I still believe that it’s important to do these things, I was crushed to find out that on its own, it is simply not enough. Globally speaking, we are going to need to go through a major transformative shift that involves reducing consumption rates while still protecting the rights of humans. Sometimes, that seems impossible, but its better to know the ugly truth than to hide in the bliss of ignorance. I went into this major having “drunk the dying-polar-bears Kool-Aid,” only to find out that it is much more complicated than that.

     Dr. Ray points out that, “The environmental justice approach shifts students’ frames of “the problem” away from a blaming-the-victim approach toward an understanding of structural injustice” (Ray 8). Understanding environmental justice has certainly changed my perspective. I used to believe that much of the environmental damage across the globe came from misuse of the land in developing nations. While in some cases this is true, it’s usually a result of multinational corporations from countries like the United States exploiting other countries lands in ways that hardly benefit the natives. ENST has given me a perspective on environmental justice that hadn’t occurred to me before.

     Now that I have entered the service learning part of my undergraduate degree, I plan to use what I’ve learned in ENST to deconstruct the value of my work and make it a critical service learning project. I have learned about the dark past of environmentalism, as well as the importance of social justice, and I hope that I can use this knowledge to offer something unique to my project with Redwood State Parks. Environmental Studies gave me a very bleak outlook on our future for quite some time, but I’m finally starting to move forward with hope that we can use a transformative approach to create a better world.