Knowing My Capabilities

Robert Johnson - Blog 4

Before I step off the last rung of the ladder, I ask myself, “should I be on this roof?”

At this point of time, I had no choice. I took the blunt end of the pike pole and sounded the roof by striking the roof surface, looking for hot spots and weaknesses in the structure. It sounded and felt solid. I peered down at my partner on the ladder and gave her the go ahead signal. She was carrying up the chainsaw. I took my first step onto the roof and continued to strike the surface. I then turned and accepted the chainsaw from my partner, so she could approach the rooftop safely. Once she was up, I handed the chainsaw back to her. We needed to progress up the gable roof to the mid ridge.

Time is our utmost concern, for we have little knowledge of the fire progressing inside. Our goal is to minimize the radiant heat in the house, by opening up a ventilation hole that would release gases. So far there were no warning signs of an unsafe roof. This would consist of melting asphalt, a spongy roof, or smoke and fire seeping out from the rooftop.

We stopped five feet before the mid ridge. The roof seemed stable so we chose our location. On the other side of the pike pole are two fork-like prongs. I slammed the two prongs into the roof and layed down the pole, securing parallel with the mid ridge. This enables me to utilize the tool as a footing. My partner is communicating with Incident Command, to verify all locations of our team. Also informing them that we are proceeding on the opening. She hands me the chainsaw and then anchors herself next to my back leg for extra safety precaution.

My mind is quickly assessing all the side variables. What level is our oxygen at? How many layers of roofing is there? What is the wind doing? What is our second means of escape?

The wind was light and at my back, so this meant that the smoke would push away from me once the hole was made. I turned on the chainsaw and prepared to make my cuts. When cutting, the chainsaw must be in a 90 degree angle. The first cut I made was a vertical cut about 4 feet long, away from my body. Smoke began releasing through the seam. I then proceeded to make a horizontal cut on top about 3 feet. This cut is crucial because beams come in play. I angled the chainsaw at about 45 degrees and lifted it slightly. This was to prevent cutting through the beams, and losing our support. I then proceed to make a second horizontal incision meeting up at the bottom of the first vertical cut. The last cut is a vertical incision, close to us, and would open up the ventilation hole. We needed to adjust our position so that we were not directly within the gases and heat. We stepped back about 2 feet. I then began to make the incision, and could feel the radiant heat releasing. My gloves were warming up fast. Vision was decreasing slightly as I was finishing. The roof patch fell in and the gases and smoke burst out of the house, eager to escape. I turned off the chainsaw and handed it to my partner. She slowly and safely made her way back to the ladder, watching every step. I then pried my pike pole from the roof, and slowly made my way back to the ladder, where my partner was waiting, so that we can progress as a team. I took the chainsaw from her so she could access the ladder, and from there I handed it back. The chainsaw always goes down first for safety reasons. I then slowly accessed the ladder and while taking my foot back off the roof, I said to myself, “yes, I should be on this roof?”

Now that the smoke and gases are released from the house, our team downstairs can easily identify the source of the fire and put it out. Not only are they putting out the fire, they are able to see what possessions they can save and can control the amount of water destruction.

FIRE ACADEMY TRAINING - VENTILATION

For a while now I have been denying my potential and my abilities. I stopped expressing myself, my thoughts, and all that I have aquired. What I mean by this, is that my solitude is the crux of my own denial. I limited my access to learn from others, as well as to provide help to those who may have needed me. In the book Political Paralysis, Denusha Veronica Goska brings up a question that lingers with me. Why do we not honor what we can do? I think about this all the time, and it’s very true. I have the ability to connect. To pass on information or take it in. Why do I fear that? In reality I don’t fear it, I just convince myself not to do it. I put myself back in solitude because it’s easy to be on my own. But I know I am only restricting my own capabilities.

In the story above, I could not have completed that task without the help of another. It is crucial to understand that we cannot do this alone. This last semester at HSU has been an eye opener for me. A reminder that everything is relevant and the importance of having people around you, is imperative. I am done denying my own power.

Just One More Step

I wrestled for some time with my options of buying a tassel for my cap at graduation or making one to avoid wasting materials and supporting prison labor. I know this connection sounds like a stretch, but it isn’t an uncommon struggle for me in most situations. This inner turmoil from weighing daily conveniences with the horrors of our consumer society is something I am all too familiar with after venturing into Environmental Studies. With graduation just days away and the majority of my preconceived ideas shattered, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this change from passive consumption to continually practicing mindfulness. Looking back on the person I was before this process, I can truthfully say that every second was worth it. The closer I get to walking across that stage, the more capable I feel of taking on this world critically, equitably, and with a fire that I will refuse to let go out.

I eventually caved from lack of time and purchased a tassel from the campus bookstore. Looking down at the year “2018” I couldn’t help but become overwhelmed. I had no idea the weight I would feel from holding this simple bundle of thread. On the way to my car a few silent tears ran down my face as I thought about being 5 years old attending my dad’s graduation party. Memories flooded my mind of feeling so small in university hallways, quietly attending advisor meetings, and exploring the beautiful grounds of the campus on my bike. He went back to school to pursue what he cared about and 18 years later I can finally say the same. When I close my eyes, I can still see his tassel that read “2000” which hung in his office for years afterward.

It’s been eight years now since my dad passed away. It’s a strange feeling to finally accomplish the one thing I know he would have wanted and to experience his pride through something so simple as a graduation tassel. I wish I could explain to him how different this experience has been than even what he had hoped for me. I want to tell him how prepared I feel to articulate what I know and how comfortable I am to make clear what I don’t. I would love to debate and discuss with him the multifaceted structures that exist in the world and the tools I believe I now possess to help change them. I even long for the arguments I know we would have had during my grappling to understand material he would have joked about.

I would really like to tell my dad about my new job as a Keeper Aide at the zoo. He would already know how monumental that is for me. What would be interesting would be trying to explain that this step means something different to me now than it used to. It’s so odd to make it to this step that should be the beginning of everything I ever wanted, and now it’s just one more step on this ever-expanding path I’ve found myself on. The voices I hope to elevate and the impacts I expect to be a part of are so much bigger than just me. My ambitions and involvements are constantly changing and growing in unexpected ways that I am so excited for.

I am more aware now than ever that there is so much I don’t know and so much that I will continue to learn. I wouldn’t trade my experiences in ENST for anything and to all of you who have been a part of them, thank you.

Catharine Rees' Manifesto

As I reflect back, not only on my service learning project, but on my last two years at HSU, I have grown immensely as a person in more ways than I could have imagined. Looking back on the first day of ENST 120, I had no idea what a journey these two years would be. Starting with 295, I began seeing the world through different lenses and different perspectives. I have experienced feelings of hope, hopelessness, joy, doubt, being overwhelmed, insignificance, powerful and many others. However, I also came to terms that all of those feelings are okay. Being an ENST major is not always easy. It is hard to grasp the magnitude of our world’s problems, but we also gained tools to help us navigate through it. I think the service learning project was a great avenue to do that. It allowed us to channel our passions in an effective manner, outside of the classroom.

For me, the service learning project gave me a great insight into the world of conservation and ecology. Working with Patrick’s Point State Park, I was able to apply knowledge gained over the course of the many years I have been in school. I used knowledge from botany, conservation ecology, principles of wildlife, environmental communication...and many many more. However, outside of the “textbook” classes and X’s and O’s of my project, I was able to put into perspective the ENST major.

Large picture, it is easy to get wrapped up in the feeling of being overwhelmed or feeling insignificant. For me, a big battle was finding a state of mind where I don’t feel like what I am doing is insignificant, but also not trying to take on the world overnight and completely overwhelm myself. Kim Tays, the head of The No Ivy League, really helped put that in perspective for me. As I mentioned in my presentation, life really is like pulling ivy sometimes. Sometimes, in life, we put our head down and dive into a project and just when we feel like we have made a ton of progress, we stop and look around, only to realize what we have been doing has only made a small dent.

I think the biggest thing to realize is that, no matter how big the project and no matter how much progress has been made, there will always be so much more. Accepting this was one of the hardest parts of going through my service learning project. ENST has given me the tools to grapple with these feelings and turn them into positive, effective action. Conservation, especially in the state of our world now, isn’t easy. However, I feel like there has been big strides in creating awareness of our problems and that’s a start. Figuring out how to use my course work and the ENST lens to continue to promote change in the way we use our natural resources will be a challenge that will encompass social change, political change and changes in conservation management. It will take multiple disciplines and multiple avenues to do effectively, but I am confident in my ability to apply different lenses to create change.

In the End I Am Still Whole

   Its hard to process my time in college is coming to an end. I spent five years at HSU, coming out a completely different person than when I started. Like many people coming to a university I had no idea about what path to take in life. How can we select just one emphasis when there is so much knowledge in this place? I settled on Environmental Studies because both my parents were back in the day, figuring it would be a good start if I wanted to change majors. The next five years I was able to gain a variety of different perspectives and aspects of environmental stewardship, deconstructing both problems and society as a whole. Very quickly I realized I had a small understanding of the world, being only fresh out of high school in the bay area suburbs.
   Environmental Studies has numerous applications throughout the world; the flexibility being one of the appealing things for me. Instead of being taught one way to see the world we are told to expand our understanding and think about the many aspects to a problem, recognizing the hidden regimes of truth that create a peaceful and functioning society. If we don't question our reality how are we supposed to change it? Viewing the world through power and privilege highlights how problems of accessibility and influence stem from money and socioeconomic status. Being a white male from a lower mostly middle class background lessons like these weren't as easily found in my life. Recognizing privilege shows how our system became how it is and how best to address problems in a realistic and effective way. Overall this major taught how to create change in society and understand the power of community and connectedness while still being strong and healthy individuals.    
   One thing I appreciated about this field was the recognition and understanding of self care. This major made me more aware of both local and global news. Recent political events have made the news take a larger toll on our minds, but recognizing self care and fostering resilience makes for a better, stronger individual able to work on improving without getting to heavily burdened by the content. Change happens slow, sometimes painfully slow, but practicing self care and fostering support with your community ensures it will come. Actions speak louder than words and keeping hope in others makes them able to continue their actions without burning out.
   Change comes through education. Many people want to help the world but don't realize they can do more than just recycling plastic and riding a bike. When we change small behaviors, some that have been institutionalized in our societal norms, we create positive habits that are part of making change. One example is reusing bags and containers to create less excess waste. Especially in developed countries waste is a major problem we have the power to change. My media production emphasis educates and informs the public on problems and possible solutions through videos and recordings so they have tangible images and content they remember and are impacted from. I know they are the only ones who decide their behaviors, but with more education and understanding public knowledge and positive behaviors will improve and sustain an impact on society.
   Overall, the knowledge I gained in HSU studying Environmental Studies I feel was some of the most important and useful tools I could have learned in the institution. The classes taught and the people I worked with were some of the nicest and most understanding people I have met, each with their unique personalities and energies brought to discussions and lectures. Part of the content was sharing and understanding their experiences and thoughts in life and made me feel better about my own actions I do to make a difference. Though I learned so much in college I am still functioning, still sane, and still helping make the world better than when I found it. The potential for change is endless and it is up to us to help usher it in in a positive way. College is ending. I am still whole, and ready for the next step of the journey.      

Call to Action

Sarah Ray’s work spoke to all students perusing an ENST degree as it embodied the transformational experience of learning about international environmental degradation and how it relates to you as an individual and those around us. I attended her talk at the Jacoby Plaza Grill in which she outlines the two general paths students take to enter this major. Throughout her speech it was evident she had a deep understanding of her students’ needs and emotional wellbeing. Exposing preconceived notions about our positionality in relation to the environment can be a vulnerable experience filled with emotions. Moreover, learning about the current and past environmental damage AND how it hurts underserved communities the most can be truly heart breaking. Being excited to learn slowly dwindles at it becomes more and more difficult to attend and enjoy classes. Emotions do need to be recognized, but it should not be the focus. In addition, there are ways to call people to action and unsurprisingly, focusing on all the bad with only hints of light does not exactly produce young adults ready and confident to make a difference in the world. It’s like when we were only kids and were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and we responded naively yet bold with, “an astronaut” or “the President” but instead of hearing the delightful, light-hearted response of “oh wow!” we got a slew of information of how the American government is corrupt beyond measure and that the only we can really do is vote. It is this slew of true yet damning information without any real tools to create an action based plan that leaves us feeling immobile and much too small to achieve the goals we once had. Instead of regularly incorporating class sessions to deal with the emotional aspect of our studies, I think it would be more beneficial to make a curriculum that empowered students and called them to action by connecting them to local and on campus opportunities to learn by doing. Focusing too much on the emotional experience can weigh down classes and take away from what is really supposed to be happening, going out there are making a difference!

007 Agent Manifesto

If I have learned one thing in school it is that I have learned very little. There is a famous quote by Aristotle who said, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know”. So, it was not that I didn’t receive great teaching and knowledge, but that, along with that knowledge I gained a wisdom that what I have learned is merely a drop in the endless ocean of knowledge to be explored. I can say that my college experience gave me an invaluable tool set which I can now call upon when I do self-directed studies in the future. With that said, this is not the end. After the commencement ceremony and all the celebratory graduation parties end, the hard work to be done still persists. The word commencement literally means the beginning or start. This to me is the start of a new relationship with my education. Where the institution of public schooling is left behind, and my education begins anew with me now in the driver’s seat. It is all very exciting.

I now know at the end of my collegiate career that I have the power to be a social change agent. We all have the power to catalyze social change. Even if your apparent capacity for personal agency seems slight, small changes can have a large cascading effect. I was introduced to this concept at a very low point in my journey when I felt in despair after the earth-shattering Power, Privilege, and the Environment class. The concept is called Emergent Strategies, which is also a wonderful book by Adrienne Maree Brown. Below is a graphic illustrating the concept as described in the book. That is, movements and social change take the form of many collective yet decentralized actions of various scales. Just as flocks of bird’s change shape and form based on the little directional changes of individuals so too are social movements based upon the small directional changes of the individuals.

This has not only given me hope but also showed me that, even though individually my actions may seem insignificant and my efforts therefore a fool’s errand, I have real tangible power to tackle even the largest of issues.

I feel as though the Environmental studies program has opened the door to many concepts and ideas like emergent strategies that where far out of my expertise. I am one of those super seniors. During my college career I have been on the path to completing three very different majors. Originally, I was a Film major focusing on wildlife documentaries. Secondly, I took up a very scientific major, forestry with an emphasis in hydrology. Then finally an Environmental Studies major with an emphasis in geospatial analysis. Even though I have been in college for almost 10 years and at times felt that I had been wasting time by not just getting a degree, in the end I’m grateful. This has given me a very diverse foundation of knowledge with which I can make connections between. An assumption that I hear a lot is that if your studies are in a multitude of areas then you will never know mastery because you are learning only on a surface level. On the contrary, learning across disciplines provides information advantage. For example, if you are in the business of making trains and everyone else is focused on making trains more efficient, but you also know a good amount about biology, you then could create trains based on the shapes of a falcons beak, an idea that no one else making trains would come up with. For that reason, I appreciate my educational indecisiveness and appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of the Environmental Studies program.

   

I want to take a moment to thank all the folks that have made an impact on me along my educational path. First, I want to thank my partner Emma. As an ENST graduate she advocated for the Environmental Studies program when I found that Forestry was not for me. I can’t thank her enough for that gift. Secondly, I want to thank my various professors that inspired me with their passion, knowledge, and thoughtfulness. I hope that I can continue to have a relationship with them after graduation. Thirdly, I want to thank my family. Without such a solid educational support structure that they supplied I would not have made it this far. And last but certainly not least I want to send many thanks to my Environmental Studies Cohort. You are all awesome people who I have the utmost respect for. You all have such bright futures ahead and I can wait to watch you all change the world! We made it! Cheers! See you on the big stage! Much love to everyone!

Manifesto by Molly Gilmore

During my time in the Environmental Studies program, there has been one observation that has held my attention more than any. The observation is that representation and framing are the most important aspects of a society that affect how they are ran, and what people deem as important. For example, lobbyists know this is the case and spend their whole career making sure a specific frame on society exists so that their agenda is perpetuated. I started seeing this theme in ENST 295 and was certain that my change in the world would be situated around reframing the way society perceives the world and the environment. (If there is a reframing of the value of the environment versus the value of oil, things would be very different). Then in ENST 395, I learned of another concept that solidified this observation and revalidated my passion for it: Regimes of Truth. Regime of truth is a concept first described by Michel Foucault, explaining that truth is entangled with systems of power and privilege, and those with the power hold what society deems as truth. To be clearer, for example, Western science has the power to be deemed as ultimate truth over other systems of knowledge such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous Peoples. But behind the scenes of Western science, there are enormous amounts of power, and dare I say political regimes, making sure a there are specific outcomes that are portrayed in scientific findings.

My fascination with these regimes of truth followed me into my Capstone class where I decided to pursue education with a purpose of exploring how regimes of truth are situated in our education systems and relating institutions. So, I chose to work the Sunny Brae Middle School after school program. For most of my time there I wanted to soak in what it is like to work with kids (for the first time) and imagine how their education is shaping their view of the world. I still felt as though this concept was too broad to actually make any progress, so I started to explore my other passions. This led me to the connection with the food justice movement and how regimes are affecting how food is perceived and consumed.

In the last few weeks at the after school program, I facilitated an activity around the reframing of food and how it is connected to sustainability and accessibility. The first day I did a small gardening workshop including how to pot kale plant starters and how to germinate parsley seeds. During our workshop I asked the students what foods they usually eat and if they know where their food is grown. The response I got was interesting to me, because most of them already had a great sense of where their food comes from and how to garden. Furthermore, some of the children told me they couldn’t access local, organic foods because they were too expensive and their living conditions didn’t permit growing food. In this sense, I think I failed a bit in my capstone experience, but in another sense I think I succeeded. I failed to reframe healthy, sustainable foods as being a viable option for the children, but I succeeded in understanding that the problem is larger than just me and them. I have to refocus my attention back to the structures that are making healthy, sustainable foods disproportionately available to the whole population in order to be the social change agent that I expect I can be. This has been a wonderful learning experience for me and this opportunity has lead me down the path of pursuing food justice oriented work in the future. I am grateful for my time in the Environmental Studies program and I am thrilled to see where this path will take me and my peers going further.