Closing Reflection

 


The primary and instant feeling I have after finishing this course is: GO OUTSIDE MORE. I don’t know why this realization doesn’t come up more at the end of my other EV classes, but I think I might know why I feel that way after Environmental Ethics. Reading Kimmerer and Leopold made me think about how entire careers can be established around spending time outside. I think I may have had some sort of notion that this wasn’t going to be possible and that this was hindering my desire to spend time outdoors. This is not a productive way to think about the outdoors, but I think that at college, it’s easy for me to get caught up in weird subconscious beliefs that don’t make any sense. The texts we read this block made me realize the importance of almost forcing yourself to go outside for a while every day. Even if you are just sitting there and doing nothing, you start observing what’s around you and thinking about nature as a system. This habit helps view the world as something more than just the place where humans live, which is often how I find myself looking at things after spending months in the shuffle of college. This perspective on the environment is something that I think, if more people adopted, we would all feel better about climate change and, in turn, have better chances at mitigating its effects. One thing I have gathered from taking EV classes at CC so far is that half of the battle against climate change is just mentally deciding that climate change is something that we will be able to handle and mitigate. And I think this starts with more people simply going outside and not only appreciating but also acknowledging nature’s complexities. As Kimmerer says, we should view nature not as a bundle of rights but as a bundle of responsibilities.

In conclusion, I don’t think this class changed one big thing about my mindset, but instead, a bunch of smaller things that will lead to bigger changes. I am grateful that I took this class because I almost switched out right before it started, because I thought I had taken too many EV classes this year. Thank you, Marion!

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