The First Post! How Exciting.

So I guess I'll begin by introducing myself a little more for you all. I grew up in a very liberal and environmentally conscious family. My mom works at the University of Massachusetts developing environmental science curriculum, and my dad works for a engineering firm that does audits and retrofits on government buildings to make them more energy efficient. Its not surprising I guess that both my sister and I have entered into environmental studies. My sister graduated from Brandeis as an environmental science major, and is working at MIT for a economics professor doing research on the economic impacts of the recently passed House Energy Bill.

Over the past couple of years, I have settled into environmental policy as a course of study. I am very dedicated to understanding all of the issues in the field, and I am very passionate when it comes to inspiring action on environmental issues.

As a result, I found the article by Dr. Stanley Fish to be very interesting, and crucial to any discussion of environmental politics. As Professor Nicholson mentioned in the first class, it is usually very ineffective for environmental change to come from individual actions and choices such as reducing toilet paper waste in a consumer household. While these types of decisions are respectable and admirable, I agree with one of the comments on the blog who said that the environmental community has become too caught up with these types of nitty gritty details, and is losing focus of the broader picture of consumer culture and carbon emissions. We can never hope to win the long term game if we are playing it with compact fluorescent bulbs and locally harvested cabinets.

For this reason, I found the New York Times article assigned for today's class to be out of touch with the root causes of environmental degradation. The author argued, along with many scholars, that affluence is the key to successful environmental change. I believe that this is entirely incorrect and could lead to a dangerous mentality of complacency and disregard for the problem throughout the developed world. However, I am interested to hear more arguments from this perspective, along with a host of other highly controversial issues that are sure to crop out throughout the course.