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Environmental Lit > Exam #1 (lit and class notes) > Flashcards

Exam #1 (lit and class notes) Flashcards

1
Q

Science v Humanities: Science

A
  • Facts = data
  • Knowledge
  • Application
    -Nonhuman/nature
  • Objects of technology
  • Problem solving
  • Understand and solve
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2
Q

Science v Humanities: Humanities

A
  • Facts = ideas, feelings, & data
  • Knowledge of human nature, culture, cultural production & arts
  • Creation of new culture
  • Understand by asking better/more difficult questions
  • Recognizes that there are certain things that make life worth living
  • Complicates and critiques science
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3
Q

EH and compartmentalization

A

Compartmentalization of knowledge is a problem across fields, but EH works against it (even though it is sometimes necessary)

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4
Q

Ideology

A
  • Culture masquerading as nature
  • Can dictate what kind of science does or does not happen
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5
Q

When was there a general consensus amongst scientists that climate change was in fact happening?

A
  • 1980s
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6
Q

What is Kingston’s “A City Person Encountering Nature” about? When was it published?

A
  • Published 1987
  • The difference between perception and really seeing something
  • Engagement and how perception is shaped
  • Seeing as a trope (idea, symbol, metaphor)
  • Nature is mysterious and also wild
  • Even nature’s simplicity is extraordinary
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7
Q

What were the creatures that Kingston’s speaker was fascinated with in “A City Person Encountering Nature”? What creatures did she take her son to see?

A
  • Nudibranchs
  • Crabs (with no eyes)
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8
Q

What was the first popular book on climate change?

A

The End of Nature by Bill Mckibben

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9
Q

What percentage of scientists agree that climate change was caused by humans?

A

99%

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10
Q

Greenwashing

A
  • A marketing ploy by companies to make you think their practices and products are ‘greener’ than they are
  • Spreading doubt where none exits; such as fossil fuel companies funding the NIPCC
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11
Q

What nations are most affected by climate change?

A

poor island nations

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12
Q

What is GDP?

A

gross domestic products

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13
Q

What is the hardest evidence we have of climate change?

A

ice core samples

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14
Q

What other physical evidence of climate change can we look at?

A

insurance records provide evidence through risk assessments

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15
Q

When did industrialization begin?

A
  • 1780s in England
  • first factories went up in the US in 1812-1813
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16
Q

What would happen if we stopped emitting green house gases right now?

A

We would still see a rise in the Earth’s temp. because of half lives, exponential effects, and solar refraction

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17
Q

What is Earth First!?

A

a radical wing of the Sierra Club

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18
Q

What is journalism supposed to be?

A

disinterested

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19
Q

What is environmental discourse?

A

points to the social processes that construct knowledge and meaning in terms of nature; challenges the idea that science is an unbiased, objective account of reality

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20
Q

Climate Change A-J

A
  • A: Arrhenius created the first climate model in 1895
  • B: Blah, Blah, Blah; world leaders talk about climate action but never make any change
  • C: Capitalism: Companies continue using fossil fuels because it makes them money; climate change is a product of capitalism
  • D: Despair
  • E: Electrify Everything
  • F: Flight; planes that run solely on electricity
  • G: Green Concrete; carbicrete; concrete production accounted for 80% of carbon emissions in 2021
  • H: Hope
  • I: Inflation Reduction Act; 1st real climate legislation make it through congress
  • J: JOBS; cutting emissions creates jobs & money
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21
Q

Climate Change K-T

A
  • K: Kilowatts: Americans use 11k Kilowatts of energy every year; atmospheric imperialism
  • L: leapfrogging; India could leapfrog straight to electric energy instead of using fossil fuels
  • M: Math; aggregate emissions; CO2 budget for 3degreesF will run out by 2030
  • N: Narratives; climate narratives center around doom & gloom; we need stories that motivate action
  • O: Objections; Valclav Smil argues that positive narratives about climate change are presumptuous; amazing work has been done toward climate change, but almost no progress has been made
  • P: Power; de-carbonizing & democratizing the US power grid
  • Q: quagmire; new solutions come with new problems
  • R: Republicans; 0% of registered republicans believe climate change is a problem
  • S: Shortfall; Only 5% of 128 countries have taken 1st steps to reaching net zero emissions
  • T: Temperature
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22
Q

Climate Change U-Z

A
  • U: Uncertainty
  • V: Vast
  • W: Weather; 2020 had 22 weather related disasters that caused more than $1billion in damage; the number rises every year
  • X: Xenophobia; climate change’s highest costs will be borne by those who contributed least to the problem; 21million people are displaced by climate change each year
  • Y: You
  • Z: Zero; the hoover dam is ground zero for climate change, it has been in a megadrought since 1998
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23
Q

What genre is Climate Change from A-Z by E. Kolbert?

A
  • Bestiary: an old genre (often real and mythological) detailing different animals
  • educational, nature writing, science writing, history, interviews, & fieldwork
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24
Q

What is PVC and how does it affect us?

A
  • Polyvinyl chloride
  • dioxin is created when you make/destroy PVC
  • dioxin is a carcinogen
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25
Q

What do journalists bring to the environmental humanities?

A

firsthand accounts, personal fieldwork, and history to tell stories with

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26
Q

What did Arrhenius do?

A

developed the first climate model in 1895

27
Q

What was finished the year after Arrhenius died?

A

The Hoover Dam

28
Q

What is capitalism and what does it do?

A
  • A system that functions with abstraction
  • Goods/services are commodified (so are people)
  • Sees nature as a resource/raw material
  • Obscures/hides the interconnectedness of everything
  • a system where someone inevitably ends up with power over others
29
Q

What is ecology?

A

a system that studies interconnectedness

30
Q

What did Adam Smith say about the market?

A

it is the invisible hand; the market is a natural process

31
Q

Agential

A

everything makes changes/everything is an agent

32
Q

What do the Environmental Humanities do?

A
  • demonstrate/depict interconnectedness of time, space, and species
  • shows the value of seeing and feeling; context for data and ideas
33
Q

What genre are Death in the Open and The World’s Biggest Membrane by Lewis Thomas? When were they published?

A
  • creative non-fiction
  • 1974
34
Q

What is Thomas’s Death in the Open about?

A
  • nature has its own mechanism for removing dead things (scavengers/fungi)
  • death is all around us but we can’t bear to think about it all the time
  • our bodies are ecosystems and things are born/die in them all the time
  • assumes humans are sensitive and social animals but we are also ecosystems
  • death IS in the open, we just don’t see it
  • “vast mortality”; life and death are the same thing
  • tone: sadness/comfort
  • death is a pre-condition for life, it unites us
35
Q

What genre is Heaven and Earth in Jest by Annie Dillard? When was it published?

A
  • creative non-fiction
  • 1974
36
Q

What is Thomas’s The World’s Largest Membrane about?

A
  • The Earth as one organisms that respires
  • Everything (air, water, Earth) is connected
  • the atmosphere is the Earth’s cell membrane
  • goes from the biggest thing to the smallest
  • describing a system/small being that is not totally closed
  • Earth is semi-permiable like a cell membrane
37
Q

What is Dillard’s Heaven and Earth in Jest about?

A
  • Minute observations of nature
  • Observing the very small helps you think about the very large
  • Changing perspective
  • Interconnectedness is metaphysical as well as physical
  • The sublime: awestruck, seeing anew; marriage of terror and beauty
  • Dillard is emulating Thoreau’s Walden Pond
  • Thoreau, live deliberately; find out the ethical consequences of your choices
  • Thoreau, practices being “awake” spiritually, philosophically, and politically
  • Thoreau’s real-o-meter: measuring reality and what really matters; what is/isn’t true in culture
38
Q

What is some key symbolism in Heaven in Earth in Jest?

A
  • bloody pawprints/roses = love/violence, life/death
  • mountains = eternity/afterlife
  • creeks = the river of life
39
Q

What kind of scholar was Annie Dillard?

A

A Thoreau scholar

40
Q

What does IPAT stand for?

A
  • Impact, Population, Affluence, and Technology
  • Impact = Population x consumption/per person x impact/per unit of consumption
41
Q

What is carrying capacity?

A
  • The population of a species that can be supported by a particular habitat
  • i.e. the number of humans the Earth’s systems can support
42
Q

What is the ICS Working Group and what are they doing?

A
  • Industrial Control Systems Join Working Group
  • they are working to change the name of our epoch from Holocene to Anthropocene
43
Q

What is the Anthropocene and when was the word coined?

A
  • Since the Industrial Revolution humans have so altered planetary systems that they make a new geological epoch
  • It was coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer
44
Q

What are some defining phenomena of the Anthropocene?

A
  • increased population growth and energy use
  • accelerating greenhouse gas emission
  • deforestation
  • soil disruption
  • migration pattern disruption
45
Q

Wet-Bulb Temperature

A

Measures the effect of heat and humidity on the human body and what it can endure

46
Q

Biostratigraphic Markers

A
  • Rats, cats, and chickens are the largest biostratigraphic marker of humans
  • 96% of all mammals are either domesticated or human; only 4% are wild
  • 70% of all birds are chickens
  • 300mil housecats vs. 3,000 wild tigers
47
Q

What do Clark and Kerridge (textbook) say is an obstacle to fixing climate change?

A
  • Human nature and evolutionary heritage
  • we can’t comprehend the scale, complexity, and speed of climate change
  • we aren’t built to understand the very microscopic/macroscopic issues that contribute to/come from climate change
48
Q

Why is calling the new epoch “Anthropocene” cause for debate?

A
  • because Anthropogenic means caused by humans, calling the epoch Anthropocene assumes that ALL humans are responsible for it, when in fact only 1-3% of the population are really to blame
  • assuming that everyone is responsible obscures systemic inequity and reinforces inequality
  • the question becomes: can we solve problems without creating/reinforcing inequality
49
Q

Capitalocene

A
  • Another name suggestion for the new epoch
  • Names the exploitative, extractive relationships of capitalism as the cause of planetary destruction
  • industrial-scale capitalism produces the wastes that stratigraphers use to identify golden spikes
50
Q

The Plantationocene

A
  • Another name suggestion for the new epoch
  • Name sthe slave-dependent plantation system as the cause of planetary destruction, an older form of capitalism’s exploitative, extractive relationships
  • the plantation system was essential to European empire building and the “columbian exchange” thus connecting it to another golden spike
51
Q

The Cthulucene

A
  • Another name suggestion for the new epoch
  • Invented by biologist Donna Haraway
  • Rebrands the age with an aspirational identity, naming the ethical, co-creative relationships that will be necessary to cultivate
52
Q

Dating the Anthropocene

A
  • Colombian Exchange (conquest/colonization): 1610
  • Industrial Revolution: 1760-1840
  • The Great Acceleration/Global Capitalism: 20th century
  • Radiation (plutonium/nuclear bomb): 1945
53
Q

Golden Spike

A
  • An area that serves as a marker of a global event in stratigraphic material (rocks, chemicals, and animals layered in Earth’s crust)
  • ex: the site of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs
54
Q

Geoengineering

A

large scale systemic intervention of climate change such as Carbon Dioxide Removal or Solar Radiation Management

55
Q

What is the Duck-Rabbit Paradox?

A
  • The issue of “seeing” and simultaneously holding more than one belief in our minds
  • we don’t hold space to consider other perspectives
56
Q

How does Attention relate to the Environmental Humanities?

A
  • we live in a fast-paced society and therefore can miss a lot of things that are right in front of us
  • arts and humanities require us to slow down and notice things
57
Q

What is a simpler way to remember the Anthropocene?

A

It is the epoch in which human disturbance outranks all other geological forces

58
Q

How many elephants do we learn it took to get the amount of tusks being burnt in Anthropocene (2018)?

A

10,000

59
Q

When was the movie Anthropocene released?

A

2018

60
Q

What is Anthropocene (2018) ultimately about? what is it doing?

A
  • About industry/money
  • it goes from one industry to another and tracks their ecological footprint
  • Foregrounds nature despite the title; foregrounds the effects of human systems rather than the systems themselves
  • The visual scale of the film demonstrates urgency/the size of the issue
  • Much of what the film shows is uncanny
61
Q

What percentage of Earth’s forests have been cleared, degraded, or fragmented for human use?

A

85%

62
Q

Who directed Anthropocene (2018)

A

Pencier, Baichwal, and Burtynsky

63
Q

What are the two main critiques of Anthropocene (2018)?

A
  • It aestheticizes destruction
  • Its through line misses corporations and capitalism who are the real agents of climate change
64
Q

What is the half-earth project?

A

a movement to concentrate human population to half the planet and leave the other half untouched; E.O. Wilson

Environmental Lit (17 decks)

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