Course Description
ENV 104 is an interdisciplinary introduction to environmental problems which emphasizes that humans are part of ecosystems within interdependent cycles which involve other organisms, air, water, chemicals, and energy. This course examines the relationships of humans to their environment from historical, economic, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical perspectives.
Personal Course Description This course introduces the student to the many ways in which humans have had and will always have a major effect on their environment. It also explores how those effects could turn from negative to positive with the right motivation and policies to stand up for the environment. Additionally, this course shows the interconnectedness between living systems including animals, plants, and so many things in between like the atmosphere and the earth itself.
Alyssa Wallingford October 31, 2020
I chose a National Geographic article titled “Protecting land and animals will mitigate future pandemics, report says” by Sarah Gibbens. This article is basically about how deforestation and climate change is driving animals to be in closer contact with humans, as well as creating more breeding grounds for the spread of emergent diseases and even pandemics. Clearing forests to raise livestock like cattle also increases the risk for disease, since cows and other animals can act as an intermediary between the diseased animals and humans. I chose this article because I thought that it was extremely relevant given our current situation, but also because even before reading this article, I did believe that humans had a profound effect on their surrounding environment, but also that this goes both ways. Especially growing up near the ocean, I could definitely see that humans and the environment are connected. The argument that she presents is that there have been studies done to prove that deforestation can be harmful to the health of humans as a species, and not just to the organisms that live in these places. She also says that in this study, the authors of it claimed that although preventing these future pandemics could cost billions of dollars every year, the benefits of doing so would save countries trillions of dollars. She also hopes that this current pandemic has shown people the importance of protecting the environment, because the cost of not doing so can be incredibly high. An argument that could be made against this is that these two things are not connected at all, however, this side is not presented in this article.
Gibbens supports her statements with a specific study done around the impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic and other contagious diseases, and how those effects are greatly magnified due to deforestation and a decrease in biodiversity. She also uses what those experts would estimate the cost of fixing this problem to be as opposed to doing nothing about it, strengthening her first point that humans and the natural world are undoubtedly connected. This idea connects to the entire premise of the book that we are reading in class, “The Ecology of Happiness” by
Eric Lambin, in which he explores how people are connected to nature and how we need it to lead fulfilling and happy lives. He also explores how humans can have a profound effect on the nature around them, whether it is for better or worse. One of the chapters in his book is even dedicated to how emergent diseases can be worsened by deforestation and a decrease in biodiversity, just like what Gibbens argues in her article. This article that she has written is incredibly convincing to me, and hopefully to others and maybe this will help to create some sort of change for the future.
Sarah Gibbens. 2020. Protecting land and animals will mitigate future pandemics, report says. National Geographic [Internet]. [cited 2020 October 31]. Available from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2020/10/protecting-land-animals-will-mitigatefuture-pandemics-report-says/
