BACK to Warren 10B: Ecology Syllabus

Over the course of this quarter you have been introduced to a number of ecological issues, concerns, and problems. You have also read various writers’ solutions for these problems, and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. You have therefore already begun to think about how people identify problems and devise solutions to them. For this paper you will go one step further by identifying a problem and assessing possible solutions.

PURPOSE: To explore how problems and solutions are identified, defined and translated to real world action. To think about the relationships between individual action and wider social change. To explore what it means to “think globally, act locally.”

1) You will identify something in your life that you would like to change. (This should, of course, be something “ecological.”) You will then consider ways that you can work directly to solve this “problem.” As you do this, you will need to consider what significance this personal issue has for our society and ecosystem. That is, you should ask what larger problem your personal issue “speaks to,” and ask what your individual solution might offer to society. You should also assess the strengths and weaknesses of your solution(s); if all of them are “weak” perhaps the problem needs to be redefined. This is the Start Small and Get Big approach.

For example, let us say that you have noticed a hungry man holding a sign saying “will work for food” as you walk to classes. You have decided that this a problem that needs a solution. You would need to explain why this is a problem -- is it because he’s hungry, or because you don’t like walking by him, or…? You decide that it is because you don’t like walking by him, so your solution is to take a different route to class. What is the larger significance of this scenario? Perhaps your actions suggest how society in general deals with the problem of homelessness; people would rather avoid the issue than deal with it. Thinking about this, you decide that this is not an effective solution, since you cannot guarantee that you will never have to walk by a homeless person again by taking a different route (society cannot make homelessness go away by ignoring it). So you think about the problem in a different way; perhaps if the man had food, he wouldn’t need to stand there as you walk by. So you decide to bring him an apple…

2) The other option is to go the other direction -- to start with a large problem and solution(s) and break them down into something that an individual person can handle. Again, you would need to define the problem, and assess the merits of possible solutions, keeping in mind that you may need to redefine the problem after thinking about it for a while. This is the Start Big and Get Small approach.

Let’s use the homeless example again. You decide that homelessness is something that society needs to deal with; you then need to explain why that is so, as this will affect your choice of solutions. Perhaps it is because it suggests that wealth in our country is not distributed fairly? So a possible solution there is that the wealth should be redistributed. Perhaps this could be done by raising taxes and using the money to fund charities. Or you could have a revolution! Or maybe the problem is that there are not enough jobs, or not enough places to live. So one would need to consider ways that society could produce more jobs or more housing. On an individual level, what might this mean? Higher taxes? Or maybe it would mean that you might buy products from a company that you know hires the homeless and works to find them housing. Perhaps you decide to become a housing planner? Or maybe people in a neighborhood could get together to help renovate an existing house that’s in poor condition. Or…

In both cases, remember that you have all the material in the Reader and in Ecotopia to draw upon (and newspapers, friends, etc.). Since the problems that you will be considering are going to be large ones (even if you start small), don’t be afraid to “ask” these writers for help in thinking about the problems and solutions. (Don’t forget to cite them.) Some of your solutions might not work after you’ve thought about them. This is to be expected. When this happens, however, don’t just toss the solution out and move on. Ask yourself why it didn’t work -- Was the problem defined correctly? Was the solution actually aimed at a different problem? Would parts of the solution work? Would it help to look at the problem from a different perspective? Remember also that many problems are actually collections of several smaller, related problems. It might be worth focusing on one of those if the larger problem proves too difficult to handle.

Remember, think about how you can best organize your argument; your paper should not be a list of answers to these questions.

Also, while this paper will be partly an exploration of ideas, don’t forget that you are making an argument at the same time. It would probably be a good idea to write out a sentence or two explaining what claim(s) you want to make and ground before you start (but be aware that you may need to go back afterwards and re-write that claim).