This One's A Keeper.

This course is perhaps one of the most enjoyable for me this semester. It is in this course that I am able to test my assumptions of environmental politics and the debate surrounding climate change. At times it is frustrating trying to wrap my head around much of the debate and science of the issues. For me, the most interesting parts of the course were learning about different theories as they relate to environmentalism and the different approaches different actors utilize. That is, how nations differ in their approach than do international organizations or even grass roots advocacy.

In the beginning, I was entirely fatalistic about this course and how anything could change. It was depressing to learn about how just by living and the way we do we are destroying the environment. But I really enjoyed tracing our steps in history to how we got to this point, and attempting to think different about the problems. The last few weeks were particularly enlightening in this regard and now I am much more conscious of environmental efforts in my daily life. This is a difficult course to teach and covers a wide variety of topics but I believe Professor Nichols did a commendable job compacting much of the rhetoric and literature into applicable and learnable lessons. The speakers we saw were particularly valuable to making real world connections to the material.If there is one indicator at what I will take away from this course, it is the books I keep. Typically at the end of each semester students sell back the books they deem useless. But many of the books in this course I will choose to keep and refer back to in my future endeavors.