{"id":5259,"date":"2011-09-08T10:45:56","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T15:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=5259"},"modified":"2011-09-08T11:05:09","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T16:05:09","slug":"good-news-bad-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/09\/08\/good-news-bad-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Good news, bad news…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As I think about our Environmental Studies curriculum (I’m Acting Director this semester) and start to think about my Nature and Culture course (which I’ll be teaching in January), I come around to the question of how to conceptualize the fraught relationship between humans and everything else.<\/p>\n

The Nature and Culture course offers tools for thinking about this relationship, and challenges students to interrogate those tools, developing them in their own ways and to various ends (ethical, practical, political, etc.). One conceptual tool, among many, is the “good news—bad news” frame. Here’s a quick attempt to present things in this frame.<\/p>\n

First, of course . . .<\/p>\n

The bad news<\/em>… is that industrial humanity, in its collective impacts, is putting very severe stresses on the ecological systems (atmospheric, marine, terrestrial) that it depends on for its own continuation, and that the best informed among us are increasingly convinced that these stresses will bring about large-scale calamity in the decades to come. (… cries and mutterings of “Humans, boo!” “Capitalism, boo!” etc.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The good news<\/em> is that we have a lot of great ideas<\/a> and practicable means for mitigating those stresses and moving to a more sustainable society, including<\/p>\n