Professor Erica Schoenberger will be teaching a new class next fall called Environment and Society. This course will explore the environmental implications of societal decisions and resource use.
“It’s a very big title,” Schoenberger said. “It could be a 10-year class, so I had to make some big, strategic decisions about what to cover.”
Environment and Society will explore topics such as natural resources, urbanization, the history of environmental thought and types of environmental discourse from a critical perspective.
“When we say natural resources, it sounds like nature is just full of things that are resources and they’re naturally there and we just go pluck them out of nature,” Schoenberger said. “In fact, a lot of what we use now routinely would have been useless to us in previous centuries, before we had the technology or the need to use them.”
Schoenberger referred to coltan, a mineral used in the production of electronic devices, as an example of a substance that became a resource with the changing needs of society.
“Until very recently, coltan had no value whatsoever,” Schoenberger said. “It was there in nature, but it was not a natural resource. And now, it’s in an area of the world that is being torn apart by civil strife, partly over access to these resources.”
The largest reserves of coltan are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where profits from the mining of coltan are said to be directly related to financing civil wars.
“We are implicated in environmental processes ages and ages away from us, being undertaken by people we don’t know, whose lives are being drastically affected by the way we live,” Schoenberger said.
Schoenberger cited gold as another natural resource whose value is controlled by social factors.
“We’ve been digging gold out of the ground for thousands of years,” she said. “We’ve done hideous environmental and social damage to do it, and what we do with a remarkably large share of it is we dig another large hole in the ground and put it back in [ancient tombs].”
However, Schoenberger said that keeping gold in reserves is not an old-fashioned practice. A significant share of the gold that is not buried underground is now held in vaults of banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank.
“So as we’re frantically digging more and more gold, we’re sequestering some enormous part of it, and that is part of an artificial social scarcity that is imposed on the natural scarcity of gold,” Schoenberger said.
Schoenberger’s class will also examine the current discourse on environmental issues, such as arguments that advocate reductions in consumption. Schoneberger said that, while overconsumption is a problem for Americans, other parts of the world needed to consume more.
“The kind of economy we have needs to grow in order to be healthy. So it seems to me that the question to ask is not whether we should cut back, but how we can figure out how to grow towards outcomes we want rather than away from them,” Schoenberger said.
She also emphasized that personal choices must be viewed as products of societal norms.
“I want to suggest to people that dealing with environmental problems is not just a matter of personal choice, because the choices that we have available to us are structured by the larger society,” Schoenberger said.
Junior Roderick Go, who has taken Introduction to Engineering for Sustainable Development and Environmental History — two courses taught by Schoenberger — said he enjoyed these classes because they provided him with new perspectives on environmental engineering.
“If people are interested in seeing engineering from a social perspective, I think her classes are really good,” Go said.
Junior Ann Mendoza, who took Introduction to Engineering with Sustainable Development, said she liked Schoenberger’s style of teaching and would recommend her to other students.
“The professor was interactive with the class and encouraged class participation,” Mendoza said. “Overall, her insight was very informative.”
Schoenberger said that, although she has taught smaller classes in the past, she wants to reach out to a larger audience with her new class. If the enrollment limit is reached, she urged that students who are interested in the class come talk to her.
“I want people to be surprised by how the world works,” Schoenberger said.
