Professor York conducts class Monday afternoon. As part of the course, students were asked to practice conservation by giving up a daily habit for two to three weeks.
Imagine giving up driving for two weeks. Or becoming vegan. Or living without electricity. These are just some projects University students have chosen to do for a
sociology class to explore their
personal roles in environmental conservation.
Assistant sociology professor Richard York teaches the upper-division Modernization and the Environment class, which currently has 25 students. He said the class focuses on the evolving interrelation between human beings and their natural surroundings and how social conditions lead to different environmental effects.
“A large historical component of that… is looking at how human interaction with the environment has changed,” York said, adding that students delve into various
topics including industrialization,
modernization and the effects of
capitalism and their impact on
the environment.
To drive home the point, York said he asked students to modify their lifestyles for two to three weeks, allowing them to choose what they wanted to do in particular. Students then have to chart their progress and write a report on their experience. Current and previous projects include students opting to become vegetarians, changing their transportation means and working to control the amount of water they use or the trash they produce,
York said.
York said the goals of the project are two-fold.
“It’s to give some kind of feeling of what one can do about (conservation),” he said, adding that the second aim is to show the sociological limitations of what one can really do to create change. The lesson does not lie only in whether a student succeeds or not, but also in discovering the challenges he or she may face in making any type of adjustment when societal norms are taken into consideration. Things that might originally seem fairly easy to do are “a lot harder than you’d think,” York said.
“We as individuals operate in a larger social context,” York
said, adding that conservation
efforts may not only depend on
personal choice, but also on the social infrastructure.
For instance, a student who only wants to buy locally manufactured products may be hard-pressed to find everything he or she needs. Similarly, a person who chooses to give up driving may discover that in some communities, it is not always possible to live without a car because work areas or shopping areas are far away from residential areas.
“We are not free-floating individuals,” York said. “Our behavior is very much constrained by the social world we live in,” he said.
Junior Andrew Harmon decided to give up using his car — or any car for that matter — for two weeks.
“I don’t like driving my car,” he said. “Gas is very expensive
these days.”
Harmon said he chose the project because he wanted to get more exercise — he had to walk about 1.5 miles back and forth from home to school — and also to protest the country’s dependence on oil.
“Whether we like it or not we’re going to dramatically have to change our lifestyle,” he said.
Harmon learned just how dependent he was on his car, saying he had to pass up opportunities to go out with friends to places not within walking distance. Nonetheless, he said the project can help save a lot of money and someone can always “stay home and read a book” instead. And of course there are environmental benefits as well.
“I have no plans of driving my car to the extent that I used to,” he said.
Senior Kennon Kuykendall also chose to give up his car for two weeks, riding his bike or taking public transportation instead.
“I thought it was pretty important for minimizing the effects of global warming,” he said. “The environment can’t take everyone in America having more than one car.”
However, Kuykendall said it is not always feasible to live without a car, especially in areas without access to good public transportation.
“It’s not really a matter of individual choice, there’s bigger structures,” he said.
York said he is always pleased when the project has long-term impacts on students’ personal lives. A former student whose project was to become vegan for the class called him after she finished school to say that she had actually become vegan, he said.
Harmon said the class as a whole has presented “staggering statistics” about human beings and their connection to the environment. America, for instance, consumes a large chunk of the world’s resources,
he said.
“For us to try to spread our way of living to the rest of the world just can’t work,” he said.
