Beaten Greenless

One of my closest friends was required to take an environmental studies class and constantly complained about how little of a shit she gave about the material, about the hippies and the armagedon worst-case-scenario arguments. I told her that she was a bad person way deep down inside, and that the environment is very important and she should learn to give a rat's ass and be concerned. She should study the issues and develop sympathetic, informed, smarty-pants opinions about them.

For this I apologize.

(enter: stage left) Environmental Studies 360: Extinction of Species.

OR, as I like to call it:

EVERYTHING'S DYING AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT.

OR, as I also like to call it:

WORST CLASS EVER.

I'm not sure exactly which class she took, but I know it wasn't the same one that I'm in. Regardless, I'm sure I now share the same sentiment that she did. This class is a load of bullshit. Every minute I spend on it, in class or out, is time that I feel would have been better spent with someone I love. Hell, I'd rather spend time with someone I dislike than think any more about the struggle of the Costa Rican pineapple farmer (the up-and-coming equivalent of fair trade coffee...watch for it), or melting ice caps carrying throngs of chubby round-eyed seal pups, or listen to my professor gloat about how he and his family lived in a hut he built for 20 years in the Costa Rican jungle without electricity (after fleeing the US to avoid being drafted to Vietnam). "It CAN be done," he says. Yes, thank you, I know it can. Congratulations, you did it. But if you really want me to stop using electricity, stop posting lecture readings online. Also, pay for me to move to a warmer climate with more daylight.

Discussion section is worse. We're constantly "role playing" about issues that are hot today. I entertained myself with the sexual connotations of "role playing" for as long as I could to make the class more tolerable ("Hey, baby, I'm gonna drill you till your habitat is tooootally fragmented." "Oooo! Yeah! Destroy my resources!" etc etc). But even that couldn't mask the irritating nature of the exercises. More often than not, we're assigned one of several positions on a topic. I would much prefer to climb up on a soap box with an opinion I actually arrived at myself, and give mock dirty looks to the guy on the opposing soap box who is just as convinced that he's 100% right as I am. It makes for better dialouge. But no. We're given one of as many as eight opinions and forced to defend it, no matter how little sense it makes.

That's not independent thinking. I understand the purpose of presenting all arguments, whether they exist in the minds present in that particular classroom or not, but do we really have to fake our opinions? WHERE'S THE PASSION?!

Another thing that bothers me is the final project for this class. It's not to write about an extinct species and what went wrong (Dodos: The Ecological! True Hollywood Story), it's to make our lives greener. And we also have to give a pre-made (surprise!) presentation to a group of 20 poor souls about how they're killing everything on a global scale (YES, YOU!). Me, I'm going to bake some cookies and give one out to each of my friends who'll write a review of my nonexistent presentation.

Look, global warming is all over the news. We've all heard about it. We all know there are things we can do to help out. But this class presents zero new material in a way that is uninteresting and not at all thought provoking. There are times when I think to myself that I should do everything I can to increase my ecological footprint, just to spite the class. But then I realise that doing so would be equivalent to pissing my pants when wearing a dark suit. Sure, it'd give me that warm tingly feeling, but no one would notice but me.