Valuing Value Changes

Throughout my blog post I have tried to demonstrate that habit formation is a powerful way to change one’s life.  I want readers to understand that habits can transform one’s life in many ways.  But ultimately, I want to demonstrate that our individual behaviors and societal traditions are relative and can be manipulated.  This course further demonstrated to me the abundant ways in which our society’s institutions are not always designed or implemented based on practicality or even morality.  Tsing explains that hunting and gathering was a more practical and efficient method of acquiring food-yet humans became cereal farmers.  Our decision to produce cereals is contingent on something other than pragmatism.  Tsing argues that the transformation to domestication and agriculture derives from the rise of The State.  The acquisition of State territories was often acquired through force and sometimes through mutually beneficial relationships between populations and The State.  State control and regulation allowed for many of our social, economic, cultural and political institutions to take shape.  These institutions offer two things that society values: familiarity and authority.  Familiarity breeds affinity, not just among people, but among people for their institutions.  I am sure many readers doubt the degree to which society values authority.  Yet, major offenses are committed by entities of authority and very little commotion is made of resulting afflictions.  The State is a system of authority and so are financial institutions like Wall Street or political institutions like the International Monetary Fund.  Society favors institutions of order and control because life is unpredictable.  Yet, these institutions betray the public through crises like the American mortgage/banking crisis or the crippling loan repayment agreements across the developing world.  These offenses persist, yet society’s response continues to demonstrate our affection for our broken and failing institutions.

This course has discussed our most fundamental global crisis: The Anthropocene.  The human race has continued to fail our environment largely due to something Martinez-Alier explained as the “incommensurability of values.”  It’s taken a semester for me to understand the true crisis of the Anthropocene.  Despite my discussions about habit formation and individual transformation in pursuit of individual and collective change.  I have come to realize that what we value matters more to environmental change than anything else.  Nadar explains that what fellow scientists valued in green technology dictated what green technology was considered useful.  Martinez-Alier explained that commercial gold miners valued gold more than indigenous persons’ right to water, food and shelter and environmental destruction in Peru.  Throughout my blog posts I was convinced that that our society’s traditions, customs and cultural values are so influential that they undeniably influence who we are as individuals.  I assumed that if we could expand our individualistic thinking by habitually trying to do things like recycle or engage in a collective activities that we could change ourselves and ultimately change society.  I wanted to demonstrate that if our individual behavior is changeable that our value systems are also malleable.  Likewise, what our society values, inside and outside our institutions can be reassessed.  If we can change our individual habits, we should be able to change our institutions.  But we have to value changing our values.

I appreciated this course more than most of the courses I have taken at KSU.  Environmental issues are important to me so I am fairly knowledgeable about many of the issues we discussed in class such as climate change, biodiversity extinction, and deforestation and so on.  Our discussions about the Anthropos in relation to the environment was new territory for me.  Understanding what it means to be human in relation to our environment is a new kind of philosophy for me.  Understanding our presumptions of what is ‘nature’ or what is ‘the environment’ demonstrates how influential our value systems can be.  I was also unaware of the serious extent to which humans have fundamentally changed the earth’s geological processes.

My journey throughout my blog posts has brought me back full circle to where I started-individual choices matter.  But they matter in a much different way than I assumed.  The best choice we can make as individuals within the Anthropocene is to choose to engage in collective thinking and to be open to new value systems.  Throughout this course, I have come to understand that there are very few environmental issues that don’t require radical reorganization of our economic, social, political and cultural institutions.  I focused on recycling because it is an individual choice that many people don’t pursue largely because we make up excuses for ourselves.  Throughout my blog posts I have experienced wayfaring.  I started this blog believing that our society’s obsession with individualism was so influential it disheartened attention to collective systems.  I continue to believe that our fixation for individualism is supported by our institutions and our value systems.  I have noticed that many great environmental pioneers were individuals who garnered support.  John Muir or Mary Pipher’s work in Nebraska is a great example.  Pipher’s organization started with her passion and her pursuit of action generated support.  We live within our current value system, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only value system.  Through my blog, I hope I demonstrated that we can change a wide spectrum of our personal habits-including our individualistic mania.  We must choose to rethink our obsession with individualism and we must choose to be open to a new value system.   Make a habit of making choices that assist the collective.  Make a habit of embracing the philosophy of wayfaring.  Habitually, reimagining our value system is the best choice we can make for the Anthropocene.