Overall, ENVR 430 is much more interesting than I expected, the structure of the course is reasonable and every part fits in the course so well to help me understand better, think logically and encourage me to give out opinions. Specifically, I think the pre-reading and the videos are quite crucial for me to learn about some environmental and ecological ideas and concepts, it contains lots of information that are highly related to the class contents, achieving the effect of pre-study and sharping my views and ideas. It makes me realize the importance of studying beforehand to achieve better learning outcomes, which I would probably continue to study other courses in the future.

I envision that the society could show more understanding on body donation in the future and encourage people to donate their bodies after they are dead. Current social norms don’t encourage people to donate their bodies as a sign of respect to the older, even this is against the older people’s will. It is true that a donation from a healthy body could help numbers of people and benefit the scientific research. Moreover, it could save energy and reduce pollution to some extent by reducing cremation. As a result, I hope that we could publish more on people donating bodies, treating the donation of bodies more like a modern virtue instead of a strong offense of tradition culture. People still have the right to decide what to do with their bodies, but the society could have more positive feedback on body donation.

My envision for the future is a world with “environment credit”, an approach with more specific criteria to evaluate the levels of environmental-friendly. Currently, we are being told what is environmental-friendly and what is not, however, we are not being told in detail about how much we could save by turning to a certain product or to what extent we need to do to achieve a better status of sustainability. For most of the time, it seems that the only thing we need to do for the environment is to pay more and there is no sufficient approach to determine on what level we are protecting the environment, so as the large corporations. Therefore, I hold the view that we could develop criteria called “environment credit” to help achieve the ultimate goal of sustainable development. Products are detailed with their environmental consumption for producing and individuals and corporations have a certain quota for consuming the environment annually. If the consumption goes beyond the quota, individuals and corporations would be fined for their externalities and reward those who manage to consume less than the given quota.

The Volkswagen scandal could be a powerful tool to destroy public trust to some extent, making people no longer believe in Volkswagen, which reminds me that the similar incident could also take place in other industries of pollution control and environmental protection. As a matter of fact, it is hard to gain profits or even get feedbacks in a short term from investing to the environment. Therefore, it would be hard to engage individuals to donate or invest their earnings in this field that cannot get the results in a rather short period, which might create a gap between the public and the practitioners. In my vision, we need to fill in this gap if we want to engage more people into the field of environmental protection and sustainable development. In other words, we need to create space for transparency, in technologies and the policies. Education and exhibition about the applied pollution control industries should be open to the public more often to let the public know what the practitioners have done. We could accept the unobvious feedback, but we have to make sure that people are working on the project and pursuing our sustainable future.

In the field of forest management, lots of research have been done to reduce the environmental damage and maximizing the ecological benefits of forest, in terms of sustainable management and forest harvesting. To be honest, there is basically no knowledge gap about replantation strategies, prescribed burning, harvesting and fire control and other forest operating processes. However, there are still lots of the problem leading to the ongoing issues about the forest management not caused by knowledge gap. There are also lots of wonderful policies that applied to the forest, such as applying quota for each timber company to restrict the trees they are allowed to harvest. However, the policies and the management approaches are not widespread due to other reasons, mainly known as economical reasons. Therefore, I think the biggest problem for forest management is not the unknown knowledge gap, it is because these good things are not applied across the world as a result of various reasons, which are the barriers of sustainable forest management. Helping all parts of the world dealing with the problems that restrict their sustainable management would be the main concern in the future.

Agriculture is one of the keystones for human societies and it could contribute to the climate crisis to some extent when it comes to livestocks. It seems to be unfair to force a large group of people changing their life style as a result of climate change, there must be other approaches for us to deal with the uprising issue. Thus, we are expected to find out better methods to fit our agricultural processes into our current planet. By combining the our goals for agriculture and the attributes of the CAS, we could realize that lots of processes could happen between the input and output of the agriculture and there are bunch of ways to apply the CAS concept. As we don‘t necessarily know the exact process in a CAS, we could simply copy those systems proved to be workable and able to meet the needs of agriculture. As a result, rewilding in agriculture might be a possible method as it stimulates the ecosystem. However, it is not a once-for-all job for us. Keep monitoring the artificial ”rewilding agriculture” is crucial as we cannot tell what we might miss while trying to copy the whole CAS. In all, I think it is possible to apply CAS into agriculture, but there is still a long way to go to make sure it is fully functional.

Fresh water is crucial for basically all of the creatures, so as human beings. However, as it is such a fundamental component to our society, we are charging too little on water and this vulnerable resource is wasted in some parts of the world while we are suffering from fresh water shortage. To make people realize the urgency of water shortage and persuade people to save water. A reform in water pricing system might be applied. It doesn’t mean that our water price would sky-rocket, it only means while we guarantee the basic needs of water for ordinary people, we charge more one the luxury uses of water. Here are some addition things to consider while making the policy: the total assets of the family (could base on community housing price, annual income, tax paying situations) the number of people living in the family Contributions to the society (the ratio and amount of tax payed by family members, their job attributes:e.g. social service jobs) Based on the living conditions of the person and the family, variable of water price could be applied to the entire society to make sure everyone is guaranteed to use enough water while not wasting.

I would like to focus more on the distributional injustice side mentioned in this course as I think the injustice of the environment is mainly caused by the injustice of social economic and power distribution. In terms of uneven distribution of power and economics, it would lead to the incidents such as the sea otter case, the fisheries case and the water pollution case as a result of some of the most relevant stakeholders don’t have the power and social status to get enough public attention and fight for their own rights. It is more like a systematic problem rather than only defining it as discrimination. Taking the water pollution video as an example, what if the black communities and the indigenous communities become richer and have more social power? Will the same tragedy happen? How could make these communities become more powerful socially? Consequently, I believe that on one hand, a new distribution pattern is required in the society to consider more about the stakeholders and the communities that have not much social power. On the other hand, reform in education, in government officer selection might also need to be carried out to make the less-development regions become richer and have louder voice for themselves, economically and politically. Therefore, their perspectives could be heard and considered to improve social justice.

Visions: A better future with not too many useless productions Values: Fast fashions are not something we need, so we need to control the production of them. Plans for change: More censorship on advertisements could be applied to limit the publication of fast fashions and not let citizens believe in fast fashions too much. More publications and supports (economically) on long-lasting products on the national or global wide. Strict laws for limiting the fast fashion companies to produce or even banning the amount for production could be carried on.

The reflection to the Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability paper This paper mainly talks about the potential leverage points and leverages for human beings to get involved into the environmental degradation processes. Under the cooperative work from the scientists, the article managed to determine 8 leverage points globally that have impacts on environment as well as 5 leverages that might be able to alternate the environmental conditions. Though we cannot tell the exact impacts of human behaviors having on the environment from region to region, it is still clear that what we are doing to the environment right now are harmful to the sustainable development for human society and we are giving up the benefits of our future generations for our own good. Therefore, urgent movements to change the current status is highly required due to the exposing population and rising consumption levels. Social inequity also plays a crucial part in the unsustainable development of the natural resources, also leading to environmental degradation.

Hi, I'm Zhaochen Qin, a 4th year forest science student. I take the ENVR 430 course because I feel like discussing the sustainable development on a broader scale rather than sticking to the forest environment. I hope to engage more with broader environmental topics and contribute more to a better future for the Earth and human beings. Besides, I would like to know more about the forest from different scopes, hoping to get the views from the environmentalists and social workers. Nice to meet you all and hope we could work together for a better future! #UnleashValues