Another Lesson from Environmental Revolution Class: What Kind of Environmentalist Are You?

Oke, mungkin memang ada (terlalu) banyak reading material setiap minggunya. Maybe making a 5-sentence commentary for all of those reading every week is quite demanding *apalagi kalo minimal ada 6 reading material, and the shortest one is 14 pages*. Maybe, Priya can be quite intimidating when she asks your opinion and reflections about the readings in the class. Tapi, entah kenapa, saya selalu excited dengan mata kuliah Environmental Revolution. Because I learn TONS of new interesting things every week. Not just from the readings, but also from the discussion that we have in the class. Sebelumnya saya tidak pernah tahu bahwa Darwin was such a Malthusian person, atau bahwa Mephisto can be a symbol of capitalism, or that Wallace once had this MAD idea about environmental determinism *selama ini yang saya tahu dari Wallace adalah dia orang yang bikin garis-garis flora-fauna di Sulawesi itu kan?*.

The structure of the class is also quite different. Sebenernya sih mata kuliah ini cuma 6 SKS gitu, tapi sekali kuliah 3 jam euy. Dan selama kuliah, bentuknya bukan seminar. Dosennya, Priya, tidak akan berdiri di depan kelas dan menjelaskan materi hari itu. Nope. Dia Cuma duduk di sudut kelas. Dan kami berdiskusi. Tiap minggu, secara bergiliran, satu kelompok siswa akan memfasilitasi kuliah hari itu. Biasanya sih we spend first half of the class discussing about the ideas in the readings. The second half, baru ada kegiatan tertentu, diatur oleh kelompok yang hari itu giliran memfasilitasi diskusi kelas. We had some interesting activities. We created stories, we had debates, we developed scenarios…
Kebetulan untuk minggu kesembilan, Priya sendiri yang memfasilitasi kuliah di hari itu. Topik minggu itu adalah Nature and Critical Social Theory. Jadi ingat waktu kuliah semester pertama dulu, waktu kita belajar bahwa environmentalism come in a spectrum. Ada yang deep-green environmentalism yang radikal at one point of the spectrum, and at the other end of the spectrum is shallow-green environmentalism. Dalam kuliah minggu ini, we expand the categories.

A little reflection, apa sih yang muncul di benak kita kalau mendengar kata environmentalist? Pecinta alam? Frankly speaking, saya dulu akan mengasosiasikan pecinta alam dengan sekelompok mahasiswa yang hobi kemping dan mendaki gunung, para pendemo yang suka berteriak “Selamatkan lingkungan kita!”, you know ..those kind of people. Then, I learned that almost all people are actually environmentalists, in one way or another. In that “green” spectrum of environmentalist, maybe I would put my self somewhere in between. But then, there are some other categories of environmentalist. Jadi Priya meminta kami untuk “menciptakan” label yang kami nilai paling cocok untuk menggambarkan karakter environmentalism kami secara pribadi. And people came up with interesting ideas and labels. We had humanistic environmentalist, spiritualistic environmentalist, neon-green environmentalist, economic-realistic environmentalist (I kinda like this one, actually J). Me? Saya dan satu orang teman lain, Donna, we put ourselves as “occasional environmentalist”. Because, honestly, not all environmental issues are THAT interesting to me. I mean, seriously, di saat Indonesia masih menghadapi bencana alam semacam banjir dan longsor yang menelan banyak korban, do you still want me to REALLY care about the issue of whaling somewhere in Norway? Dan I have an impression, that actually, this is a more realistic one. People tend to care only on the issue that directly influences them. Including environmental issues. Take Singapore for example. Saya yakin Singapur mah bodo amat sama kondisi hutan kita, pas kebakaran hutan tahun 99 dulu waktu asapnya nyampe ke mereka, baru mereka mulai ribut… See?
Anyway, it’s another interesting lesson that I got from this class. That people can be environmentalist as they want it to be. It's not as hard as it seems. Ga perlu pake acara kemping segala, atau jadi anggota Greenpeace, or hug the trees. Just take a look around us, and try to realize how close we are with the nature. Open your mind, that we are not apart form the nature, indeed, we are actually a part of nature.

Can you feel it? Are you an environmentalist? What kind of environmentalist are you?

picture come from this site