Environmental Analysis / Fall 2018 / Portfolio
Environmental Analysis, or ENVS 220, is the methods course for the ENVS Program at Lewis & Clark College. The course holds both lectures and labs which include fieldwork, data analysis, and skill building in programs like GIS and Google Sheets. Additionally, students in ENVS 220 plan, develop and research their own concentration on a topic of interest.
This page links to all the work I have done in the course. Because I am in ENVS 220 this fall, this page is a work in progress that I will update over the course of the semester.
Classroom & Synthesis
The activities we do during class time are diverse, and sometimes it can be hard to find a common thread between them. In Diverse Analyses, I compared and contrasted two class activities—a brief exploration of UN Global Sustainability Goals and a panel discussion featuring local experts—and discussed how environmental analysis is the common thread that runs through them.
The first few weeks of the course contained conversations centered on the Anthropocene. As a way to reflect and continue my thinking about the fundamental theme from class, I paired my Sociology / Anthropology class, the Political Economy of Food, with what we’d learned in Environmental Analysis. In Food & the Anthropocene, I contemplated the Anthropocene from the specific angle of the industrial food system.
In the middle of the semester, we class turned our attention to the 21st annual Environmental Affairs Symposium. In preparation for Symposium, we read literature that focused on difference, polarity, and communication in our country. Following both Symposium and the November 2018 midterm elections, I wrote Communication Across Difference in an attempt to connect the dots between current events, what we’ve studied in class, and the power of communication showcased in Daryl Davis’ symposium keynote.
As an integral piece of the ENVS program, doing “Situated Research” is something that’s been emphasized in class lectures. Of course, situated research is not exclusive to ENVS, but exists in many disciplines. In my post, Situation Situation, I provide situated and broad examples of readings from ENVS 220 and other classes to explore what it means to do situated research and why it is worthwhile.
After reading Julie Guthman’s Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, I wrote a post that connects the book’s amazing content to the lab section of ENVS 220.
After completing the lab portion of the class and our arduous situated project, I felt it necessary to reflect on this big effort and to look forward to my semester abroad in India in the fall of 2019. I did so here.
Labs
With the Anthropocene in mind, our class wanted to investigate human influences on the planet. To do this we studied spatial and temporal changes in our area.
Our first lab began our investigation of land use and cover change on and around the Lewis & Clark College campus. We established a research site in Riverview Natural Area and collected microclimate data there.
We returned to our site in RVNA to complete our second land use and cover change lab. We studied our site’s composition in detail, measuring the tallest object in our site and taking extensive ground and canopy cover readings. Later, we classified our site with a MUC Land Cover Code.
In our third lab, we used Google Sheets to compile all data collected by the class into one spreadsheet. We used charts to compare our data to other sites and averaged data from different research locations. We found that visual representations help to highlight and expose trends in data that are hard to see in spreadsheets alone.
Our fourth lab took our visual representations of our data to another level. Using GIS mapping technology, we played with color and size to express microclimate relationships. We also compared imagery from the area from as far back as 1939 with the program’s current satellite map to understand the area’s history of land use and cover change.
In our final Anthropocene lab, we used Story Maps, an ArcGIS program, to create this interactive page. The story map utilizes text, maps, and other imagery to lead viewers through the story of our spatial and temporal studies.
In weeks 7 through 10 of Environmental Analysis, we shifted our focus from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene. Our first Capitalocene lab, although framed conceptually by literature about the Capitalocene, was largely quantitative. We studied income group and environmental performance data at the country-level and found that capital affects the environment.
Building on what we learned in the first lab, our second lab required us to return to the World Bank’s data repository to add a third indicator by which to measure the Capitalocene. Our third indicator was the percentage of countries’ populations living in slums. When we merged this indicator into our spreadsheet and mapped our data with ArcGIS we found that countries in lower income groups had a higher percentage of their populations living in slums and scored lower on environmental health and performance. Inversely, countries with higher incomes had lower percentages of their populations living in slums and higher environmental scores.
Diving deeper into our investigation of the Capitalocene in our third lab, we swapped out our slum data with country-level data from the World Survey that showed environmentally significant values and behaviors around the globe. We narrowed our focus to three countries that differ in average income: Peru, the United States, and Haiti. Unlike previous labs, where our data forced us to assume uniformity at the country level, the World Survey data allowed us to explore differences within countries. The distributions of responses we found did not align with what we’d concluded about capital (income group) and the environment in earlier labs.
With this conclusion in mind, we concluded our investigation of the Capitalocene with our final lab. Shedding the limitations of country-level data, we studied data from our very own Portland, Oregon to draw conclusions about air pollution and environmental justice. We used both Portland Air Toxics Solutions (PATS) data and American Community Survey (ACS) data to find trends and relationships between concentrations of diesel particulates and concentrations of white and nonwhite Portland residents. ACS data is collected at the city block level and is as detailed as possible while still protecting the anonymity of its participants. The maps we created with ArcGIS showed distinct concentrations of white and nonwhite residents and suggested that white and nonwhite residents of Portland Oregon experience unequal amounts of exposure to diesel particulates.
Our final set of labs had a focus of environmental research in situated contexts. My lab partner, Margot, and I situated these labs in India, where we will study abroad next fall. We were both excited to begin to orient ourselves in the country environmentally. These final labs guided us down the “hourglass” of situated research and came together to form a situated project proposal.
A comprehensive overview of our process as well as our final product can be found on my Situated Project Proposal Page.
In our first lab, we began research to find key framing and focus sources. Our framing literature was broad and unsituated and was largely about the relationship between social class and environment. Because our focus literature was situated in India, we searched for sources about class and environment there. By the end of the lab, we’d created an online Zotero library which helped us to access and organize the sources we collected. Later, Margot and I created a concept map (C-map) to help us visualize the relationships between class and environment in our situated context.
In our next lab, we thought out our project’s methodology. With many options methods available to us in interdisciplinary environmental analysis, we determined that the most effective method might be a set of surveys. We also thought about what our results might imply.
In our final lab, we had a major breakthrough. After revisiting our research, we realized that within the large frame of class and environment, we were most interested in what motivates environmental action. We reworked our framing and focus questions, methodology, and results accordingly.
Concentration
This semester I am taking a Sociology / Anthropology class called the Political Economy of Food. I have always been interested in food, and the class has given me an opportunity to study it systematically in an academic setting. Early in the semester, it became apparent to me that food is an environmental issue that affects everyone. 
When I read about the large level of control retailers hold over entire food systems, I was convinced that supermarkets are an environmental issue worth studying. The second draft of my concentration can be read here.
In the ENVS 220 Environmental Analysis methods course, I’ve become proficient in powerful analytical tools like Google Spreadsheets and ArcGIS, explored prominent theories and frameworks in environmental studies, and used them to do both empirical and conceptual environmental analysis. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the environmental studies major, its methods extend to the other disciplines I engage with and provide a common thread that connects fields that are otherwise disparate. I am excited to continue to apply what I’ve learned in ENVS 220 to the remainder of my studies at Lewis and Clark College.
Grace Anderson 