Climate Change

The presentation on climate change was very well done. The contrast with the video at the end was a brilliant idea to highlight both sides of the controversy. As environmental sociology students we are so much more willing to believe in these issues and to be willing to enact real change against them. The Al Gore video was interesting because it took such huge issues and broke them down to make them understandable to ordinary people. He focused on visually showing the changes associated with the extra emissions of CO2 which is great for understanding. He also gave simple solutions that we could each choose to follow and inspired hope that this is a problem that can be fixed. Of course for all of its very good points there are many points that it glosses over, but overall I thought the film was a great choice and really got to the issue that the text was presenting. As much as the text focused more on social justice issues and our moral responsibility to fix this I believe that Al Gores more personalized approach of speaking about specific issues is more effective. As much as we want to be ‘good people’ who are concerned for the well being of others, it is much easier to mobilize people on an issue that they believe directly effects themselves.