32 research outputs found
Climate Change and Student Behavior: Recommendations for the University of Richmond
Get PDFWe, the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Class of 2008, choose to recognize climate change as an imminent threat. After rigorous examination of the scientific, social, and political aspects of climate change, we initially wanted to help construct the carbon emissions inventory required in the PCC. However, citing their ability to build the inventory through existing University institutions, our administration steered us towards the Scope 3 emissions inventory, a component which focuses on student behavior. While we found Scope 3 too limiting, we decided our goal as a class was to impact student climate change awareness on campus. Therefore, we separated into three “working groups” and developed three distinct projects to meet our goal: 1) develop a database of projects and initiatives other universities have implemented to address climate change; 2) execute a comprehensive survey of the student body’s understanding of global climate change and energy consumption patterns and; 3) present the University of Richmond with options and recommendations for addressing climate change on campus.
Our goal is to inspire individual responses to climate change. Raising awareness does not indicate everyone will or should agree with our beliefs and convictions, but it will enable individuals to come to their own conclusions. We wholeheartedly believe climate change is an issue we cannot disregard and we stand by the belief that the risk of doing nothing is the biggest danger of them all.
Paper prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar
Faculty Advisor: Dr. David Salisbur
Multispecies Livelihoods: A Posthumanist Approach to Wildlife Ecotourism That Promotes Animal Ethics
Get PDFResearch on animal ethics in tourism has gained traction but posthumanist approaches to wildlife (eco)tourism remain sparse. There has never been a more urgent need to redress this paucity in theory and practice. More than 60% of the world’s wildlife has died-off in the last 50 years, 100 million-plus nonhuman animals are used for entertainment in wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs), more than one billion “wildlife” live in captivity, and some scholars argue that earth has entered its sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene. This paper presents a posthumanist multispecies livelihoods framework (MLF) based on an applied ethnographic study of 47 wildlife ecotourism (WE) operators and wildlife researchers in protected area WTAs across four countries. Like any framework, it is a snapshot of the authors’ thinking at a particular time and must be improved upon. The MLF does not purport to solve the negative treatment of nonhumans that can occur in tourism settings, but rather responds to calls in the tourism literature to acknowledge our effects on other species and advocates for equitable human-nonhuman livelihoods. This paper argues that we have a moral responsibility to nonhumans and the environment, and the authors hope to generate reflexive discourse concerning the role tourism can play in redressing the ecological crisis and improving the treatment of individual nonhumans to foster wildlife-human coexistence
