This bibliography critically examines the failures of environmentalism and unabated deforestation, and it highlights the inadequacy of our efforts. As I have journeyed through the ISS program, I went looking for hope and saw glimmers of hope early on, as I dug into my first keyword, environmentalism. Unfortunately, my learning plan extinguished my hope and exploring my keyword, deforestation, extinguished any sense of hope I had for our wonderful maritime evergreen forests here in the Pacific Northwest. I learned the levels in which deforestation continues, how we are burning more fossil fuels than ever, and how climate change models continue to spell doom for our species. While I began this journey with a hope to explore innovations toward mitigating climate change and minimizing environmental impact, I learned I am now too cynical to continue the search for hope.
We have numerous problems we are facing as a species, and these citations represent the sobering reality we are not doing enough to mitigate them. From looking at how ICT’s are spreading throughout the developing world, and how it just means more mining, more burning of fossil fuels and more climate change, to how deforestation continues in places like the Amazon rainforest and the Canadian boreal forest, and how all this negatively affects other ecosystems in the world, like the Pacific Northwest. It is all rather overwhelming at times and when I look at one thing we are improving, I find ten other things where humans are atrocious. I look at all these problems and find myself repeating over and over – we did it to ourselves, we are all guilty, and whatever suffering befalls us, is deserved. By confronting this harsh reality, I am working to understand the systemic failures preventing meaningful problem solving – failures that continue to hinder efforts to mitigate climate change and environmental destruction.
Alier, Joan Martínez. "The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation." 2002.
Martinez-Alier goes into detail on how competition for resources, how conservation and ecological economics play out for different social groups. Where economic growth oftentimes translates into environmental degradation, impacting populations disproportionately. They emphasize how the poor need nature, and how nature is not a luxury for the rich. How the environmental justice movement implies some kind of environmental benefit for one demographic, or some first world nation, but it’s at the expense of the poor in some other locale. Martinez-Alier promotes sustainability and advocating for environmental justice in Latin America and Asia, through organized labor and popular environmentalism.
This citation tied perfectly into my cynicism toward humanity and environmentalism. Yes, it is a cautionary tale, with some aspects of hope for positive change, but it demonstrates perfectly the realities of deploying carbon-cutting technologies across the globe and how the poorest and most vulnerable communities risk paying the highest cost. It states that not only have the poor bore the brunt of the imperialistic policies which contributed to the climate crisis to begin with, but they will continue to suffer as we employ solutions to the climate crisis, unless we balance the needs of everyone along the way. It’s ideological in nature because it makes assumptions that poor people, when they acquire more power and more time, will somehow not negatively affect the environment. It is this notion I disagree with from the reading, but it is worth mentioning because it illustrates how complicated humanity’s circumstances are in regard to its relationship with nature.
J. Lowitzsch, C.E. Hoicka, F.J. van Tulder, "Renewable energy communities under the 2019 European Clean Energy Package –
Governance model for the energy clusters of the future?", Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews,
Volume 122, 2020, 109489, ISSN 1364-0321, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.109489.
This journal article describes the 2019 European Clean Energy Package, and case studies on how energy clusters were deployed to provide renewable energy to local communities, with communal benefits, and how the clusters were operated without profit aims. It describes how these concepts, policies and technologies are essential to our transition to renewable energy, for they use less resources, less infrastructure and provide greater benefits.
As I was mapping out my keyword, these concepts around “energy clusters” and “energy governance” kept popping up. This study fits nicely into the “redefinition of environmentalism”. Regardless of humanity’s fate and the immeasurable suffering I see in our future, energy clusters and how they’re used can provide significant communal benefits, while consuming less resources to facilitate their construction. Basically, you’re not building some enormous wind farm in one geographical location, and running hundreds of thousands of tons of copper and aluminum wiring to provide electricity to multiple other geographical locations. You’re building at a much smaller scale, to serve a specific community. This distributed model uses much less resources overall, than giant solutions.
Medvigy, David, et al. “Simulated Changes in Northwest U.S. Climate in Response to Amazon Deforestation.”
Journal of Climate, vol. 26, no. 22, July 2013, pp. 9115–36. https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-12-00775.1.
Medvigy studies how the Amazon deforestation is not only affecting the indigenous peoples reliant on the rainforest in South America, but how it impacts the climate in the Northwestern United States. From California to Washington state, researchers determined when large-scale deforestation occurs in the Amazon, it triggers atmospheric disturbances which can propagate into North America. These disturbances have the chilling effect of altering the precipitation patterns here in the Pacific Northwest, causing reduced precipitation, which results in drier and hotter seasons, more forest fires and longer droughts.
The studies conducted here are the most illuminating in how all these rich ecosystems around the world are inextricably linked. While the actions of Brazilian ranchers and loggers seem like a million miles away because they’re located on the other side of the world, their affects are being felt here in the Pacific Northwest, from droughts in California, to forest fires all up and down the west coast, to disturbingly warm winters here in Washington, all of these trends are disturbing and feed into this deep rooted sadness I feel when I see these forests dwindling away.
Montgomery, Ellen, and Sammy Herdman. “Threatened by Logging, the Boreal Forest Needs Our Help.”
Environment America, 27 Sept. 2022, environmentamerica.org/articles/threatened-by-logging-the-boreal-forest-needs-our-help.
Montgomery and Herdman discuss the threats facing the Canadian boreal forest due to unsustainable deforestation. The article not only describes the diverse species of trees, but the diverse species of animals, and how all are threatened because the Canadian logging industry supplies lumber to Home Depot.
This article outlines another disturbing trend of massive deforestation and ties to my greater narrative that all these forests around the world are home to diverse species, these forests absorb billions of tons of CO2 and their preservation is tied to the preservation of humanity.
Mote, Philip. “Projecting Future Climate, Vegetation, and Hydrology in the Pacific Northwest.”
Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, 2012,
nwcasc.uw.edu/science/project/projecting-future-climate-vegetation-and-hydrology-in-the-pacific-northwest. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Mote and other researchers make a multitude of projections for environmental changes in the Pacific Northwest. Mainly due to climate change, they model a future with hotter seasons, drier summers, wetter winters, snowpack decline and increases in wildfires. All these factors see many of the forests in the Pacific Northwest experiencing regime change, shifting from maritime evergreens, to subtropical mixed-woodlands. The impacts call for adaptation strategies for farmers, foresters, wildlife managers and urban planners to prepare for significant changes in the environment.
The study and projections in this article are the most depressing for me. As I was exploring deforestation and learning about regime change, the other elements of climate change come together here and highlight how my wonderful maritime evergreen forests have an uncertain future. This uncertainty is becoming more and more evident, year after year. I go hiking, and I can see changes in the forests highlighted here. I hike through areas from recent forest fires, and evergreen trees are not recovering. It is a depressing testament to how our species is wrecking our planet, and the effects are almost literally, in my back yard.
Sestino, Andrea, et al. “Consumers’ Innovativeness and Conspicuous Consumption Orientation as Predictors of Environmentalism:
An Investigation in the Context of Smart Mobility.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, vol. 36, no. 1, 2024, pp. 59–72,
https://doi.org/10.1080/09537325.2021.2020752.
What I was able to read from this excerpt, it described a study into smart mobility, specifically electric scooters, and found the relationship between consumers' attitudes toward green products would enhance environmentalism. Particularly, when combined with consumer innovativeness and a tendency for conspicuous consumption. The experiment was conducted among 403 participants from America, Asia and Europe to assess these effects. The study was used to provide insights for marketers and policy makers on promoting sustainable transportation options like electric scooters.
What I love about this study was that it referenced encouraging trends - consumers responding positively to environmental choices when marketers and policy makers promote sustainable transportation options and increasing numbers of consumers preferring smart mobility over conventional transportation. As I am redefining environmentalism, smart mobility is a key concept, as it combines with green urban development and illustrates less overall resource consumption, and less overall environmental impact than traditional transportation choices.
Shellenberger, Michal, and Norhaus, Ted. “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.”
Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, pp. 121–63. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26804018.
Accessed 24 May 2024.
Shellenberger and Norhaus delve into the concept that environmentalism, as a modern social movement, is a failure. They cite the lack of any meaningful environmental policy over the last 30 years as evidence of this failure. They also go into detail describing how environmentalism fails because it doesn’t prescribe to the reality it needs to coexist with economic, social and cultural prosperity. They also lay the foundation for a new definition of environmentalism to include these concepts, and do so by leveraging technologies to work in tandem with the environment.
It was this reading that truly brought everything together for me. Meaning, my cynicism around humanity’s trajectory due to climate change comes from environmentalists' narrow ideological focus, and ultimate failure. This includes myself! While it doesn’t allow me to accept our fate any easier, it does allow me to be pragmatic in how I try to enact positive change while we fail. It means I still think we’ll fail, but I have better tools at my disposal to describe our best path forward, where I include these tools in my ISS portfolio with my redefinition of environmentalism. It also allows me to include another notion, outlined by Wapner, which involves redefining our relationship with nature.
Silva, Celso H. L., Junior, et al. “The Brazilian Amazon Deforestation Rate in 2020 Is the Greatest of the Decade.”
Nature Ecology & Evolution, vol. 5, no. 2, Dec. 2020, pp. 144–45. https://do4i.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01368-x.
Silva describes the rise in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, after Brazil was implementing strict guidelines to curb deforestation with the “Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation” (PPCDAm) between 2004 and 2012, and then we see deforestation peaking again in 2020. It’s a disturbing increase, with significant consequences, not only for indigenous Brazilians, but for the rest of the world.
I included this article as it ties to another article which discusses the effects the deforestation in the Amazon is having on the Pacific Northwest of North America. With my deforestation keyword, along with my focus on the Pacific Northwest, this article is key to highlighting how the fate of precious forests all over the world are inextricably linked with each other.
Stanke, Hunter, et al. “Over Half of Western United States’ Most Abundant Tree Species in Decline.”
Nature Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20678-z.
Stanke studies tree populations in the western United States, and through what researchers dub the “forest demographic index”, researchers are able to analyze trends over the past 20 years. With ongoing environmental pressures, western forests are experiencing a negative “forest stability index” (FSI), which calculates tree growth rate as less than tree mortality rate. These stressors are already leading to widespread forest transformation, with significant negative impacts on biodiversity and ecological stability.
This article highlights for me the unfortunate trajectory of our native tree populations in the Pacific Northwest, and how regime change for temperate forests is a very likely future. Without sufficient forest management strategies and failing conservation efforts, combined with the other factors I’ve highlighted from other articles, we’re already seeing massive amounts of tree species dying off at an alarming rate.
Unwin, T. “ICT4D: Information and Communication Technology for Development.”
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 7-69.
Unwin outlines all the positive aspects of delivering ICT’s to the developing world, how to overcome the challenges in delivering ICT’s, the importance of effective communication practices leveraging ICT’s, and the frameworks required to ensure the reliability and scalability of ICT’s. These all paint a picture of how to leverage technology to improve the social and economic trajectories of developing countries.
While Unwin lays out the benefits for delivering ICT’s, this all implies significantly more global warming and negative environmental impacts to other struggling communities. With the developing countries realizing the benefits of access to information and, subsequently, other markets previously inaccessible, it also means greater mass consumption, which also translates into even more climate damage. This all ties into concepts I intend to explore, which further reinforce this notion I have toward human demographics, where when you give any single human demographic more power and more time, they will reliably demonstrate significantly more negative environmental impact.
Wapner, Paul. “Living through the end of nature: the future of American environmentalism.”
MIT press, 2013.
Wapner describes politics and power, how this ultimately determines who gets what, when and how, and how humans need to seek other guiding principles outside of politics for human conduct. Wapner argues nature is a source of value, and no longer a realm seen as separate from humanity. Nature is seen as a canvas for us to project our needs when we blend the realms of nature and humanity together. Through understanding the social influences on our perceptions of nature and humanity, we can redefine universal human nature to include our sociohistorical and cultural narratives.
When I stumbled upon Wapner’s work, I found it complemented the notions discussed in Schellenberger and Norhaus’s work. Where redefining our relationship with nature, that it’s no longer a separate realm, but had to include human necessities. This, paralleled with the reasons why environmentalism, as a social movement, failed because it failed to accommodate social, economic and cultural prosperity as part of the reality of humanity and nature existing together. Both citings do away with the notion nature is this pristine construct and our relationship with it is based on it being separate and us conserving it. If you just look outside you see nature and humanity together as one, and when you redefine environmentalism to include this notion, there's a much greater chance for positive outcomes in politics, policy and social acceptance.
Zipperer, Wayne C., et al. “Urban Development and Environmental Degradation.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science,
Aug. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.97.
Zipperer highlights the consequences of urban development on the environment, with significant impacts on hydrology, climate and biodiversity. Rapid urban development leads to deforestation, with over 13 million hectares removed annually in areas around the world. With all of this urbanization, we see increases in storm runoff from more impervious surfaces, which result in flooding, water contamination, ecosystem disruption and habitat fragmentation. Other side effects include the urban heat island effect, which sees rising temperatures, affecting air quality and even precipitation patterns.
This article is included because it not only outlines the costs of rapid urbanization, but also offers solutions such as green infrastructure, strategic urban planning initiatives and how urban centers can balance growth with conservation.
Maryland Center for History and Culture. “Climate Anxiety and Eco-grief: A Psychological Response.”
YouTube, 27 Feb. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI6JZGok7Yk.
This YouTube video, produced by the Maryland Center for History and Culture, digs into the emotional, psychological and communal challenges posed by climate change. It includes experts from the MCHC and the Visual Hands Collaborative and describes how individuals are affected by ecological loss, how these emotional responses are natural, and strategies for shaping our grief and anxiety into meaningful engagement. Presented as a virtual discussion, the video features mental health and environmental experts who reflect on the psychological effects of environmental disruption. It is supported by photographs, slides and maps, thus making their personal narratives more tangible and emotionally resonant. The format invites authentic dialogue and enables the audience to witness the panelist’s lived experience and vulnerabilities. With the use of audio and video, these experts are willing to lay bare their own challenges, thus bringing a level of authenticity to the audience. Unlike text-based formats, which may feel clinical or detached, this modality validates the viewer’s emotional struggles and reduces stigmas around climate grief and mental health. It also reaches a broader audience, including non-academics who may be apprehensive to process or express these emotions.
The YouTube video example shows how even mental health and environmental experts are also expressing grief in relation to the climate. When a panelist is describing the concept of “losing winter”, and it is paired with an image of a child in winter, it deepens the emotional engagement. This approach informs my own work in the ISS in the World Project, where I seek to evoke visceral awareness of environmental loss through imagery and narrative.
Jennifer W. Atkinson, Ph.D., “Facing It: Facing Down Climate Grief.” Podcast, Episode 1.
SoundCloud, 2020, soundcloud.com/jenniferwren/episode-1-facing-down-climate. Accessed 19 July 2025.
Facing It is a podcast hosted and narrated by Dr. Jennifer Atkinson, and it explores the emotional and psychological toll of climate change. The series gives credence to emotional responses to ecological loss as not only being valid, but as necessary to instigate change. Through research and personal reflection, the podcast provides frameworks to transform grief into meaningful activism. The podcast, being strictly audio, is narrated by Dr. Atkinson, and it also includes musical scoring. Each episode functions as a thematic essay, which includes scholarly research, quotations from famous authors such as Thoreau, Leopold, Carson and Rumi, and environmental commentary. The lack of visuals encourages the audience to listen introspectively. This audio-only format also creates an intimate framework, which is well suited to exploring the bevy of emotional themes. The approach gives the listener permission to sit with discomfort and transforms ecological grief from a private burden into a shared human experience. In contrast to written formats, which might feel analytical or emotionally detached, the podcast serves as a guide, with Dr. Atkinson’s voice taking the listener through difficult emotional topics with knowledge, experience and empathy.
For my ISS in the World Project, this podcast serves as an example of how emotional honesty and scholarly insight can transform into accessible environmental and emotional storytelling. The narrative concept can emphasize vulnerability and validate grief as a response to ecological disruption. It parallels my interest in conveying loss through imagery and text, showing how intellectual depth and emotions can coexist, thus resonating with my audience of late-career individuals.