Reflection Paper
According to John Barry, environmental citizenship involves the integrating of individual’s activities into internal environmental systems and keeping up with the ISO standards to maintain the environment. Sustainable environment is an advancement of environmental citizenship, which involves the incorporation of environmental laws to a “greener” citizenship.
Resistance simply means criticism of the existing state laws and policies for the transformation of state structure and policies for the sake of encouraging a “greener” economy of a nation.
Liberty theory advocates for “civic republican” form of citizenship, since it will call for change that is required towards the specified, greener economic goal.
Civic republican advocates for duty, since it calls for people to perform what is right and get off from their comfort zone to find out what is right and ought to be done.
Scranton’s “theory of the good” implies that for any successful environment conservation, there must be a measure to it which advocates conservativeness. This theory advocates practices that uphold the proper use of the environment; proper utilization incorporated with good ethics, human value and design. These aspects will always lead to “good” use of the environment as well as its conservation.
According to Scranton, the only way to uphold environmental policies for the purpose of its success is by upholding “conservativeness” nature. It implies the proper use of environmental resources using policies that will always have a positive influence on the environment. Conservativeness advocates “preservation” of what already existed, making good use of it at the same time using it reasonably. Sharing of responsibilities is a key component as well.
Agrawal’s idea of ecological knowledge criticizes the “modernized” form of indigenous knowledge. He claims this form of knowledge to be westernized and claims to lack integration in terms of maintaining “indigenous environment”. He agrees to the fact that knowledge is a changing process affected by many exogenous factors; however, this form of knowledge has its impacts on social set ups too. Comparing it to the idea of environmental conservatism by Scranton, both parties focus on using what was initially there, and if need be, improvement can be done with no influence from the outside world. For example, the idea of Scranton maintaining environment through conservation can be said to be more “indigenous” as compared to what Barry advocates. Thus, it is in line with Agrawal’s thinking. However, Agrawal accepts the fact that knowledge obtained could change in due time, something that Scranton fails to mention and uphold.
