Blog Post #6

            I decided to be a part of the Social Ecology GTP group because I thought the short description that David gave in class sounded really interesting.  I don't know much about the subject, so I didn’t really have a lot of background information about before I completed the readings on Blackboard.  The GTP readings for Social Ecology, however, are very informative and give a nice overview of the subject. 

Bookchin’s “What is Social Ecology” provides a great introduction into the subject, however the reading is pretty lengthy and is a little dense at some points.  I do really like his challenge of Darwinism and I think that this could be a great topic to focus on during our GTP class time.  The Milbrath reading is also fairly lengthy but it provides a nice comparison of the Dominant Social Paradigm vs. the New Environmental Paradigm.  He provides some very strong arguments about how humans need to start accepting limits to their behavior and also argues that environmental problems originate in the socioeconomic-political system.  My favorite reading was the Trainer “Third World Poverty” reading.  This reading is not only the most manageable but also the most powerful.  Finally, I thought the Center for a New American Dream was very interesting to look at and provides a nice example of how an organization is transforming the arguments of Social Ecologists into direct action.

I’m not sure exactly how our GTP group should lead the class on this topic, however I think it would be really nice to bring in a guest speaker from either the Environmental Studies department, Sociology department or even the Philosophy department.  Social Ecology seems to cover a wide number of topics so it will just be a matter of narrowing down what topics we find either the most interesting or the most informative and then going from there.