This week, our Duke Engage program read the first half of All We Can Save, an anthology featuring pieces by women focusing on the climate crisis. As an engineering major, I find that many of the articles I read are filled with scientific jargon, data, and graphs that give a holistic view of a problem when combined, but they take significant effort to get through and often don’t touch on important societal aspects. With this anthology, the climate crisis is presented through various methods from poems to memoirs. Significant data points are included in some of the works, but the importance and effect of the data is elaborated on. While reading, I learned a lot more about the history of the fight against climate change, and I was able to read about how interconnected the climate crisis is with other social justice issues like racial and gender equality.
During our team reflection on the readings, one of the other people on this program brought up how social media plays a part in the climate crisis. In one of the pieces in All We Can Save, social media is discredited and diminished to something that is used to distract from harsh reality. This got me thinking about the pros and cons of social media, and I found that I disagreed with the author’s stance. Like all things, social media can be used for good and bad. However, I have found that I have learned from social media about immediate threats to the environment and organizations that I can get involved with to help. In reality, an Instagram thread or 280 characters in a tweet are nowhere near comprehensive enough for substantial learning. With a vast topic like the climate crisis, it can be easy to become overwhelmed or misguided by what you read online, but certain organizations breaking it down on their social media accounts can be beneficial for initial learning and understanding.