Marga Pacis

This s a critical response I wrote to Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History. It was an EfS course requirement in the winter semester of 2018. To summarize, the urban ideal in the developed, Western realm promoted industrialization, land degradation, ethnocentrism, capitalism, and over-consumption. While these themes contradict environmentalism, I believe that today’s urban world and modern sustainability practitioners can reconcile these two historically opposed entities.   Urbanism vs. Environmentalism in the Developed World A recurring theme in Guha’s Environmentalism: a Global History (2000) was of the contrast between the urban…read more

  I wrote a paper that delves into my Sundance experience (with some background information and a bonus creative writing piece at the end). Read the full paper here. This is an excerpt from my paper: Being removed from this dominant, mainstream form of education and put into a place of ceremony, my frames of thinking started to shift. In school, we analyze and rationalize everything and try to create hypotheses or give things reason. In contrast, the pedagogy of ceremony requires that you simply be . Language acts to control, therefore…read more

You create your place, but it shapes you too. The term “place-based learning” has almost become overused jargon in my education-oriented mind, but the importance of it has yet to diminish. When you learn something within the relevant place, the knowledge is more valuable than if you were to learn in a traditional classroom. In my mind, if you learn something within four walls, then the information is confined to that space and therefore will not be as easily translated into the real world. Place-based and experiential learning allow learning…read more

The Summer Institute course that happened this August seems like it wasn’t all too long ago, although it was almost two months ago now. From this two-week intensive course, it was very clear that this masters program was quite different from the type of schooling that had my mind had been entrenched in. There are no lectures and no exams that require pure memorization and regurgitation of facts. Instead, we participate in dialogue and co-create our classes and present our knowledge and take in that of others through art and…read more