Introduction to Environmental Studies (ENVM1501)

Task description

Assignments 1 and 2 must be based on one of the following three issue areas.

1.     Roll out of renewable energy infrastructure in rural and regional areas

2.     Emission reduction targets for livestock agriculture

3.     Human and shark interactions in coastal locations

Note: These are deliberately broad, and you are encouraged to refine and focus them for your assignments. You may adopt a national or international focus with these topics in your assessment.

Topic:

Environmental issues in context: identifying social (including, cultural, political and institutional), economic, and biophysical (physical, technical and environmental) dimensions of a contemporary issue.

Aims:

• Identify and describe key social (including cultural, political and institutional), economic and biophysical dimensions of an issue and how these interact to influence and shape that issue,
• improve your ability to read widely on a complex social/environmental issue and integrate the available information, and
• provide early feedback on your written communication.

Background:

Frequently environmental issues are defined or viewed only as the physical expression of human activities. This is what Dovers (2005 pp41-42) describes as the ‘substantive problem’. Frequently these physical expressions become the focus of attention. However, in environmental management what we rapidly realise is that there are very different views both underlying causes and what the appropriate policy response(s) ought to be to complex problems with multiple causes. This course attempts to give students a far more critical way of defining and thinking about environmental issues and their management context.

To illustrate, consider the issue of ‘land clearing’. There are a number of ways of defining the issue, and what the cause(s) may be. It could be stated as any of the following depending on a person’s particular position:

• Inadequate laws to stop clearing,
• Too restrictive government intervention that stymies development, economic opportunities and capacity to feed a growing population,
• Poor incentives to change land use,
• A financially and economically driven activity due to decreasing terms of trade for agriculture and declining profitability,
• A largely historical problem that is now exaggerated by environmentalists,
• Failure of a market system that inadequately rewards good land management, or
• A threat to biological diversity.

These are all views that are expressed by different people or groups with an interest in the issue. These interested parties are referred to as “stakeholders” (more on this in assignment 2). Alternative ways of seeing issues stems from the different background and the values and attitudes of individuals (covered in Module 4 and assignment 2), as well as the particular circumstances that an individual may face. In this course, you should gain the ability to look critically and impartially at an environmental issue in a range of ways. Specifically we are encouraging you to appreciate the social, economic and physical dimensions of environmental issues in order to ultimately develop better ways of managing and solving such issues. This assignment will be the first time that many students have attempted to look critically at an issue in such a way. Although challenging, this will be a very useful skill for your professional career even if not directly related to environmental and sustainability.

Task:

Your assignment is to identify and describe key social (this includes cultural, political and institutional aspects), economic, and biophysical (environmental) dimensions of the issue that you have chosen. Each of these dimensions should be addressed by explaining how they influence the issue and are influenced by the issue. Another way of thinking about this is, what are the drivers that are shaping the issue, and how do the components of the issue then effect, or drive, other aspects. Some discussion of the interactions across dimensions should be included (see the marking criteria). The word ‘institutional’ mentioned above can create confusion for those not familiar with it. What it means is the formal and informal rules and behaviours that operate in society that affect an issue (see Connor and Dovers 2004 p 11). Frequently the term is more specifically applied to the formal and informal organisations of people acting in environmental management or other arenas (see for example Lane and Robinson (2009)). These rules and organisations vary from place to place, culture to culture and time to time. So to some extent there will be overlap between culture, institutions, politics etc.

To do well, and get the most from this assignment, you should aim to provide a written report based on extensive reading and synthesis of that literature. The written report should be treated as though you are providing advice to a senior decision maker (this could be any level of government, an NGO or private sector organisation) in order to clarify the nature of the issue that they may have to deal with. Your report should be 1500 words. Your assignment must be based on one of the three topics used for the two written assignments for ENVM1501 this year.

Expectations:

The assignment will be marked on the criteria and standards linked in this ECP with the following expectations in mind. Your assignment should:

• contain evidence of wide reading and that you have gained an ability to integrate information rather than simply reproducing information,
• contain a wide range of cited references including, quality academic literature, media articles, and some relevant web sites,
• be written in excellent English, with a style and written expression appropriate to a professional report, and
• be well structured with a clear flow of ideas.
• Have a short reflection on any use of AI in the development of your assignment. This will involve a short table with three broad heading:
• What prompts you used and in what search engine or AI program;
• Audit of quality using at least two outputs that you compare with peer reviewed sources, and
• Thoughts you have on the limitations and or biases that may be involved in the search engines or data bases or AI used to support your assignment.

References from above.

Dovers, S. (2005) Environment and Sustainability Policy: Creation, Implementation, Evaluation. The Federation Press, Sydney.

Connor, Robin, and Stephen Dovers (2004). Institutional Change for Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=210442.

Lane, M. and Robinson, C. (2009). Institutional complexity and environmental management: the challenge of integration and the promise of large-scale collaboration. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 16, 16-24.

Suggested outline for Assignment 1:

Introduction:

Make sure that your introduction:

• conveys the aim of the assignment to the reader and convinces them that it is something worth investigating,
• briefly introduces the issue under investigation, and
• provides an outline of how the assignment is to be structured.

Body of the assignment.

• I suggest using sub-headings based on the key ideas you draw from the literature. Make sure that there is a logical flow and links between the sections and paragraphs.

Conclusion

• Be sure to match your conclusion to the aim of the assignment (ie. Show how you achieved or demonstrated the aim). DO NOT PROVIDE SOLUTIONS to the environmental issue you have chosen.

Ethical and Critical Use of AI in ENVM1501

In this course, we recognise that generative AI tools (such as Microsoft CoPilot) can support learning when used responsibly. Students are expected to engage with AI critically and ethically by:

• Disclosing all AI use in assessments (including prompts and outputs).
• Verifying AI-generated content against credible academic sources.
• Reflecting on limitations and biases in AI outputs.

We will explore these practices during tutorials and lectures to ensure AI is used as a tool for insight, integrity and creativity rather than a substitute for independent thinking. Misuse or undeclared AI use may constitute academic misconduct under UQ’s Student Code of Conduct.

Assignments 1 and 2 must be based on one of the following three issue areas.

1.     Roll out of renewable energy infrastructure in rural and regional areas

2.     Emission reduction targets for livestock agriculture

3.     Human and shark interactions in coastal locations

Note: These are deliberately broad, and you are encouraged to refine and focus them for your assignments. You may adopt a national or international focus with these topics in your assessment.

Aims:

• Identify and describe human values in relation to environmental issues,
• Demonstrate that you can identify how values shape people’s positions on environmental issues, and
• Improve your ability to critically review and analyse an environmental issue.

Background:

Individuals exhibit beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that are driven by their environmental values, environmental philosophy or environmental ethics (for the purpose of this course we can use these terms interchangeably, although there are distinctions). Good summaries of can be found in Stern and Dietz 1994, and Dietz, Fitzgerald and Shwom 2005, and the relationship between environmental philosophy and ethics is outlined online by Brennan and Lo (2011) at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, most people are unaware of environmental values as their influence is generally subtle, and mediated through attitudes and contextual factors that can significantly affect how people behave or act (Stern et al. 1995). Our values exert a powerful influence on what we consider ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, how we view an issue, whether we perceive a problem, and thus how we consider an issue should be resolved (de Groot and Steg 2007). 

Frequently, at the core of many debates and differences of view around environment and sustainability issues are different sets of values. Unfortunately, these values and their role are rarely acknowledged. Usually, the discourse of an environmental issue is framed in the realms of ‘facts’, ‘logic’, ‘rational thought’ and ‘technological’ science, which precludes any analysis of values (see for example Welcomer et al. 2000). In order to better understand the social construction and views of environmental issues this assignment is designed to give you a brief introduction to environmental values and to assist you to explore how they may expressed in an environmental issue. The capacity to explore environmental issues at this deeper level will be important for you in any career that deals with people and their environments.

Task:

Provide a written assignment that shows evidence of how different peoples’ (individuals and groups) views of the issue you have chosen vary, and how this may be linked to their underlying (environmental) values. You are to provide a written assignment based on extensive reading and synthesis of that literature. Your assignment should be approximately 2,500 words, and must be based on one of the three topics for ENVM1501 this year. See the suggested structure for ideas on how to address the assignment.

Expectations:

The assignment will be marked on the criteria attached to the ECP with the following expectations in mind. Your assignment should:

• contain evidence of wide reading and that you have gained an ability to integrate rather than simply reproduce information,
• contain a wide range of cited references including, quality academic literature, media articles, and some relevant web sites,
• be written in excellent English, with a style and written expression appropriate to a professional report, and
• be well structured with a clear flow of ideas.
• Have a short reflection on any use of AI in the development of your assignment. This will involve a short table with three broad heading:
• What prompts you used and in what search engine or AI program;
• Audit of quality using at least two outputs that you compare with peer reviewed sources, and
• Thoughts you have on the limitations and or biases that may be involved in the search engines or data bases or AI used to support your assignment.

References

Brennan, A and Lo, Y, "Environmental Ethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), EN Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ethics-environmental/>.

de Groot, JIM & Steg, L 2007, 'Value orientations to explain beliefs related to environmental significant behavior' Environment and Behavior, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 330-354.

Dietz, T, Fitzgerald, A & Shwom, R 2005, 'Environmental values' Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 30, no. pp. 335-372.

Stern, PC & Dietz, T 1994, 'The value basis of environmental concern' Journal of Social Issues, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 65-84.

Stern, PC, Dietz, T, Kalof, L & Guagnano, GA 1995, 'Values, beliefs, and proenvironmental action: Attitude formation toward emergent attitude objects' Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 25, no. 18, pp. 1611-1636.

Welcomer, S., Gioia, D. and Kilduff, M. (2000) Resisting the Discourse of modernity: Rationality versus emotion in hazardous waste siting. Human relations. 53 (9): 1175-1205.

Suggested outline for Assignment 2:

Introduction:

• Make sure that your introduction:
• conveys the aim of the assignment to the reader and convinces them that it is something worth investigating (remember the focus is on the role and influence of values in social environmental issues),
• briefly introduces the issue under investigation, and
• provides an outline of how the assignment is to be structured.

Body of the assignment (consider a series of subheadings).

• A relatively brief but well researched overview of environmental ethics/values should be incorporated at the early part of the body.
• The remainder of the body should demonstrate how different stakeholders’ and positions in the issue illustrate a range of environmental values, with the purpose of showing how the issue is constructed differently because of the fundamental differences in people (This exercise should help in your professional development to avoid judging other people’s perceptions of an issue as right or wrong).

Conclusion

• Be sure to match your conclusion to the aim of the assignment. DO NOT PROVIDE SOLUTIONS to the environmental issue you have chosen and do not be tempted to indicate which environmental values are right/wrong or more/less enlightened.

Ethical and Critical Use of AI in ENVM1501

In this course, we recognise that generative AI tools (such as Microsoft CoPilot) can support learning when used responsibly. Students are expected to engage with AI critically and ethically by:

• Disclosing all AI use in assessments (including prompts and outputs).
• Verifying AI-generated content against credible academic sources.
• Reflecting on limitations and biases in AI outputs.

We will explore these practices during tutorials and lectures to ensure AI is used as a tool for insight, integrity and creativity rather than a substitute for independent thinking. Misuse or undeclared AI use may constitute academic misconduct under UQ’s Student Code of Conduct.

Reflective essay based on discussion series

Aim:

1. To develop skills in critically reading literature from a diverse range of disciplines.
2. Develop capacity to explore multiple perspectives on what can be seemingly straightforward topics.
3. Expose students to some of the underlying themes in many environmental issues.
4. Develop skills in research and the ability to communicate in a professional style your views on a complex matter based on reading and critical thought.
5. Provide an opportunity for students to explore some concepts from the course in more detail

Format:

The assessable item is the reflective essay (see below) but this will be based on your engagement in online discussion throughout the semester. You must also submit a detailed list of all postings made throughout the semester that includes the posting number date and time, and the title where relevant. This is important should we wish to quickly check any of your postings.

Four (4) discussion topics will be posted on the web site (Blackboard) for this course. Each topic will be introduced with a paragraph or two capturing its importance and relevance to issues of environmental management. References to relevant readings are posted with each topic. The topics shall remain open for discussion throughout the semester. Staff will be reading the discussion postings and engaging in the discussion as often as possible to provide advice and feedback as well as probe ideas further.

Task (what is the assessment?):

You are to engage in all four discussion topics throughout the semester, as frequently as you wish (minimum of 2 posts per topic). The assessment will be based on a short reflective essay. Each student is to write 3 to 4 written pages (~1200 to 1500 words) of the discussion series indicating what they have learned from the interaction, and from the topics. This reflective essay should particularly focus on new insights you gained, challenges and alternative points of view that were raised and the relationships between the topics that you noticed. Keep the following in mind:

• We are looking for quality contributions (in the discussion series) that show evidence of reading and critical thought. Your responses must be clear and properly referenced, including reference to other students’ contributions. This means that your views and opinions must be well argued and preferably based on reading, observations and reflection.
• Each contribution may be as long as you wish; however, keep in mind that long rambling contributions are unlikely to be read by other students. Look for clarity and try to keep your contributions as concise as possible (say less than 500 words, 300 is about ideal).
• Any student who abuses this discussion series will receive zero for this piece of assessment, and depending on the severity of the abuse may face further action (see the rules below). Abuse means making rude comments or comments of a personal nature or using inappropriate language (eg. sexist, racist, derogatory etc).
• To pass this component of the assessment you must have contributed at least twice to all of the discussion topics by the end of the last teaching week, but earlier is better (please check the marking criteria). If less than 8 contributions are posted then it will be deemed that this piece of assessment is incomplete and the maximum grade for the course will be a 4.
• As with all assessment, read the assessment criteria carefully.

Due dates:

Your reflective essay is to be submitted (through Turnitin) on the last teaching week of semester. Please note that you should be making notes towards this assessment throughout the semester – it will make the reflective essay more thoughtful and easier to develop.

The topics:

1. The theory of island biogeography and conservation in fragmented landscapes: an elegant theory but does it limit our ability to see beyond the ‘remnant / non-remnant’ dichotomy?
2. Environmental values: Have we climbed above Nature and “freed” ourselves, or have we “fallen” from the grace of Nature? 
3. Tragedy of the commons: reality or paradigm in economics and conservation?
4. Levels of empowerment and autonomy: who has the right to determine how resources are used (NB. There are no prescribed readings for this topic. Let’s see what comes out.)

Standards, expectations and rules:

The guiding principle for this piece of assessment is simply to maintain courtesy, respect and consideration at all times for all other students.

• The discussion series is designed to improve your skills in high quality professional debate based on information and critical thinking. For this reason, abbreviations and mobile phone ‘SMS text chat’ are not appropriate (for a benchmark consider you were discussing the topic in an electronic format with a professional in your field).
• There are to be no comments of a personal or private nature (this does not exclude personal observations or experiences of an issue that is relevant to the discussion).
• Contributions should be based on reflection, literature and current affairs when appropriate. Personal views and opinions are encouraged, but must be based on your reading and understanding of the literature and reflection on other students’ comments. In the absence of reference material, ideas must be fully explained in order to justify your position or ideas. Speculation and creativity are encouraged, but be sure that other people can follow your logic and that what you are speculating has not been written before in the readings or by other students.
• Plagiarism is not acceptable (see plagiarism warning in the ECP).
• Any deviation from these rules will result in zero for this assessment.

Ethical and Critical Use of AI in ENVM1501

In this course, we recognise that generative AI tools (such as Microsoft CoPilot) can support learning when used responsibly. Students are expected to engage with AI critically and ethically by:

• Disclosing all AI use in assessments (including prompts and outputs).
• Verifying AI-generated content against credible academic sources.
• Reflecting on limitations and biases in AI outputs.

We will explore these practices during tutorials and lectures to ensure AI is used as a tool for insight, integrity and creativity rather than a substitute for independent thinking. Misuse or undeclared AI use may constitute academic misconduct under UQ’s Student Code of Conduct.

Demonstrate proficiency in the application of course materials related to all learning outcomes.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Translation (MT)

This assessment task is to be completed in-person. The use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Translation (MT) tools will not be permitted. Any attempted use of AI or MT may constitute student misconduct under the Student Code of Conduct.