Developing a Research Question

The field of Environmental Studies includes topics ranging from national parks and protecting wild lands to food systems and the intersection between social justice and climate change science.

Right now most of my interests are driven by the things that I'm involved with outside of the classroom. I work for Compost Cats, which is a student-run program that partners with the city of Tucson and the San Javier CoOp farm to divert foodwaste from the landfill and produce a nutrient rich soil amenment for use in local farms and gardens. Our program is very closely tied to issues of food insecurity in Southern Arizona. Tremendous amounts of food are wasted in Nogales, the largest land port in the United States, and yet Arizona has the third highest rates of childhood food insecurity in the nation. 40% of food grown is wasted. There aren't many human societies history that could afford to waste this much, and I don't think that we can either. This work has led me to question our current food system. Are there other food system models that would be more effective than our current one? What role should local, organic, and genetically modified foods play in a re-imagined food system?

I'm also involved in a branch of Students for Sustainability called the Energy and Climate Committee. Our goal is to develop a Climate Action Plan for the U of A that will lay out a path towards carbon neutrality over the next ten or so years. This work has led me to think a lot about how grassroots movements gain momentum. What are the integral pieces of a successful university climate action movement? How do these things typically gain the popular momentum necessary to convince administration that it's the correct path forward? Answering these questions is going to be incredibly important for us in figuring out how to move forward with our plan.

Djwosa. "Climate Change" 7/25/2015 via Pixabay. Creative Commons License

Another thing that I'm interested in is Diana Liverman's (she is a world renound environmental activist and geographer who currently heads the Institute for the Environment at UA) work surrounding climate change and environmental and social justice, and climate policy.  I'm also interested in environmental philosophy and the commodification of nature, and questions of how best to live given the dire outlook of humanity's current situation. Diana Liverman has many published works, and I would really like to choose one of them to do an in depth analysis of. One that seems interesting is: "Who Governs, at What Scale and at What Price? Geography, Environmental Governance, and the Commodification of Nature"