The anchor course is not just meant to be the main introductory course to sustainability, but it also serves as a base-builder for future concepts and themes that are vital to the area of study of sustainability. For my anchor course, I decided to take LAND 2310, also known as Introduction to Sustainability. To be frank – you couldn’t get more base line in sustainability than this.
The class, as an introductory class tends to do, covered a wide variety of topics within the field of sustainability. From how the Cherokee Tribe utilized the land around them in sustainable ways, to the ways we tend to interact with the watershed, most things that could be covered under sustainability were. While these more rigid, lesson based topics did interest me, the activity that I took the most from was our Climate Summit Simulation that we did as a class. For this, we were each assigned a country, NGO, or energy company (at random), and were designated to make decisions towards a general climate change solution plan the same way our entity would vote. So, for my country of the United Kingdom, I obviously fought hard for better benchmark goals and tougher regulations towards a tangible temperature increase goal, while a peer of mine who has, say, Exxon Mobil, would argue against.
What was valuable about this activity is that it not only gave me insight to the difficulties in real life negotiations within sustainability, but it bettered my skills at performing these types of tough negotiations. Being able to convince another party to go against there previous interests in order to reach a goal is something that, while I am still working to improve, was made better by this activity, and as someone who’s eventual end goal in life is to go pursue a career in public office, having this skill is vital in order to achieve anything in civics. While our end goal was never fully reached in the simulation, I was able to, through negotiation and compromise, turn some stubborn voters to my side; which is not just an accomplishment, but shows the positive overall effect this simulation had on my abilities to work with others.