When I first walked through the door of Howard 102 with my proverbial bright eyes and bushy tail, I thought that environmental studies was one thing.
(You know, The Environment. Which is also one thing. And if big business would just stop paying politicians to not prioritize The Environment, we could solve all our problems in a second. How can people be so short-sighted?
…Ok, so I’m painting a pretty unfavorable picture of myself as a first-year. But it was something like that.)
Very quickly, however, I started studying a whole slew of seemingly unrelated topics—from agricultural commodity chains to toxic release inventories. The notion of breadth in environmental studies was the first to come to the forefront. Environmental studies wasn’t just one thing—it was hundreds! I was simultaneously excited and overwhelmed. It was thrilling to consider the prospect of studying a zillion different disciplines, and being able to address the wicked problems that span across them, but it sure did give first-year-me a lot to think about.
It didn’t take long, however, before I was being told to pick one. The notion of concentration was not far behind that of breadth, and it was, in many ways, the opposite experience. Now that I had been exposed to the many different disciplines environmental studies dealt with, I needed to narrow my focus to the one that appealed to me most. Once again, simultaneous excitement and overwhelm-ment. To simplify a long process and a wide array of proposals, discussions, and major statuses, I ended up as, to put it vaguely, an Urbanist. That is to say, I was interested in problems that affected cities. The specifics fluctuated over the semesters and years, but the commonality was a focus on city amenities, and who had access to them.
And for a while, frankly, it was kind of lonely. Urbanists aren’t altogether uncommon within environmental studies, but in my year, I was the only one (or so I felt at the time). I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, however. There were a few of us with specific enough fields so as to not share a huge amount of overlap with other people in our year. It was ok, because the scholarly community in environmental studies was strong enough that we were able to work together effectively even when our work wasn’t super related. Even so, though, it felt a little bit like being an environmental studies orphan.
The more I worked with my peers, however, and examined their work in relation to mine, the more I discovered connections between our areas of work that hadn’t been readily apparent. My concerns for who has access to urban amenities played well with the concerns of some of my more social-justice-oriented peers, and my later focus on trees as an urban amenity associated me with other students who were using specific “artifacts” to illustrate the process of a discipline creating meaning. I realized that branding myself as “the only urbanist” had been a bit of a fallacy. Of course there were distinct points of difference between my focus and that of my peers—that was true for all of us. What allows us to work together so effectively, however, is the myriad of intersections between our studies that lie just beneath the surface.
In thinking back on the days of breadth and ENVS 160, I’ve come to understand that environmental studies isn’t just one thing, but also isn’t a hundred different things. Yes, as an interdiscipline, we study a wide swath of disciplinary fields. But it is the intersections between those fields that empower our interdiscipline to approach issues from a variety of perspectives, and still synthesize a tangible and sensible approach. When, in my senior seminar, I update my peers on the progress of my thesis, I often have several people come up to me afterwards with resources and ideas, each of which brings a distinct mixture of disciplinary approaches. While we all have our specific focus, our understanding of how a breadth of disciplines intersects with our focus is what allows us to function so effectively as a scholarly community.
And so, in a twist from Dickens, this story ends with the heartwarming environmental studies orphan adopted into a big, loving, scholarly family. It was the best of times.