Regardless of personal opinions on the environment most people agree it is complex and messy. People are complex and so is the environment. To approach the inherent diversity of ideas and realities that come together to form what we now refer to as the environment an interdisciplinary context is required. Coming into Environmental Studies as a Junior, Sociology & Anthropology Major I was comfortable with confronting the diversity, nuance of ideas and realities. What I could not have expect looking back now is just how my understanding of the environment would grow, develop and change.
Here I will try to confront a few of the major lessons I learned along the way by. This post will be structured around the chronological progression of class texts and their stories, perspectives, and lessons. Followed by periods of reflection and the much less direct progression and growth of my own understanding of the texts and their arguments. I focus primarily on three areas of knowledge and understanding that changed the most for me over the course of the semester. The questions of, how we understand our own relationship to the environment, how we communicate this understanding of the environment with others, and how we try to control or change the environment will anchor these three lessons.
Our own understanding of the environment, how we communicate it, and how we make change it, find their foundation in the early conceptualization of Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Hume, 2009). These themes will be traced through the narratives and arguments presented in Making A Modern World (Vaclav, 2014), Austerity Ecology (Phillips,2014), and Love Your Monsters (Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2011). From the arguments found in the text I will synthesize and reflect on my own.
How do we understand our relationship to the environment? This may seem at first an approachable question with relatively intuitive answers, I assure you this is not the case. How we understand, environment, as a word, concept, and reality, and our relationship with/to it intersects with many complex systems of power. For Mike Hume in Why We Disagree About Climate Change theology is central to the endeavor of understanding ‘environment’. The question of our understanding of the environment, when approached from the individual to the global scale becomes a question of how we understand ourselves.
How do you understand yourself? That seems like a much less approachable question than when we started. Hume begins this endeavor with a primarily theological approach by describing the “four myths of nature”(Hume, 2011) he grounds in biblical scripture. However, he also approaches conceptions of the environment through cultural theory. From the grid group theory of (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) Hume extrapolated parallels between culture, religion, and environment I had not previously considered in relation to one another.
My understanding of the environment is grounded in liberal western notions of modernity, nature, and development. I was raised atheist, but I was also raised to have a deep respect and affinity for nature. So while I felt nature and what I thought of as the environment as separate from religion and its practices. After reading Hume I realize how naïve that understanding is. While it is still powerful and important that I have a respect for nature, my communication of that perspective, with others who were raised and who live in totally different circumstances and relationships with the environment than myself is critical. That lesson really hit home for me in environmental studies.
So how do we communicate our understanding of the environment? In Making A Modern World and Austerity Ecology the authors approach this question from primarily economic, political, and social contexts. The intersection of these discourses with globalization and the increasing diversity of understanding now being confronted requires that we work harder to communicate with and understand one another.
Communication can be hard on many levels. What we are communicating also changes and is changed by the context of discourse. For economist the environment is communicated through the language of “dematerialization” (Vaclav, 2014), energy, and energy use. As well as the complex system of production, distribution, and trade of resources.
Discourse is often shaped by perspective. To break communicating concepts of the environment into more approachable ideas, environmental studies use the categories of empirical and conceptual theories. Empirical Theory being our claims about reality. Conceptual Theory being our preferred ideas of it. Through communication about the environment we as individuals and a global community are taking actions.
For me communication and action are two parts of a while. I see it working both ways, if communication is action, is all action also communication? I would say that yes. How do
we change our environment. Is it best to approach it from the context of ideas or evidence? I think in reflecting on the readings and discourse throughout the semester, we must approach the environment always with both the context of ideas and evidence. Through communication and action, both personal and institutional the environment and our understanding of it is changed constantly (Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2011). Understanding these systems, the environment, and ourselves becomes not only the work of environmental studies but the work of life.
I learned over the course of environmental studies not to view the environment as a pristine but wild. Not to find comfort in the austerity of ecology, politics, economics, or societies but to engage and embrace the nuance and difficulty of environmental action.
To love its monsters and my own.
Sources
Hume, Mike. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. London: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Phillips, Leigh. Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts. United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2014.
Smil, Vaclav. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialziation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2014.
Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Edited by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. The Breakthrough Institute, 2011.