When we first attempted to define “environment” and when we watched Darwin’s Nightmare, we confronted the notion of “purity,” this notion that things can be purely good or purely bad, purely economic or purely scientific, purely biological or purely cultural. I believe that purity is a gross reduction of the complex and interconnected world we live in and are studying. Richard White argues against purity, drawing upon examples about race and nature. When we studied the anthropocene, the notion that nature doesn’t exist anymore because we have changed it and made it more machine, or at least more human made me uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable because it seems ridiculous to separate ourselves as a species from “nature,” however we define that imprecise term. Are things that are man-made not part of nature? Are the urban landscapes that we create not part of nature? Just as the environment can be interpreted to encompass nearly anything, nature is and always has been interconnected and implicit in humans and our creations.
John Keats writes to his brothers George and Thomas about “Negative Capabilities,” or when “a man is able to live with uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” (Norton Anthology, pg 968). He is talking about the ability to live comfortably in a world with mystery, with uncertainty and insecurity, where things are deconstructed and don’t always necessarily add up. There seems to be a crisis, or at least a fragmentation of the environmentalist movement today, with clashes between classic and contemporary thought, where neo-liberal, pure science doesn’t seem to be moving things along effectively. What White argues in his rejection of purity is that we need to embrace the muddled, confusing, intricate, messy world we live in, where nature and humans are far too connected to be separated. We need to learn to be comfortable with messiness. The best solutions, as Lach argues, may be clumsy ones.
Classic environmentalism was reductionist, but is science inherently reductionist? Does science try to narrow down cause and effects and categorize them indefinitely? Perhaps science is not conducive to clumsy solution and negative capability. I know one of the seniors in ENVS 400 is writing her thesis on the limitations of biology, her second major, as compared the the multidisciplinary “messiness” of environmental studies. Biology is needed, science is certainly needed, but it is not the only thing that is needed in altering the political, economic, and social structures that are causing many of the problems this major is trying to solve.