I recently looked back at my posts from my environmental studies intro class. My very first post, titled Limitlessness, connects our foundational Limits to Growth and IPAT readings to Wendell Berry’s Faustian Economics and his essay “Staying Put” from his book The Unsettling of America. I first read Berry when I was a junior in […]
Contact Improv & Constrained Constructivism
“When an apple fell on his head, Isaac Newton was inspired to describe his three laws of motion. These became the foundation of our ideas about physics. Being essentially objective, Newton ignored what it feels like to be the apple.” This is the introduction to Fall After Newton, a video describing Steve Paxton’s modern dance […]
To Infinity and Beyond: Categorizing Reality in the Anthropocene
This week, our discussion of the big and scary word “The Anthropocene” is nested within a larger theoretical/philosophical question about “what is reality?” In delving through many different readings which argued for a variety of interpretations of the human effect on the planet, we attempted to understand the breadth of categories under which writers and […]
Come On, Eileen! & Other (Over)reactions to Environmental Academics
Anyone who has ever tried to hang out with me while I do my environmental studies reading knows that I am very vocal when I have a reaction to said reading. Oftentimes, this reaction is a happy reaction, such as when a new connection is formed between William Cronon and John Rember in Hal Rothman’s […]
The Nature of Language: What Do We Mean When We Say?
One of the most important lessons I have learned as an English major is that language is, at its most basic, a system of symbols. Thus, everything created in language (such as theory!) is a representation. Although this idea of language as an illusion can be hard to wrap one’s mind around (Lizzie Bennet from […]