Environmental studies students at Lewis & Clark do a lot of explaining of ourselves and our work as participants in a nontraditional interdisciplinary program, one which I must often reiterate is not environmental science (although we do take breadth courses in the natural sciences). Defining, elaborating, complicating are all activities which we are trained to do, unsettling the settled. One of the fundamental things we learn through the program (as early as our intro course ENVS 160) is that words and terms can be charged with multiple meanings which are used or ignored based on the speaker’s political agenda. In ENVS, the words we like to pay particular attention to are coined “Big Words.” I think Frances Swanson, a junior ENVS student currently enrolled in Environmental Theory (ENVS 350), an upper level breadth course aimed to ground environmental studies in theory, illustrates what is meant by “big” in her post Big. Green. Words.
Big words are, as provisionally defined by Jim [Proctor] as, ‘General (big) concepts that are meaningful (big) to many people and enjoy major (big) practical significance. They’re thus big in three ways:
- Conceptual in scope: Many specifics subsumed under them
- Cultural resonance: Many people find them meaningful
- Practical significance: They really matter in the world of practice’
Frances then goes on within her post to justify the benefit of defining “big words,” stating that it is important for the understanding and development of environmental theory, a field of study which is in the process of being established. Showing the many ways in which a word can embody meaning and intersect with different modes of thinking shows the relevance of doing environmental studies: issues often investigated within this genre of study can be made relevant to ourselves and simultaneously with those contexts which are larger than us, as we like to call “glocal” (global & local).
Reading posts by other Environmental Theory students it became clear that this class was challenged to interrogate and unpack the notion of “bigness” of certain words through the lens of current events, such as the Presidential Primary Race (authored by Alex Groher-Jick) and the Malheur Occupation (authored by Roan Shea) in Southeastern Oregon. What I found to be the most interesting and effective about Alex and Roan’s posts was how they put their “big words” into the context of current events. Alex’s post provided a particularly approachable and relatable way to unpack “big words” in situating his exploration in the presidential primary race, a current event which gets a lot of media attention and most likely has captured our own attention at one point or another. I find that Roan’s post also effectively uses a combination of diverse methodologies, making his post dynamic. Making use of Voyant Tools, varying Oxford Dictionary definitions, and Google Trends, he clarified through different approaches how the word “rights” has taken on various meanings within the Bundy rhetoric.
I found myself focusing on the methodologies used to approach “big words” in these posts by current Environmental Theory students because the exercise took a different form when I took Environmental Theory when it was first offered, back in Spring of 2014. For our section on implicit theory, we also performed an exploration on “big words,” but this instead took the form of unpacking particular “isms” such as essentialism, ecocentrism, etc.
I focused on anthropocentrism in this post. Through the posts we wrote on our particular “ism,” we were trying to give a broad Wikipedia-style overview of the concept, meant to serve as a dictionary/encyclopedia resource for other students if they wanted to approach unpacking one of these “big words” themselves; our writing served as a starting point for this process.
Alex, Roan and Frances’ posts are worth a read, to me as a former student of Environmental Theory, but I also find them to be valuable to a diverse audience: They are a refreshing read if you are an ENVS major who is sick of thinking about “big words.” And for the non-ENVS folks out there, they’re a great example of the scholarly work we do all the time in ENVS. Happy reading!