Last night I was looking through the different nominated content for the ENVX page (don’t forget that you can nominate your own Digital Scholarship content to be featured by following the instructions on this page) and I had the pleasure of reading content by students in this semester’s course ENVS 350 – Environmental Theory, a breadth course offered every other spring, where students encounter different theoretical frameworks that shape approaches to environmental studies. Having taken this class in the past myself, it is interesting to see how these students are dealing with ideas I once tackled, and how the content of the course has evolved or stayed the same.
The two posts I read in detail were by current 350 students Lex Shapiro and Hannah Smay, where they expound upon their class discussions on ontology. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, or in simpler terms the study of “reality” or “what is.” In Lex and Hannah’s posts they both outline the structure of class discussion in terms of counting to one, two, and beyond. The metaphor of “counting” is meant to symbolize how reality is classified or understood. “Counting to one” is a metaphor for understanding reality in terms of monisms, or theories which deny the existence of dualities and distinctions, such as that between matter and mind. Contrastingly, “counting to two” serves to do the opposite: to understand realities in terms of dualisms, or binary opposition. Finally, “counting beyond two” is another way of opening up our understanding of reality in terms other than “either/or,” “this or that” and moving beyond restrictive and mutually exclusive binaries (e.g. nature/culture, male/female, developed/developing countries).
Both Lex and Hannah approach monisms via environmentalism in the “deep ecology sense.” In other words, “counting to one” in environmentalism takes form in the commonly held notion that we’re one with the natural world and therefore need to care for it as we care for ourselves. In Hannah’s reflection on “counting to one” she raises the important point that monisms are dangerous because they can lend to essentialism, which is often neither productive nor accurate in describing the way things are; humans, the “environment,” and “nature” are much more complex than a single fixed or essential definition.
Next, Lex and Hannah describe what it means to “count to two” in their respective posts. Lex uses her experience and learning abroad in Bolivia to represent her understanding of dualisms, offering the example of “developed v. developing countries.” She problematizes this dualism in exhibiting how the rhetoric surrounding development in Bolivia is socially constructed and used as a “powerplay,” and creating binded categories of “either/or” and “this or that.” Hannah also critiques dualisms because though they are present in our lived realities–in the American political landscape, gendered commodities, and introductory courses–they offer us a “neat and tidy narrative of tension,” which is not accurate in a complex world.
Both Lex and Hannah, in citing each other’s posts, agree that counting beyond two is necessary because it was the most authentic and accurate way to approach reality, accounting for the complexity and intersectionality in the world; we live in the multiplicity. What was most engaging about these two posts was where these two students went with this shared conclusion. Lex shows how counting beyond two, going beyond a binary or a “this or that” is challenging through the jumping off a cliff metaphor:
[I]t is like we’ve just approached the edge of a cliff and someone has told us that in order to move on we must jump. This unknown abyss of reality, the future, the anthropocene, and of counting beyond two is scary and exciting at the same time.
She goes on to state the importance of jumping off into the abyss of counting beyond two lies in how it challenges the status quo. Thinking beyond dualisms doesn’t take things “as they are,” but interrogates their complexities, interconnections and intersections–the very nature of interdisciplinary and situated environmental studies. Hannah similarly ends her post by posing some questions asking where to go from here now that it is possible to understand reality outside of binaries. She wonders about the distinction between “thinking beyond two” and “acting beyond two”–challenging the omnipresent binaries which define mainstream understandings of reality and calling for a need to put theory into practice.
These two posts are prime examples of the challenging and boundary-pushing work environmental studies student encounter in their coursework. Uncovering and pushing beyond the binaries particular of ENVS can be uncomfortable, but it is important work because it contributes to the effort to move past troublesome yet ever-present monisms and dualisms both found in our academics and our daily lives. To count beyond two is to uncover the complexities of the modern era. We go beyond “either/or” and “this or that” to open up the possibility of “this and that,” acknowledging how points of difference and inclusion shape our connections.