Scholars don’t usually deploy such black and white terms as right/wrong, for good reason, so take that title with a grain of salt. Actually, what we’re really good at is saying what’s wrong more than what’s right. I’ve told my students the (unfunny) elephant joke to justify this tendency: how do you carve a statue of an elephant? Answer: just chip away at everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
As I work on a book on environmental theory, it seems helpful for me to put my cards on the table, especially in terms of what sorts of environmental theory we don’t need. I’m currently writing about three ways not to do environmental theory—all understandable given the sheer breadth and cross-disciplinary nature of environmental issues, but unhelpful nonetheless.
- Environmental theory as just-so story. You may have read Kipling’s Just So Stories for Little Children (1902): how the camel got his hump (punishment for laziness), how the alphabet was made (a daughter-daddy collaboration, most likely reflecting Kipling’s sorrow over the loss of his own child), etc. Just-so stories are theories that make intuitive sense but have precious little empirical or conceptual justification. They tend to be rampant in environmental theory, and are generally bandied about not as theories, but as timeless truths. The example I briefly give in the book is Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons (1968), perhaps the most widely referenced just-so story there is, with over 30,000 citations…wow, I wish one of my papers had 30K citations.
- Environmental theory as part of the elephant. Just-so stories successfully invade the environmental realm due to its complexity; in a different manner, part-of-the-elephant theories reduce environmental complexity to one particular disciplinary approach. The notion comes from the famous South Asian tale of the blind sages and the elephant, meant to suggest the tendency toward part-whole substitution: touch the elephant’s trunk, or tusk, or tail, and the whole elephant incorrectly shares these limited properties. My example: E.O. Wilson’s consilience argument (1998a), applied to what he considered the most important issue of the 21st century, this “century of the environment” (1998b). Wilson, a celebrated biologist and conservationist, defines consilience as “the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines,” which sounds reasonable to most ears until you realize that, to Wilson, it all boils down to biology. Wilson hopes that consilience will help us better understand the connection between human nature and environmental crisis, i.e., why people—”instinct-driven, reckless, and conflicted”—are destroying the planet. Yet others—famously, Wendell Berry (2001)—are less sure that Wilson’s part of the elephant is the whole thing.
- Environmental theories of everything. A third common problem in environmental theories, again understandable given their multifaceted nature, is overreach. These are the sort of theories that often inspire many people but make some scholars wince: as important as it is to think outside our disciplinary boxes (and that’s what my whole book is about), we know how hard it is to do big theory. Typical characteristics of TOEs: they arise from one person, they don’t waste time triangulating with existing scholarly theory, and they look sort of Platonic in that they are nice-sounding ideas that don’t sully themselves in the rich messiness of the world. The example I give is Ken Wilber’s integral theory, applied to the environmental realm by a few acolytes (e.g., Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman 2009; Mickey 2014). Now, the term “acolyte” sounds harsh, but that’s another characteristic I see in TOEs, in that they have their passionate adherents; indeed, environmental TOEs are more interesting to me for why people are so strongly drawn to them than whether they somehow unlock the mysteries of ecological existence.
I haven’t even started to discuss the right way of doing environmental theory! Ah well…in time.
References
- Berry, Wendell. 2001. Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. Counterpoint Press.
- Esbjörn-Hargens, Sean, and Michael E. Zimmerman. 2009. Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Shambhala Publications.
- Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–1248. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.
- Kipling, Rudyard. 1902. Just so Stories for Little Children. New York, Doubleday, Page & Co.
- Mickey, Sam. 2014. On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy of Integral Ecology. London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
- Wilson, Edward O. 1998a. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1st ed. New York: Knopf.
- Wilson, Edward O. 1998b. “Integrated Science and the Coming Century of the Environment.” Science 279 (5359): 2048–2049.
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