Environmental Studies, Humanities, And Sustainability (Commentary‪)‬

To paraphrase John Livingston (2007 [1981], 10), we people in the line of universities have rarely had time to draw back and take a painstaking look at what we are doing. Ironically, we're too busy doing it to ponder its implications. We're all subject to the paradoxical blindness of insight, which means that, now paraphrasing Michel Foucault, we know what we do, frequently know why we do it, but do not know what what we do does. It's the meta-reflective, second-order observational perspective on the university's raison d'etre that is so very hard to adopt and sustain. The university and its faculties do their thing - in short, they spray out knowledges of various kinds like a lawn sprinkler, imagining their waters will eventually fall where needed. But they do this without much attention to the big questions: What are you watering? What or who do you want to grow? In other words, it's assumed that there is an audience to whom we address our work (and by definition there is, for nobody speaks without at least one implied listener, even if it is only oneself). But maybe the audience addressed by the university isn't the universal one, the ideal congregation the professoriate constructs in its wooly thoughts (some congeries of The Student, The Citizenry, The Public Good, and The Community of Reason, I suppose). Maybe the actual, immediate audience is someone else entirely.