Limits of Environmental Understanding: Action and Constraint

Abstract

Some recent influential work on understandings of the environment identifies what can
be called a “Modern” view, which sees the environment in impersonal, objective terms, as separated from the Modern individual. That work also tends to ignore the ways that
people’s actions regarding their environment can be constrained by external factors and
can result in a modification of people’s initial views of the environment or the adoption of additional views. This article looks at some environmental activists in Jamaica to suggest that people with Modern backgrounds can have a non-Modern view of their surroundings, and to illustrate the ways that their actions regarding the environment can lead them to complicate their understandings of their surroundings.