“As he watched the TV, he remembered a lecture in his second year of college by a professor of environmental science. The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as ‘immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens’ or ‘all mental patients deserve our respect.’ That in the workings of, for example, an agency, you could, with effort, discover not just the abstract thought behind it but the concrete emotions.”
– Control (John Rodriguez)
That… sounds like sociology or anthropology. Clearly environmental science has more connections with humanities / social sciences than I’ve previously thought!
VanderMeer, Jeff. Authority (Southern Reach Trilogy 2). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, p. 147.
Co-Geeking 