Critical Thinking Hinders Progress

This is about a problem with my personal future - about how to make sense of the great diversity of organisations where I might want to pursue a job, or institutions and people I might want to study further with. My education here has done a good job (I think) in teaching me to think critically. Now when I read someone's writing or hear someone speak, especially when it is about something with which I'm familiar - like environmentalism or sustainability, my thoughts often turn to questioning their positionality, whether their opinions are shaped by their philosophical viewpoints, and I always try to see the bigger (or smaller) picture. I believe that this has been very beneficial, and has allowed me to understand a greater depth of what I read and what people say.

However, it also means that when looking at organisations and people working in a field with which I'm familiar - environmental protection, environment-society, sustainability - and wondering where to work or study, I'm faced with lots of individual outlooks and missions, and few of them seem to match what I'm looking for. While I'm sure much of this is due to me being unclear about what I want, this increased critical awareness has come at a cost - I can't just wander, blind and uncritical, into a comfortable (and perhaps well-paid) job anymore!

This all ran through my mind while watching the final episode - entitled Living Together - in the awe-inspiring BBC documentary Planet Earth. A wide range of environmental professionals, academics, policy researchers, etc. are interviewed as the discussion unfolds, even including the Chief Scientist of the World Bank, and a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research. And as I watched, I agreed with elements of what many of these people were saying, after all many of them are people whose opinion I respect - such as Jonathon Porritt (UK Sustainable Development Commission) and Tony Juniper (Friends of the Earth). However, many of them also said things which grated - bringing to mind some criticism of the foundations of their argument, or an implicit link to post-colonial critique, the debate over critical realism in the environmental movement, or criticisms of the role of international environmental NGOs.

Which leaves this feeling of confusion, and a need to find some way of prioritising the good points in all these different views and missions, in order to find a good path to take in the next few years.