Research
The associated faculty of the Environmental Humanities Initiative carry outcollaborative, interdisciplinary research projects that use the insights and conceptual frameworks of the humanities to provide a better understanding of the issues that arise at the confluence of the cultural and natural environments. This work helps inform the public discourse about how to go forward in a time that calls us to new, better, and bolder thinking. The research projects share an environmental humanities approach.
- Drawing on multiple ways of understanding the world
- Bringing together facts and values
- Creating common vocabularies, productive conversations,and new metaphors to express emerging paradigms
- Creating new narratives about the world and our place in it, and telling those stories well.
Here are some of the questions the Environmental Humanities faculty are addressing:
- What are the most effective ways to communicate about climate change? What new ethic is consistent with an ecological and socially just worldview?
- How can indigenous wisdoms suggest worldviews and values that will ground just and sustainable social systems?
- How can science ally itself with the power of religion, drawing on the great human reverence for creation?
- How can we reach decisions about resource management that integrate science and human values?
- How can science ally itself with the power of the written word, drawing on literature’s creative imagination and emotional power?
- How should a complex society feed itself?
- What is justice between people in different generations, between people and the rest of nature?
- How does literature explore our deepest environmental values, including love for the natural world and grief for its losses?
- What are the human rights implications of climate change and environmental toxins?
The Environmental Humanities Initiative furthers this work with a number of programs:
