“The environmental humanities, by contrast, envision ecological crises fundamentally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference, and divergent histories, values, and ethical frameworks” (Ursula K. Heise 2021)
This week was a little different than the others, as I had the pleasure of assisting and presenting at Dr. Sarah Williams’s Hypothes.is workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as getting to participate in her class seminar and hear the end of her Tuesday lecture. My work this week was also assigned to her students in Forest, Farm, Shellfish Garden: Experiential Learning and were focused on the rise of a new field of study; the Environmental Humanities.
Environmental Humanities is the interdisciplinary, cross-genre study of the natural environment, focused on collaborative discussions for solutions and crossing the divide between the sciences and the humanities. Much of the research and readings I have done, not just in this class but over my last year with Dr. Williams, has fallen under this umbrella, and I am especially curious as I am starting to familiarize myself with the world of academia.
The two texts that I read alongside the class were The Cambridge Environmental Humanities Introduction and The Routledge Introduction to the Environmental Humanities both of which detail the authors’ views of the purpose of expanding to this specification, and the ways in which the environmental humanities can better us as a species if we chose to follow it’s theories.
I particularly connected with this quote from The Routledge Introduction to the Environmental Humanities
“But as the sociologist Kari Norgaard, the philosopher Dale Jamieson, and the climatologist Mike Hulme, among others, have shown, simple insistence on the scientific facts remains politically ineffective when it is disconnected from the political, social, cultural, affective, and rhetorical forms that the climate problem takes in different communities”
As I noted in my annotation, I have a few years of political organizing experience, a profession I fully intend to return to after college, and this really reminds me of voter engagement rhetoric. When you’re working in elections you have two main goals, getting voters to like your candidate, and getting voters to vote for your candidate. Obviously, there are goals underneath this umbrella that meet the everyday campaign life expectations but all with the overarching goal of getting a voter to put effort and time into something they don’t have to do.
Climate change action and policy advocacy will have to be driven by similar methods that are used to encourage voters. Narrative and storytelling are key aspects of campaigning, making people feel connected to a candidate will motivate them to complete the task that the candidate asks of them. The environmental humanities acknowledge the much needed human emotion aspect of climate policy as current election organizing strategies do.
I also got to develop a small presentation of my ILC work so far this quarter which ran about 10 minutes. I was so excited to get a chance to present about the work that I’ve been doing, especially to people who have some context as to what I am working on. I presented some work that I did in Spring talking about a Stuart Hall quote in one of our earlier readings. I used a map to show my personal history with Lancashire County and how close to it I was born, and my personal experiences with not truly understanding the roots and colonial history of what I had leaned to be a British staple, tea. I got some good engagements with Sarahs students after and I am really hoping to get to do some more work with them in the future, and hopefully write it into my ILC for Winter.
Next week I am planning on finishing The Ecofetish and starting to dig into further understanding digital annotation with Skim, Dive, Surface.