Humanities for the Environment
Subtitle
Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice
Edited by Michael Davis and Joni Adamson
"Humanities for the Environment," or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013–2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories.
"Humanities for the Environment" showcases how humanists are working to "integrate knowledges" from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new "constellations of practice" that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay) towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the "Anthropocene" as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range across geographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical "laboratory" in Phoenix, Arizona, to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination.
This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.
Bio
Joni Adamson is professor of English at Arizona State University, where she directs the Environmental Humanities Initiative and is a Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. She is also affiliate faculty of ASU's Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.
Praise for this book
[This book] presents the work of researchers challenging the parameters of research in the traditional humanities with a view to developing more engaged, more effectively communicative modes of scholarship in response to the overwhelming environmental tumult and tragedies of our time. These are thinkers — some Indigenous, many involved in Indigenous collaborations — working at the limits of imagination and passion in an effort to bring modern civilization back from its blind brink to some semblance of ecological maturity, morality and sanity.
Freya Matthews Latrobe University, AU
Drawing upon indigenous cosmologies, environmental pedagogy and grassroots activism, 'Humanities for the Environment' admirably decolonizes the fraught term, Anthropocene, and compassionately advocates with engaging and critical yet deeply felt narratives for ‘new constellations’, or gatherings of lifeways, practices, and disciplines. The aim is to put 'this world back together' for all living beings. We would do well to heed this clarion chorus.
Subhankar Banerjee Lannan Chair and Professor of Art & Ecology, University of New Mexico
