"Use Them All": The Humanities and Environmental Study
When William D. Ruckelshaus became the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, he claimed that legal action was all that would be needed to handle environmental issues at the level of public policy. He soon realized that virtually every field of knowledge, every discipline, contributed to our understanding of the environment. "Use them all," he declared.
In this seminar we shall try to "use" the humanities, recognizing, of course, that such an interdisciplinary approach is difficult. It invites dilettantism, a fate we shall try to avoid, in part, by teaching and guiding one another. The seminar will address several crucial yet problematic topics, each one incapable of being defined or circumscribed by a single mode of knowledge or inquiry, topics like climate change, energy, sustainability, wilderness, ecosystem conservation and restoration, history as a key to grasping environmental problems, and concepts of Nature. Such topics will take shape following particular interests of seminar members, though there will be common readings and films as well as guest lecturers. We shall ask what roles the humanities play or can play, through literature and literary (or eco–) criticism, philosophy, ethics, the study of religion, and visual art. Each seminar member will adumbrate a special project or case study with its own materials and will present initial findings on this project or case study to the seminar in our final meetings.
This seminar will be an experiment. There will be a framework, but we shall together create the house, its economy, its ecology. A seminar is a seedbed, a nursery, and this seminar should result in our own experiments, ones we continue after our meetings. A primary object is to encourage the development of entire new courses or, at the least, new ways of modifying courses we have been teaching. Another object is to reach out to faculty in other disciplines both to strengthen environmental studies and to ensure that the humanities will be included among them. The premise of this seminar is therefore basic but challenging: environmental literacy derives from a number of disciplines, and the path to addressing environmental issues successfully draws on specialized knowledge coupled with interdisciplinary awareness.
Faculty members from all disciplines and departments are encouraged to participate. All that is asked is a commitment to environmental studies and a desire to include the humanities in them. It may turn out that the humanities are especially well equipped to undertake this interdisciplinary approach, for they can deal with the results of science and public policy, and they have the potential to communicate the issues involved in the light of values, human conduct, and habit.
