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.
1. Introduction: "Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice in the Environmental Humanities"
Section I: Integrating Knowledge, Extending the Conversation
2. "Backbone: Holding Up Our Future"
3. "Country and the Gift"
4. "Introduction: Backbone and Country"
Section II: Backbone
5. "Twilight Islands and Environmental Crises: Re-writing a History of the Caribbean and Pacific Regions through the Islands Existing in their Shadows"
6. "Seaweed, Soul-ar Panels and Other Entanglements"
7. "Is it Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice"
8. "Gathering the Desert in an Urban Lab: Designing the Citizen Humanities"
9. "Environmental Rephotography: Visually Mapping Time, Change and Experience"
10. "Integral Ecology in the Pope's Environmental Encyclical, Implications for Environmental Humanities"
Section III: Country
11. "Radiation Ecologies, Resistance, and Survivance on Pacific Islands: Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow and Syaman Rapongan's Drifting Dreams and the Ocean"
12. "Walking Together into Knowledge: Aboriginal/European Collaborative Environmental Encounters in Australia's North-East, 1847-1850"
13. "'The Lifting of the Sky': Outside the Anthropocene" 14. "Literature, Ethics, and Bushfire in the Anthropocene" 15. "Placing the Nation: Curating Landmarks at the National Museum of Australia"
16. "The Oceanic Turn: Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene"
