Main Content
Environmental Humanities at Colby
Mission
A critical challenge for the twenty-first century is to address urgent environmental concerns in ways that can bring about social and institutional change. The complexity of environmental problems has provoked both a flurry of activity and political paralysis in the industrialized world. This signals the need for a collective questioning of basic assumptions about human relations to nonhuman nature through a culturally, socially, scientifically, and historically informed understanding of human interrelations with the environment. The Environmental Humanities encompass a broad range of initiatives in many fields that attempt to explore the most basic frameworks, narratives, assumptions, and principles humans employ to defend, justify, legitimate, and normalize their relations with nonhuman nature. To this critical approach are conjoined exercises in imagining socially just and ecologically benign futures for humans and nonhumans in a global collective yet to be cooperatively defined.
STUDENTS
Today's students must learn to grapple with environmental challenges from a wide range or perspectives, exploring their historical, ethical and philosophical dimensions in addition to their scientific and policy aspects, and learn how to communicate their findings through the languages of the arts, literature and philosophy.
SCHOLARS
Researchers and scholars must engage in long-term, laborious inter- and trans- disciplinary attempts to articulate the genuine environmental problems that fail to politely conform to disciplinary boundaries. Both the "humanities" and environmental studies will be strengthened through the challenges arising from interactions between them, and through forging new connections to current issues of enormous importance facing today's world.
COMMUNITY
The public will have opportunities to learn and engage in these initiatives through the innovative modes of inquiry, presentation and civic engagement concerning the environment developed by faculty affiliated with the environmental humanities program.
I plan to be an environmental lawyer, and in terms of the work I want to do on the side and how to inform my work, definitely EH principals will apply. -Cindy Nguyen …
When you think about literary theory, most people think about analyzing books, but now we have technological tools which let us look at general trends. -Shafat Rahman …
Finding a course that was devoted to EH was a big moment for me . I could finally write about what I’ve wanted to write about for a long time - Ben Theyerl …
We don’t live separately from the natural world, we’re part of it, we interact with it. Studying those interactions is crucial to understanding the world we live in.-Lauren …
In urban studies, you wouldn't think British Romanticism would be in there, but it's changing my view of how we can change our spaces & use our environment. -Danya …
I took Keith Peterson's Philosophy of Nature which introduced me to a conceptual framework of analyzing science through a more critical lens.- Jared Fong …
This field humanizes victims of environmental disaster in a way that scientific reports can't really do. It bridges the gap really well between science and people... -Meghan Hurley …
