How Can Humanities Interventions Promote Progress in the Environmental Sciences?

Sally Kitch

doi:10.3390/h6040076

Abstract

Environmental humanists make compelling arguments about the importance of the environmental humanities (EH) for discovering new ways to conceptualize and address the urgent challenges of the environmental crisis now confronting the planet. Many environmental scientists in a variety of fields are also committed to incorporating socio-cultural analyses in their work. Despite such intentions and rhetoric, however, and some humanists’ eagerness to incorporate science into their own work, “radical interdisciplinarity [across the humanities and sciences] is ... rare ... and does not have the impact one would hope for” (Holm et al. 2013, p. 32). This article discusses reasons for the gap between transdisciplinary intentions and the work being done in the environmental sciences. The article also describes a project designed to address that gap. Entitled “From Innovation to Progress: Addressing Hazards of the Sustainability Sciences”, the project encourages humanities interventions in problem definition, before any solution or action is chosen. Progress offers strategies for promoting expanded stakeholder engagement, enhancing understanding of power struggles and inequities that underlie problems and over-determine solutions, and designing multiple future scenarios based on alternative values, cultural practices and beliefs, and perspectives on power distribution and entitlement.

Highlights

IntroductionEnvironmental Research “If wishes were horses, I’d have a ranch,” croons singer Lucinda Williams
The Aspirational Impact of Environmental Humanities on ScientificEnvironmental Research “If wishes were horses, I’d have a ranch,” croons singer Lucinda Williams
We are in conversation with Future Earth about integrating the Progress Method into their Knowledge/Action Networks, and plans are underway for collaborating with carbon-capture projects being developed in the Global Institute for Sustainability at ASU

Summary

Introduction

Environmental Research “If wishes were horses, I’d have a ranch,” croons singer Lucinda Williams. As important as they are, these methodological and conceptual differences among the humanities, sciences, and social sciences may be trivial compared with the institutional barriers, communication difficulties, disciplinary habits, and rankings of disciplines in the academic hierarchy In their 2013 Bioscience study, Roy et al report that 61 percent of environmental scientist respondents named institutional barriers, including tensions within departments and lack of credit for interdisciplinary work in promotion and tenure decisions, as the real obstacles facing radical interdisciplinarity in environmental research The Stakeholder Toolkit’s strategies for identifying conflicts and possible points of convergence in historical and contemporary power relationships, varied ethical systems, versions of the facts, and assumptions, as well as multiple problem framings, is designed to produce a broader and deeper understanding of the environmental/social/cultural challenges facing decision-makers. The latter takes a transcultural perspective “that is genuinely global and makes the Earth and the whole human family the unit of analysis” (Patton 2016a; 2016b, p. 380)

A Case Study

Scaling Up

Findings

Conclusion