Replacing nature in environmental studies and sciences

Abstract

The concept and practice of place is an important answer to two questions posed at the outset: what is the environment of environmental studies and sciences (ESS), and what sort of ecoliteracy do we need today? Yet place is more than it has often been understood in ESS, where notions of the local and the natural have loomed large. Scholarship from the field of geography can help ESS reframe environment and ecoliteracy in a manner amenable to the contemporary world. Place has been a century-long conversation in English-language geography, building on traditional regional approaches and running to recent work, paralleling contemporary notions of geographical imaginations, in which places are now understood as diverse nodes in larger hybrid nature-culture networks, and senses of place are now understood as “glocal” identities. Contemporary geographical approaches to place challenge common associations with nature and the local; and ESS may feel a bit like “everything studies and sciences” as a result. But ecoliteracy could become a new knowledge and practice of the larger connections that define place, and this deeper sense of place could suggest to our students a deeper way of dwelling on Earth.