Environmental Humanities Center

Collaborative EH Research Projects at UCSB

Learning and discovery rarely take place in a vacuum. UC Santa Barbara has been home to a number of deeply collaborative projects that have networked students and faculty from across the arts, humanities, and sciences. For example, a recent project brought together faculty from Film and Media Studies; Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology; Sociology; History and Anthropology; English; and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies in order to consider the issue of impending sea level rise (more).

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Sea Change

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $175,000 grant to UC Santa Barbara in support of a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures entitled “Sea Change: Integrating the Historical Study of Human Cultures and Marine Environments in Three Pacific Regions.” The Sawyer Seminars program supports comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The program funds seminars that bring together faculty, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from the humanities, social sciences, and related fields. Only institutions that are invited to do so may submit proposals to the program. The grant covers a period of two years, and provides support for one postdoctoral fellow and for the dissertation research of two graduate students.

The research seminar at UCSB focused on the development, integration, and application of historical knowledge about the relations between human cultures and marine environments. It sought to advance the emerging field of marine environmental history while integrating diverse geographic perspectives and disciplinary approaches.

“The prestigious Sawyer Seminar grant will allow our faculty members to research an important topic through the type of interdisciplinary collaboration that is a hallmark of this campus,” said Melvin L. Oliver, executive dean of the College of Letters and Science. “In addition, by helping to fund the dissertation research of two graduate students and a post-doctoral researcher, the grant supports our mission of teaching and training the next generation of scholars.”

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Participants

Peter S. Alagona, Associate Professor, History, Geography, & Environmental Studies

Teresa Shewry, Associate Professor, English

David Lopez-Carr, Professor, Geography and Director of Latin American and Iberian Studies

Jennifer Martin, Postdoctoral Fellow

Sienna Cordoba, Graduate Fellow

Jessica Marter-Kenyon, Graduate Fellow

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Figuring Sea Level Rise

Figuring Sea Level Rise was a year-long initiative from UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center to extend conversations among scholars, students, policy-makers, activists, and broader publics about the projected effects of sea level rise on human and natural systems.

Sea level rise is perceived, understood, and portrayed differently by different groups within the academy, as well as among those who live or work in coastal zones. Indigenous peoples, as stewards of the waterways, have recorded shifting marine currents, weather irregularity, and changing animal migration patterns through inter-generational media such as oral history and ecological knowledge. Ocean scientists calculate possible sea levels based on climate models, and create interactive maps that can allow you to see when your house might become oceanfront property – or even the property of the ocean.

Scholars in the social sciences and humanities explore the socio-cultural experiences and landscapes of affected communities and the representation of people, place, and environment in documentary films, entertainment media, news outlets, the web, and literature. Managers of coastal communities and companies, and those who insure them against risk, deal with probabilities of likely impact from coastal threats.

The project was widely collaborative, engaging faculty from Anthropology, Communication, and Sociology to Art, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, English, and Film and Media Studies to Earth Science, Marine Science, Environmental Studies, and Engineering. Workshops, seminars, a multi-media website, film screenings and a conference explored who sea level rise is perceived, understood, and portrayed differently by different groups within the academy, as well as among those who live or work in coastal zones. The unifying “environmental media” approach considered how research on the rising oceans is conducted through sophisticated techniques of measuring and modeling and represented or “figured” through various types of media.

Website

Participants

Janet Walker, Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies

Josh Schimel, Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology and Chair of Environmental Studies

John Foran, Professor of Sociology

Mary Hancock, Professor of History and Anthropology

Stephanie LeMenager, Associate Professor of English

Ann-Elise Lewallen, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

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A Sanctuary for Science

The University of California natural reserve system (NRS) is the largest and most diverse network of university-run field research stations in the world. The UC acquired its first reserve in 1937, and today the system includes 37 sites with access to more than 1.4 million acres. UC reserves span from the Northwest forest to the Mojave Desert and from the Channel Islands to the High Sierra. They provide space, resources, and infrastructure for thousands of research projects, hundreds of college courses, and dozens of community outreach programs in the environmental sciences and related disciplines. They have also produced crucial data that has shaped political debates, legal proceedings, and public policy decisions regarding the state’s environment and natural resources. The NRS’s story exemplifies the role of field stations in post-war Californian and American environmental history, and it provides exceptional opportunities for studying the relations between people and nature on a changing planet.

A sanctuary for science, the UC Natural Reserve System history and archive project, seeks to document, preserve, and study the history of the NRS and the California ecosystems it encompasses and represents. To achieve these goals, the team has begun by conducting a historical resource survey and archival conservation initiative that will ensure permanent access to the system’s vast but largely unorganized collections. These archival materials will ultimately enable them to use the NRS as a laboratory for conducting landscape-scale environmental history, and as a microcosm for understanding the role of field research stations in American environmental history since World War II.

This project has benefited from generous support, partnerships with key colleagues, and endorsements from NRS leaders. It has received funding from the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Institute for Social Behavioral and Economic Research, and Office of Research, as well as the UC Office of the President and Packard Foundation. In 2011, Peter S. Alagona received a prestigious five-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for my work as the principal investigator. The group is also working with the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration at UCSB, the Keck Engine natural history archive project at UC Berkeley, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. For most of these partners, this project has been their first opportunity to collaborate with scholars from the humanities.

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Participants

Peter S. Alagona, Principal Investigator

Laurie Hannah, Project Archivist

Andrew Esch, Graduate Assistant

Tim Paulson, Graduate Assistant

Marissa Lopez, Undergraduate Assistant

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Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

This project emerged out of two international, interdisciplinary conferences that brought a range of scholars to UC Santa Barbara.

The first, Before Environmentalism, looked to the Renaissance and eighteenth century in order to better understand both the origins of our contemporary environmental crisis, as well as the emergence of modern environmental thinking. Environmental issues such as air pollution, toxic waste, increased urbanization, deforestation, wetland loss, and radical changes in land use were surprisingly timely in Early Modern England, routinely making their appearance in the literature of the day.

The goal of the second conference, Beyond Environmentalism, was not only to analyze the difficulties of creating a global environmental imaginary, but also to build such an imaginary, to create a set of strong metaphors that move us beyond what provocateurs Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus label the “literal-sclerosis” that has limited environmentalist rhetoric in the US.

These companion conferences generated a book entitled Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, which was edited by three UCSB professors and included essays by over a dozen leading scholars. The goal of this edition was to showcase the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.

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Co-Editors of Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

Stephanie LeMenager, Associate Professor, English

Tess Shewry, Associate Professor, English

Ken Hiltner, Professor, English & Environmental Studies and Director of the EHC

Contributors to Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

Forward, Lawrence Buell

Introduction, Stephanie LeMenager, Tess Shewry, & Ken Hiltner

Section I: Science

1. The Mesh, Timothy Morton

2. Posthuman/Postnatural: Ecocriticism and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Paul Outka

3. Revisiting the Virtuoso: Natural History Collectors and Their Passionate Engagement with Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin

4. Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species, Jill Casid

5. The City Refigured: Environmental Vision in a Transgenic Age, Allison Carruth

Section II: History

6. Ecopoetics and the Origins of English Literature, Alfred K. Siewers

7. Amerindian Eden: the Divine Weekes of Du Bartas, Edward M. Test

8. Erasure by U.S. Legislation: Ruiz de Burton’s Nineteenth Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge, Priscilla Solis Ybarra

9. Shifting the Center: A Tradition of Environmental Literary Discourse from Africa, Byron Caminero-Santangelo

10. Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War and Black Ecological Imaginings. Jennifer James

Section III: Scale

11. Home Again: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Aesthetics of Transition, Michael G. Ziser

12. Reclaiming Nimby: Nuclear Waste, Jim Day, and the Rhetoric of Local Resistance, Cheryll Glotfelty

13. Imagining a Chinese Eco-City, Julie Sze and Yi Zhou

14. “No Debt Outstanding”: The Postcolonial Politics of Local Food, Susie O’Brien

15. Pathways to the Sea: Involvement and the Commons in Works by Ralph Hotere, Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, and Ian Wedde, Teresa Shewry

Afterword: Ken Hiltner’s interview with Elaine Scarry