Protecting the natural world will require changing the human world. While science is a powerful tool to inform the choices we make in the future, those choices will be made by humans. Politicians, policymakers, business leaders and consumers need to be convinced to take action now for the long-term health of our planet. However, the curricula of American universities force well-intentioned scientists into ivory towers, unequipped to translate discoveries into plain human language. Conservation science degrees too often focus solely on the study of plants, animals, and ecosystems, neglecting the study of humans’ impact on the natural world. We need to include this impact in all environmental degrees.
I first encountered the divide between these disciplines during my undergraduate Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation degree at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) when I participated in an experiential internship in Alaska. While on this trip, we conducted research with the goal of understanding salmon and halibut populations, trying to understand whether the ecosystem could support more commercial fishing.
Our fieldwork in Alaska was followed by lab work in Utah. I spent the next five months dissecting, identifying and sorting all of the specimens we had collected. As I sat in a lab all summer and looked at fish stomach contents, I wondered who was going to benefit from this research. Were locals working in the fishing industry going to change their behavior? Or was this academic article going to languish in some forgotten journal? I loved the scientific rigor of our work, but I wondered how significantly our findings would influence human behavior.
A few semesters later, a friend told me about a class called Environmental Humanities — I had never heard of it. On my first day of class, it became clear that this had been the missing piece, bridging the gap between the sterile scientific world and that of nuanced human experience.
Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring is an example par excellence of using skills taught by the humanities to not only change human behavior, but to spark a movement. While scientists had been warning the public of the dangers of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) since the 1950s, it was not until Carson transformed dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane from a colorless powder into stark images of empty woodlands and fallow fields that the pesticide was banned. Her eloquent writing fundamentally shifted how we treat the natural world. Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle brought the seas to life for millions, inspiring generations of marine biologists and ocean stewards through film and writing. The prose and verse of Octavia Butler and Amitav Ghosh give substance to the menacing but remote impacts of climate disasters in their works of cli-fi (climate-fiction).
While scientific knowledge is the essential foundation of these works, it is insufficient on its own to effect change. Film, music, poetry, novels, philosophy, history, art — the humanities — are necessary to make incomprehensible jargon accessible and impactful for humans without a background in hard science.
I was lucky to have found the environmental humanities. Many of my classmates never did. Stewardship of the Earth is too important to be left up to luck. At the country’s top environmental and conservation science programs at Harvard, UC Davis, the University of Florida, students are not required to take any course in the arts or humanities. While some universities, like the University of Washington, have integrated at least one humanities course into their required curriculum, our universities can do much better.
Middlebury, home of the country’s oldest Environmental Studies program, is ahead of the curve in this respect. The header of the Environmental Studies major page states: “Environmental solutions cannot come from one type of knowledge or way of thinking, not just from politics or chemistry or economics or history.” This is exactly the mindset we need to foster in every environmental degree.
We need a generation of environmentalists who understand science and can communicate it to folks from different educational backgrounds. This connection will not be made with cold, hard science alone. Wendell Berry expressed this in typically direct language: “The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystems.’ But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities…The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains.”
The humanities help us understand humans. Conservation science helps us understand how to protect the natural world. The field of environmental humanities brings the two together. In a world so divided by politics, so distrustful of science, we need to bridge that gap. We need to connect people to rivers, valleys, animals and plants. As we lose species to extinction, wilderness to development, and tranquility to business, it is imperative that we help rising environmental leaders find ways to connect everyday people to the natural world. I call on leaders in higher education to require the environmental humanities in all environmental degree programs. I extend this appeal to professors and leaders at Middlebury, where this lesson has already been learned, to encourage colleagues and collaborators at other universities to follow Middlebury’s example.
