Humanities and Sustainability

What do the humanities contribute to sustainability studies? 

Ecological sciences and the humanities must be coupled in the sustainability enterprise. Scientists look at physical processes, and social scientists examine sociological processes. Humanists focus on ideas, values, language, culture, and history.  To sustain our human communities, our natural resources, and our rich global biological and cultural heritage, we must explore humans’ beliefs about their relationship to nature and integrate knowledge and policy across the disciplines in order to understand, inform, and direct human development toward a responsible, sustainable future.

Humanistic studies help sustain our environment by focusing on ideas, values, language, culture, and history by integrating knowledge across disciplines. Through a number of programs and projects, the IHR continues our focus on the humanities, sustainability, and the environment by providing support for scholars whose research contributes to our understanding of the world that surrounds us. Since 2007, the IHR has been supporting scholars working across disciplinary lines to articulate the role of the humanities in environmental issues.

IHR Fellows

2007-2008: The Humanities and Sustainability

ASU Fellows

Sustainability, Sense of Place, and Cultural Preservations
Principal Investigator(s): Elizabeth A. Brandt, Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Steve Semken, Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration
Consultant, Christopher Boone, Associate Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change and School of Sustainability

Sustainability, Systems, and Ecological Art
Principal Investigator(s): Julie Anand, Assistant Professor, School of Art
David Birchfield, Assistant Professor, Arts, Media and Engineering
Claudia Mesch, Assistant Professor, School of Art

Visiting Fellows

Aldo Leopold: The “Fierce Green Fire” of Sustainability
Principal Investigator(s): Dan Shilling, Independent scholar; adjunct faculty, ASU Department of English

Feminist Fronts: Invention of Gendered Traditions of War
Principal Investigator(s): Lorraine Dowler, Director of Women's Studies, Associate Professor of Geography, Pennsylvania State University

On the Ambiguous Religious Roots of the Environmental Crisis
Principal Investigator(s): Lissa McCullough, Independent scholar; adjunct professor of Religious Studies, Muhlenberg College

Seed Grants

Project Director(s): Gary Marchant, Paul Schiff Berman, Kenneth Abbott, Laura Dickinson, Andrew Askland; Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law

Research Clusters

Alternative Ideas of Sustainability and Human Flourishing

Public Events

2007-2008

Public lecture by Linda Weintraub, "Power's On: Contemporary Art and the Primordial Sun"