A Deep Dive into Environmental Humanities
The annual Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities brings together scholars from all over the world
This summer, American studies scholar and poet Beatriz Yanes Martinez is in a period of transition—the perfect time to be part of the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities.
Martinez, who just finished a two-year curatorial fellowship at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, is preparing to launch a doctoral program in American studies at New York University. For them, spending a week in Maine talking about ideas and sharing research has been an energizing, positive way to dip their toes back into academia.
“I’m at this very interesting point in my life,” Martinez said at the beginning of a day-long visit to Allen Island, part of Colby’s Island Campus. “I’ve been out of school for about five years. So it’s been nice to have a program where I’m not getting graded, where I’m enjoying a lot of beautiful conversations and engaging in intellectual conversations without feeling pressure. I’m feeling a little bit more prepared in all ways to get back into school.”
The annual summer institute brings academics and thinkers from all over the country and world to Colby to consider critical environmental issues from a humanistic perspective. Originally funded through a Mellon Foundation grant, the institute is now supported by the College and is part of a larger initiative for environmental humanities. The multidisciplinary field recognizes the failure of the industrial world to address complex environmental problems and the need to question long-held assumptions about human interactions with nature.
Seminar participants cover a lot of intellectual ground, but they still find time for classic Maine summer activities like sunset swims at the Colby-Hume Center on Messalonskee Lake and a trip to Allen Island in Muscongus Bay. With an atmosphere of energized talking, sharing, and making connections, there’s something of a feeling of a weeklong Pecha Kucha (capped with a lobster bake) about the summer institute.
An important goal for the week is to create space for conversations about cutting-edge environmental humanities topics. This focus has meant that over the five years since it started, the summer institute has become a leading gathering place for established and emerging scholars. The institute, which is organized and hosted by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, is also dedicated to building an international network of scholars and creating opportunities for mentorship and rigorous scholarly engagement
“We’re really looking for generous interlocutors, people who have exciting projects in the environmental humanities who are looking to exchange ideas and really develop the conversations across the course of the week,” said Dyani Taff, assistant professor of English and one of the organizing committee members.
The power of stories
On a steamy late-July day on Allen Island, the group hiked through the spruce forests and took a quick dip in the chilly Atlantic Ocean. One highlight was hearing from Darren Ranco, a member of the Penobscot Nation and an associate professor of anthropology and coordinator of Native American research at the University of Maine.
Ranco talked to the group about ongoing work to create more access to land and promote the concepts of land return and the rematriation of traditional Wabanaki land. Land return involves giving land back to Indigenous people, while rematriation rebuilds traditional Indigenous stewardship and caretaking to ancestral places, Ranco said.
He also told a story about his ancestor, Joe Polis, a Penobscot guide and tribal leader who shepherded Henry David Thoreau on his third and last trip to the Maine woods. They traveled far and wide in the state, going to Mount Katahdin and the Allagash, returning via traditional canoe routes to Indian Island, where Polis lived.
“Thoreau turned to Polis, and said, ‘Oh, you must be so happy to be home—you have your family there and everything,’” Ranco said. “And Polis said, ‘Oh, no, I was at home the whole time we were out there. That’s our home. This is our land. This is our place.’… I think that’s a great story because, of course, by then, through a variety of nefarious colonial settler means, including a series of illegal treaties, our access was starting to become limited to those spaces that they had been traveling over, that he was being guided through.”
This conversation about Indigeneity and land justice is a critical part of environmental humanities.
“Hearing those stories is such an important part,” said Astrida Neimanis, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and one of this summer’s four seminar leaders. “Environmentalism means nothing without Indigenous leadership. And I hope there’s more of that in the future and learning with really the people who’ve been looking after the environment since time immemorial.”
A thread that binds
Four scholars in the field of environmental humanities served as seminar leaders. They helped teach and mentor the 35 or so fellows, who ranged from graduate students to tenured professors and who came from a diversity of academic backgrounds and institutions. They also come from all over the world, with this year’s fellows hailing from Cuba, Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Canada, Singapore, and beyond.
A thread that binds them is the belief that the humanities, arts, and social sciences must play an important role in helping to solve environmental problems, which science alone cannot do.
“I often say my work is about feelings, because when you think about any decisions you make in life, we justify them with rational reasons, but we really make decisions from our guts,” Neimanis said. “And so it’s such an oversight to think that we could ever deal with something as big and monumental as the environmental crisis just rationally.”
There is power in this gathering, the conversations that organically take place, and the relationships that develop over the week.
“I love learning about people’s work and just feeling inspired, and learning new things,” she said. “I also want to do things that embolden students. You don’t just have to do it the way you think you have to do it. We don’t have to look at academia as separate from all the other things that you’re passionate about in life. … Students can live their feminism, their decolonial politics, and their queer politics. You can bring all of that to the table.”
Neimanis, who teaches English, cultural studies, and gender, women, and sexuality studies, was joined by three other seminar leaders: Marisol de la Cadena, a professor of anthropology and science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis; Cajetan Iheka, professor of English at Yale University; and Jason W. Moore, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
For fellow Emily Zong, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, the field promotes dialogue across disciplines and knowledge traditions—something she also noticed about the summer institute.
“It’s been intellectually invigorating, and has a really good vibe,” she said. “It’s not just about learning new knowledge, but also different ways and methods of thinking that we can come back with, and integrate with our own research.”
Conversations and connections
Ranco’s talk resonated with fellows like Renan Porto, an interdisciplinary researcher and rising postdoctoral student from a small village in northeast Brazil. He’s from a family of cacao farmers living in a region marked by the erasure of Indigenous identity.
“I grew up without any connection to my Indigenous ancestry, and the Indigenous identity was not part of the way that we understood ourselves collectively,” he said.
In the course of his research, he has tried to develop a conception of law and justice from an Indigenous perspective.
“By recovering Indigenous knowledge, people are also recovering their connections with the land. I am thinking of the importance of this practice in the context of climate change,” he said. “It’s been very nice to meet other people who work in environmental humanities, to learn about their research, and to share my research as well.”
Making human connections during the summer institute really matters, said Chris Walker, assistant professor of English, who joined Colby in 2017 as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities.
“It’s just so important to have these relationships and to be able to speak to each other face to face,” he said. “And because we’re talking about a lot of really pressing environmental issues, I think it’s also important to have that community for support and to feel like you can keep doing this work that’s oftentimes dealing with really troubling issues. It can be depressing.”
Talking, laughing, and learning together can be an antidote for that.
“I’m excited to get back into the classroom and take some of the conversations we’ve had here and encourage students to be curious and explore,” Walker said.
