Introduction

As members of an unusual “research group” at the University of Illinois, we have spent the academic year of 2019-2020 exploring this emerging field of “environmental humanities.” Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, our group was diverse—an “intergenerational and interdisciplinary” collaborative team featuring members from various humanistic disciplines and at various stages of their academic careers, all united loosely by a shared interest in this new and exciting field. Working with this group was rewarding. To be honest, however, we often struggled to define our shared subject—the environmental humanities. The phrase is exciting, but the particulars of the field are difficult to pin down. Perhaps that elusiveness is meaningful in itself—the scope of the field is almost too wide to define. In our work, we have explored a number of themes including environmental justice, industrial development, land rights, and colonization, working in weekly seminars to explore new analytics with our research group. All the while, we have observed that we were only scratching the surface; nearly all of the subjects of humanities disciplines can be understood through an environmental lens. We have come to realize that there are so many varieties of environmental humanities, and the near universal possibilities for application of the environmental lens makes the field all the more important. We have come to believe strongly in the value of humanistic study of the environment and critical examination of the relationship of the human and non-human.

We are so excited about the following publication because the collection of undergraduate work shows the breadth of rigorous, original research in the field. There are many undergraduates at University of Illinois who are doing original, critical, creative work in the humanities, and we are so happy to have an opportunity to highlight some of them. While we admire our classmates across campus who are doing research in STEM fields, we are proud to have a chance to showcase some of the innovative undergraduate research in the humanities. To put it bluntly, research in the humanities is difficult. Questioning what is considered fact, thinking critically about the social, political, and cultural networks in which we live, and coming up with new explanations for what constitutes human social structures, governments, technology, art and lives pushes students beyond their academic and personal comfort zones. Framing these humanistic questions in terms of the environment has been rewarding because it has both expanded our understanding of what the humanities are, and revealed connections among modes of thinking, academic subject areas, and regions of the world.

Academia is characterized by a number of disciplinary boundaries and navigating and surmounting them has been a cornerstone of our process. Initially, we thought about working with people in the sciences to apply a humanistic perspective to their work. But we also realized there is so much room for collaboration and expansion within the humanities disciplines themselves. Instead of taking what is traditionally considered “environmental” in the scientific sense and forcing a humanistic lens on it, we decided to keep the focus on the humanities and their special approaches and methods. Examining humanistic concerns—stories, narratives, discourse, ways of

knowing—and looking at them in the context of environmental issues has been incredibly rewarding.

In our current cultural moment, and at the University of Illinois in particular, STEM fields are often considered a more promising way to address environmental issues. This misconception is harmful because it limits the possible solutions to mitigating climate change and environmental degradation. We believe that culture is the single most important factor in effectively addressing environmental and climate problems. So, in the process of working towards solutions, studying the ways in which people understand their relationships to the environment is at least as useful as technological innovation. Understanding both the environment itself and the ways we know it through art, literature, history, and philosophy is essential for solving environmental problems and climate issues. And so perhaps this conviction can begin to answer the question we began with, since it is undoubtedly the basis for the field of environmental humanities.

The following essays are an eclectic bunch. From studies of dystopian novels to historical excavations of the so-called Green Revolution in India, they range across the world, through time, and into various analytical terrain. They are exemplary of a strong and growing body of work by undergraduates on our campus who are engaging the new field of environmental humanities. Read them for their wisdom on critical environmental issues, and also for the window they provide into how undergraduate students are helping define and shape this emerging area of academic inquiry.

• Sarah Gediman • Amanda Watson • Alaina Bottens