Knowing and Growing
The Climate, the Possibility and the Environmental Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeffrey Mc Carthy
The emerging field of Environmental Humanities (EH) offers interdisciplinary opportunities for scholars who would engage both local and global sustainability. EH builds solutions with humanities tools like ethics, aesthetics, history, and narrative. In this sense EH can celebrate human-sized, vernacular perspectives while critiquing the global language of consumer capitalism shaping the broader economy. EH is an intriguing path into questions about framing responsibility to act and the ways ecological realities frame our planetary existence. My paper spotlights environmentalism’s transition toward social engagement, and explores my current Mellon Foundation Grant focused on environmental justice and community-engaged learning. Our Mellon grant enables collaboration between the University of Utah and marginalized communities, and allows careful listening so we scholars can learn climate experience from vernacular and Indigenous voices. At the same time, our work deploys western scholarship to imagine human sustainability in a precarious time. These contrasting insights build bridges between the worlds of academic inquiry and climate activism.
Thrift and Thriving: The Links between Thrift, Frugality, and Disposability, and How Quality, Emotionally Durable Goods Can Shift the Consumption Paradigm View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marie Miller
Research shows that climate change across the globe has been significantly worsened due to overconsumption practices, particularly in the United States and the Western World. This paper focuses on the differences between thrift and frugality mindsets, and how these affect consumption behavior. While thrift is shown to negatively impact purchasing habits, frugality is shown to reduce both spending and consumption. Similarly, materialism is divided into two varieties. The first, based on image, success, and status, correlates with greater consumption, while the second, based on happiness, identity, and emotional attachment, correlates with reduced consumption and longer product life cycles. To shift the public focus from an emphasis on high quantities of disposable goods to the benefits of purchasing quality, emotionally durable goods, storytelling that amplifies the voices of craftspeople over mass-manufacturers is espoused. This paper proposes that this would reduce environmental and social damage caused by the current consumption system.
