Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

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.