The University of Hawaiʻi is rolling out its first "Environmental Humanities" course this summer. But with other humanities majors and degrees on the decline at colleges around the country, what makes environmental humanities a good bet?
HPR's Savannah Harriman-Pote spoke with professor Christina Gerhardt about what the course of study can offer students. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Interview Highlights
On how Gerhardt came to this work
CHRISTINA GERHARDT: I'm German American. I grew up in Germany and my aunt was one of the co-founders of the Green Party. And don't worry, I'm not going to take you step by step through my life from then to now. But I have this long-term commitment to addressing environmental issues with an environmental justice focus. I've worked as an organizer for ballot initiatives in San Francisco in the Bay Area. I've also worked in communications for environmentally focused NGOs, again, in the Bay Area. And I've worked as an environmental journalist covering sea level rise, hurricanes, energy policy, annual UN climate negotiations, for venues like The Nation, Grist, Sierra Magazine. So I come at this from a number of different angles in addition to my academic training and literature.
On the historical division between science and humanities disciplines in education
GERHARDT: Some of the challenges in connecting these disciplines actually come out of the ways in which academia, universities were structured. So thinking sciences or the environment and the humanities together is something that one sees done a lot in Hawaiʻi, in the Pacific, but it's western notions of university structures that give us basically the structures of universities to the present day. So the fact that we have a college of natural sciences, we have a college of arts and humanities, these are constructs. These disciplines do not need to be separated. And one of the kinds of things that the environmental humanities seeks to do is to restore those kinds of connections between the disciplines, because the humanities fields have a way of engaging with the environment that actually benefits people who are in the sciences.
On the decline of humanities degrees across the country
GERHARDT: I think one of the major issues with the humanities that is responsible for its decline is funding from the federal and the state level. In the decade that I've been [at UH Mānoa], we've had consistent threats of cutting particular programs, specifically in the humanities from the state Legislature. Mānoa is disproportionately funded at that level relative to other systems I've taught in, like the University of California system. To keep the focus on the positive, the environmental humanities is one of the areas within the humanities [that] has been disproportionately growing. You can measure that in terms of programs, in terms of students enrolled, in terms of majors, in terms of publications, most major university presses have established series and environmental humanities. I'm editor of a journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature in the Environment, which is one of two large journals focused on this field. And there's an uptick in interest in publishing in this area.
On approaching climate change through different academic fields and the design of the course
GERHARDT: If we start to look at all different disciplines through the lens of climate change, meaning what solutions are we therefore going to put forward, and we climate proof our Shidler College of Business, and we climate proof the John A. Burns School of Medicine and think about how that needs to engage and grapple with climate change. We'd be in a good place to weather the coming storms.
GERHARDT: Specifically in terms of environmental humanities, what is the focus going to be? We have decided, aside from being interdisciplinary, to center Hawaiian and Pacific Island studies and Indigenous studies. And the reasons for that are numerous. It's a large portion of the constituency in terms of our undergraduates. A lot of the undergraduate population does come from either the Hawaiian Islands or the Pacific Islands. Even if students are not Hawaiian or are not Pacific Islanders, just honoring the place that they are studying in is really crucial.
On students' role in fighting climate change
GERHARDT: There's so many different burdens among the generation of traditional-aged undergraduates right now. Climate change is one of the issues. The cost of living here and then the number of jobs our students work, and then the rise in cost of tuition and student loan debt, those are other issues. And I feel like just working to address one of those issues is what I can do. And teaching students that they don't have to address everything in climate change, just pick your little niche field and what you're concerned about. Focus on sea level rise or drought. Not everything has to be addressed, but action is always better than inaction.
Professor Christina Gerhardt is the author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. She is establishing the "Environmental Humanities" course at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Gerhardt will offer the first course [IS 260] online this summer via the UHM Outreach College. More information can be found here.
