Lecture Notes on Environmental Humanities

General Discussion

  • A lone table to think about what you said.
  • Provoke good debates.
  • The podcast was skipped by someone.

Canva and PowerPoint Presentations

  • Canva is being used on Canvas.
  • Another presentation will be made using PowerPoint.
  • A physical version of the presentation is allowed if a digital version is submitted.
  • Pictures of a printed-out presentation on cardboard are acceptable with scripture.
  • A digital version should also be submitted.

Upcoming Class

  • Next week, class time will be dedicated to workshopping ideas, especially the rhythm component.

Digital Humanities

  • Digital humanities were discussed last week, including whether it is a discipline or an interdisciplinary set of tools and methods.
  • It is not quite a discipline in the same way as previous topics.

Environmental Humanities

  • Environmental humanities overflow the divide between science and us.
  • It relates to physical sciences like physical geography, biology, ecology, geology, and climate science.

Bell Plumwood's Reading: Nature in the Active Voice

  • The first half of the hour will focus on Bell Plumwood's reading.
  • The article unpacks underlying conceptual ideas of environmental humanities.

Core Terms and Concepts

  • Discussing Plumwood's article will help unpack core terms and concepts.
  • Key ideas include:
    • Anthropocene: Not in the article but mentioned in Stephanie Fischl's audio lecture; the environment of humanities emerges and comes into its own
    • Dualism or Reductive Materialism
    • Animism as an Enriched Materialism
    • Anthropomorphism

Environmental Philosophy

  • Plumwood works within the tradition of environmental philosophy, which deals with ideas and concepts in abstract terms.
  • Starting with this article is a good way to get into the environmental humanities.

Cartesian Epistemology

  • Connection to "cognito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am).
  • Implications within Anthropocene and world context.

Cartesian Dualism

  • The same issues that Plumwood addresses relate to Cartesian dualism.
  • Environmental humanities rejects this dualism and tries to build something different.
  • Understanding dualistic backgrounds in Western philosophy is important.
Cognito Ergo Sum
  • Originates from Descartes, who sought certainty by doubting everything he could.
  • He realized he could not doubt his own thinking, leading to "I think, therefore I am.”
  • Thought or mind is the one thing that can be absolutely certain.
  • The separation between the material and mind, world is matter, which is dead and inert and not active, not creative in any way. Raises prospects of immortality and ethical problems.

Dualities

  • Human nature; culture nature; and mind matter choices.
  • Human consciousness brings meaning to the world, which is otherwise inert.
  • Descartes extends this to animals, considering them automata without inner nature or self-awareness, only having value in relation to human beings.

Determining Value

  • Determining the value of a species of trees.
  • Agriculturally, some species of plants and ecosystems are vital.
  • Their worth is established within their own systems.
  • There's a constant battle between perceived worth by humans and actual contribution.

Compassion

  • Humans have compassion for things.
  • That's the reason we don't, you know, ceaselessly murder or, you know, do terrible things to animals.
  • A selfish human decision?
    • Humans saying that we are only doing this because we believe that it's there, because we want that to be in a positive way with ourselves.
Scenario
  • Wanting to breathe and own a home.
  • However, cutting down trees and ecosystems is needed to do that.
  • Taking away oxygen to gain something else.

Worth System

  • Humane worth system is emotional and instinctual.
  • Cultural values change depending on the environment, which changes the worth of something.
  • Adding religious and interpersonal beliefs into the mix, changes the worth of something further.

Cartesian Philosophy

  • Cartesian belief where external deity created everything and therefore everything has value.
  • The god or the deity is outside the system.
Materialist Reductionism Philosophy
  • Matter is completely inert.
  • There's no kind of creative energy in it or anything like that.
  • In order to infuse anything with meaning beyond human beings just infusing things with their own meaning.
  • There has to be this creator that comes from outside.
Science
  • Reductive forms of science have themselves to blame for creationism.
  • A sufficiently stripped down dualized machine nature demands an external anthra form.
Thinking Differently
  • The real alternatives are not creationism versus reductionism, but creationism slash reductionism versus animism as enriched materialism.
Enriched Materialism
  • There is a god or some sort of spiritual force within matter.
  • It's not external, not the creationist who sets the wheels in motion.
  • It's the sense of the kind of spiritual value or godliness within matter itself.
    • Referred to as an enriched materialism.
    • It is still a materialism and still focused on the material reality of the world, but it's not this kind of dead materialism of a sort of machine world.
  • She's a philosophical animist.
  • People talk about this as kind of panentheism or panpsychism.
  • Nature is an active and a creative force.
Indigenous Knowledges
  • Increasingly normalized in Australian English now.
  • A conception of land which has spiritual values in it and relational connections between people.
  • Assigning personas to landmarks represents meaning for them.
  • They view land as part of their society.

Terminology

  • Difference between country and land.

Active Voice

  • Discussing nature in the active voice.
  • Something a noun does rather than something that has things done to it.
  • Thinking about nature with periods of agency.
  • Nature is another word that has complicated connotations.
  • The more than human world is an agent.

Anthropocene

  • The theory of the Anthropocene is the idea that humans are active agents.
  • Aware of the Anthropocene because nature keeps doing things back to us so much.
Anthropomorphism
  • A policeman for reductive materialism.
  • The kind of policeman of our minds that stops us from thinking differently.
  • It is a trick of the mind.

Ethics

  • Adds up to a ethic of embeddedness and an ethic of connection.
  • Very often related to indigenous knowledge as indigenous ways of being.
  • Claims about certain philosophies, certain ways of viewing the world, and certain ethical commitments that are not things that come out of research.

Perspective

  • Ethical to value any sort of value our own country, we have to ascribe human personas or characteristics to it.

Environmental

  • Then I want to think a bit more about what some of the other sub disciplines are the environmental.
Fields of Environmental Analysis
  • Thinking about the theoretical links between these sort of fields of environmental analysis.
Versions
  • People talking about similar things, but actually a very different kind of commitments than people doing so

Ecocriticism

  • Fairly new thing within the academic field.
  • Came to fruition in the nineteen nineties, 1992.
  • Initiatives such as the Earth Bible one is there to critically reinterpret text and events and bring to life that information and sort of, like, take it a step back and be like, hey. Here's the literacy evidence that we can apply to that to show the meaning, so to speak.

Australian ecocriticism field

  • Within humanities as part of the intercultural endeavor within the Australian ecocriticism field.
  • Be explained by building bridges between the sciences and humanities and how they can affect each other.
  • A way to do that is to engage in events and then literacy evidence to sort of give that context again and helps us further evaluate it via the biblical text, for example, via the indigenous artwork that they used to communicate, hieroglyphics, etcetera.
  • A way of developing moral action in relation to the natural world being renewed.

Eco Critical Lens

  • The only one that I can really distinctly remember reading was Curtis I think I almost kind of, like, at the time didn't quite know what to do with it because it actually felt like it robbed against the kind of very be critical of everything kind of skills I was learning is why this is important.
  • The need for it.
  • Events like the colonization is what has stripped.
  • An in-depth subject.

Environmental Studies in IR and Political Science

  • Sub discipline developed in response kinda just to the Anthropocene
  • To try and mitigate the harm caused by global warming and climate change.
  • Developed in response to, like, the necessity for global policy that kind of mitigates those harms, like the Paris Agreement and the 2017 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
  • A treaty for 02/1930, the coal elimination treaty.

Mabo Decision

  • 1992.
  • Literature.

Relationship between Humans and Nature

  • Talking about the relationship between humans and nature and how so that's sort of the shape of industrialization, sustainability, the Anthropocene.
  • The history wasn't really sort of in the mainstream until, like, the nineteen fifties when you had a little bit more understanding, like, ecological crisis crises.
  • Influence that comes that that changes how humans behave based on nature and there's an influence on nature based on how humans behave.
  • Humans are influenced by nature by where they are in the world and what they're doing with the resources of the world