A Humanities Approach to Climate Education — News from Syracuse University

Participants of the Green Teaching Summit met lakeside at the Minnowbrook Conference Center in the Adirondacks.

Can religion, philosophy, history, English and writing help address the problems of climate change, the environment and ecology? Absolutely, says Mike Goode, professor of English and the outgoing William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities. With his Tolley Professorship, a role designed to enhance the educational experience and increase effectiveness in the classroom, he aims to demonstrate how important the humanities are in helping society understand and respond to today’s complex environmental challenges. Here are just four of many ways humanities scholars are involved in climate research:

A. More than just a card: While maps represent selected data about a place, humanities scholars play a key role in translating and communicating maps’ messages about power, representation, and the urgency of climate change – critical insights for leaders making decisions about resource allocation and policy implementation.

B. Losing languages: Climate change doesn’t just affect the physical world. It also affects human culture. When climate change forces people to leave their homes, they often lose their language as well. By studying language endangerment, humanities scholars investigate the causes, processes and consequences of language extinction and work on ways to preserve them.

C. Religion and Ecology: Religious scholars might examine the environmental impacts of festivals and pilgrimages that attract millions of people to an area. Or scholars of sacred texts might examine how they shape environmental awareness in different faith traditions, raising political questions and doctrinal concerns.

D. Human-animal interrelationship: Bestiaries or works about mythical creatures can stimulate discussions about the interrelationship between humans and animals in different countries and contexts.

A key component of Goode’s professorship was to highlight opportunities for faculty and staff across campus to share resources to help students respond to the impacts of the climate crisis and think ecologically.

Inspired in part by a successful collaboration with the Syracuse University Art Museum, in which Goode worked with staff and students to explore how objects and artworks from the museum’s collection could be used as resources for teaching ecology and climate, he wanted to explore how others at the university could form partnerships to improve their own research and teaching in ecology. In May, he gathered a team of faculty from many humanities disciplines for the Green Teaching Summit at the university’s Minnowbrook Conference Center in the Adirondacks. The three-day conference offered scholars the opportunity to discover common interests and forge collaborations—all in a place that is itself ecologically vulnerable.

Arts and Sciences Communications (A&S) caught up with Goode to talk about his motivation for the summit and how the humanities play a critical role in sparking ecological discussions.

Why is it so important for humanities scholars to focus on ecology and climate right now?

I remember one of my professors, Homi Bhabha, declaring during my PhD in English in the early 1990s that every humanities course, regardless of our training and expertise, would soon have to grapple with the history of colonialism and empires in some way. His comment was met with considerable skepticism from the audience at the time, but it proved prophetically correct. We are facing a similar tipping point in the humanities. Regardless of our training and expertise, we are probably less than a decade away from a time when every one of our courses will have to grapple with ecology, climate, and environmental justice in some way. As Tolley Professor, I focused on helping the humanities at Syracuse University prepare for this coming shift and increase their visibility on campus.

Between presentation sessions, teachers met to discuss collaborations on the shores of Blue Mountain Lake.

What was the inspiration for the Green Teaching Summit?

Because the Tolley Professorship is charged with expanding and improving humanities education, I wanted the summit to be a humanities-focused event with faculty from a variety of environmental disciplines. I wanted as many of the most recently hired humanities faculty with tenure prospects to participate as possible, along with staff who could identify ways to make even better use of campus resources so that the next generation of humanities faculty would be equipped with the critical perspectives necessary to raise awareness, inspire action, and help shape socially just and culturally sensitive policies.

What do you hope the faculty can take away from this experience?

I had three goals:

1. Encourage people on campus who already teach in these areas to connect with each other, describe their work in the classroom, learn more about how different subjects are taught from different disciplinary perspectives, and lay the groundwork for future initiatives and collaborations.
2. Highlight campus resources, centers, and offices with which you can collaborate on experiential learning, student success, and professional development related to ecology, climate, and environmental justice issues.
3. Bridge the generations by connecting Syracuse’s newly hired and tenured humanities faculty with the senior faculty on campus who already teach and research in these fields so that we can inspire each other, learn from each other, and collaborate in the future.

What are the benefits of bringing together a group of scientists (and administrators) for a summit like this? Do you think the setting was/is particularly important?

One piece of feedback I’ve repeatedly received from participants is that they weren’t aware of how many other people on campus teach in these areas, and they were excited to meet faculty with similar interests that they might not have otherwise met. The setting of the Adirondacks, as aesthetically pleasing as it may be, also likely contributed to a sense of urgency, as several of the weekend’s talks touched on the region’s ecological vulnerability and its connection to the history of environmental injustice through Native American displacement and dispossession.

As you complete your two-year Tolley Professorship this summer, what are you hoping to achieve from the Green Teaching Summit at SU?

I would love to see a dedicated chair in environmental humanities created. o (pictured, at podium), University Professor of Environmental Systems and Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Computer Science, gave a talk titled “The Adirondack Park and Its Lakes.” In his talk, he discussed how human-caused climate change has changed the Adirondacks. Specifically, the burning of fossil fuels has led to increases in acid rain and mercury levels, and as a result, people are forced to limit their consumption of fish, such as bass caught in the lakes of the Adirondacks. Like the SCRC and the Belfer Sound Archive. Unfortunately, climate change is all of our futures and every single faculty member needs to be able to address it in their teaching. I really hope that the newest humanities faculty on campus left the summit energized to devote more time to this project in their own teaching going forward.

For more information about the Green Teaching Summit, visit the College of Arts and Sciences website.