{"id":8051,"date":"2015-04-09T10:30:43","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T15:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8051"},"modified":"2015-04-09T10:51:55","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T15:51:55","slug":"33%e2%85%93-environmental-studies-greats-or-a-canon-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/04\/09\/33%e2%85%93-environmental-studies-greats-or-a-canon-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"33\u2153 Environmental Studies greats (or, a canon, revisited)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a significantly revised version of an article I posted<\/a> to the Indications<\/a>\u00a0blog\u00a0(and\u00a0etc<\/a>)\u00a0five and a half years ago. I was curious to see how much of it still holds (a lot, I think), so I’ve revisited it and expanded its proposed sort-of-canon, in the second part of what follows, into a list of 33 or so classics and quasi-classics of the environmental studies — and, at least through substantial overlap, environmental humanities — field(s). Comments welcome.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Throbbing-Gristle-20-Jazz-Funk-Greats\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is there an Environmental Studies canon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

An e-mail asking about an \u201cenvironmental studies canon,\u201d sent to\u00a0the ASLE listserv<\/a>\u00a0in 2009\u00a0by veteran environmental writer John Lane, might have flared up into a full-throttle debate over the joys and pitfalls of disciplinary canonization, but quickly fizzled out, probably due to its coinciding with the end of summer and beginning of the fall semester. John\u2019s proposed list, shared below, reflected the \u201cmainstream\u201d American environmental studies consensus fairly well, and the responses pointed\u00a0both to its problems and to the breadth of unquestioned support some of its texts would get from those who teach in the field.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Lane\u2019s initial suggestion of canonic readings leaned toward the traditionalist end of American environmental studies (henceforth, “ES”). Here it is…\u00a0(Quiz question: what do almost all of the following have in common?)<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Aldo Leopold\u2019s \u201cThe Land Ethic\u201d from Sand County Almanac<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Garrett Hardin\u2019s \u201cTragedy of the Commons\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. Preface to Jared Diamond\u2019s Collapse<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  4. Henry Thoreau\u2019s \u201cWalking\u201d<\/li>\n
  5. First chapter of Silent Spring<\/em>\u00a0by Rachel Carson.<\/li>\n
  6. Wallace Stegner\u2019s \u201cWilderness Letter\u201d<\/li>\n
  7. \u201cSeeing\u201d by Annie Dillard from\u00a0Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  8. Robinson Jeffers\u2019 \u201cHurt Hawk\u201d<\/li>\n
  9. Something from E.O. Wilson [?]<\/li>\n
  10. Barry Lopez\u2019s \u201cChildren in the Woods\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The first\u00a0criticism that arose within minutes of its\u00a0posting was that this list represented a bunch of white males, with two token white females, and that all were American (i.e., USan, pronounced \u201cyou-essan\u201d). Suggested additions and replacements to that list included Robert Bullard\u2019s\u00a0Dumping in Dixie<\/a><\/em>, Deming and Savoy\u2019s Colors of Nature<\/a><\/em>, Cherrie Moraga\u2019s Heroes and Saints<\/em>, Wole Soyinka\u2019s The Swamp-Dwellers<\/em>, Vandana Shiva\u2019s Staying Alive<\/em>, Karl Polanyi\u2019s historical treatise The Great Transformation<\/em>, Ursula LeGuin\u2019s SF novel The Dispossessed<\/em>, and Neil Evernden\u2019s ecophilosophical The Natural Alien<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    To the first list, based on other list members\u2019 responses and suggestions, Lane eventually added a series of other readings, which included Al Gore\u2019s Earth in the Balance<\/em>, Bill McKibben\u2019s The End of Nature<\/em>, Michael Soule\u2019s and Daniel Press\u2019s provocative 1998 Conservation Biology article \u201cWhat Is Environmental Studies?<\/a>\u201d (but I would suggest you read Maniates\u2019 and Whissel\u2019s reply <\/a>to that as well), David Orr\u2019s Earth in Mind<\/em>, Aldo Leopold\u2019s \u201cThinking like a mountain\u201d, E.O. Wilson\u2019s \u201cBiophilia and the conservation ethic\u201d and Stephen Kellert\u2019s \u201cThe biological basis for human values of nature\u201d (both from Wilson\/Kellert\u2019s collection The Biophilia Hypothesis<\/em>), Richard Louv\u2019s Last Child in the Woods<\/em>, Paul Dayton\u2019s & Enric Sala\u2019s \u201cNatural history: the sense of wonder, creativity, and progress in ecology<\/a>\u201c, Wendell Berry\u2019s \u201cIn distrust of movements\u201d and \u201cThe idea of a local economy,\u201d Frances Moore Lapp\u00e9 and Paul Martin Du Bois\u2019s \u201cDemocracy\u2019s lifeblood\u201d, The Brundtland Commission’s\u00a0\u201cOn Population, Environment, and Development\u201d, and Michael Pollan\u2019s \u201cNaturally\u201d, \u201cPower steer\u201d, and \u201cWhen a crop becomes king\u201d (three essays that presaged The Omnivore’s Dilemma<\/em>). To soften\u00a0the blow of a still overwhelmingly white, male, and essayistic list, he added\u00a0Stephen White\u2019s translation of Pablo Antonio Cuadra\u2019s Seven Trees Against the Dying Light<\/em><\/a>, Helena Maria Viramontes\u2019 Under the Feet of Jesus<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>, Luis Sep\u00falveda\u2019s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories<\/a><\/em>, and cartoonist Gary Larson\u2019s There’s a Hair in My Dirt<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

    Any such attempted canonization inevitably raises as many questions as it answers. The field has had a handful of\u00a0anthologies that have already tried to create such a canon (such is the nature of anthologies): Glenn Adelson et al\u2019s Environment<\/a><\/em>\u00a0mega-tome, Nelissen, van Straaten & Kliners\u2019 Classics in Environmental Studies<\/a><\/em>, and Olszewski & Schiavo\u2019s now out-of-print Readings in Environmental Studies<\/em> (both of the latter could use updating), as well as loosely related anthologies like American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau<\/em> (McKibben, ed., 2008), The Palgrave Environmental Reader<\/em> (Payne & Newman, eds., 2005), and various British and other analogues. Related fields like \u201cgreen studies\u201d (see Laurence Coupe\u2019s collection\u00a0The Green Studies Reader<\/a><\/em>), environmental humanities, ecocriticism, et al. have all featured somewhat more specific anthologies.<\/p>\n

    But there are so many directions one could go with environmental studies canonization \u2014 e.g., towards literature and poetry (Whitman, Wordsworth, Callenbach\u2019s Ecotopia<\/em>, Frank Herbert\u2019s Dune<\/em>); literary and cultural history (Raymond Williams\u2019 The\u00a0Country and the City<\/em>, Simon Schama\u2019s Landscape and Memory<\/em>); popular science (Ehrlich\u2019s The Population Bomb<\/em>, Lovelock\u2019s Gaia<\/em>, Gregory Bateson\u2019s Mind and Nature<\/em>, Humberto Maturana\u2019s and Francesco Varela\u2019s The Tree of Knowledge<\/em>); environmental history (Carolyn Merchant\u2019s The Death of Nature<\/em>, Alfred Crosby\u2019s Ecological Imperialism<\/em>, Richard Grove\u2019s Green Imperialism<\/em>); ecophilosophy (Val Plumwood\u2019s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature<\/em>, Murray Bookchin\u2019s Ecology of Freedom<\/em> \u2014 which is less philosophy than all-round interdisciplinary historical treatise); religion and ecology (Lynn White\u2019s classic article, which I\u2019m surprised no one seemed to mention, Vine Deloria\u2019s God Is Red<\/em>, Catherine Albanese\u2019s Nature Religion in America<\/em>); green political theory (Robyn Eckersley\u2019s Environmentalism and Political Theory<\/em>); eco-sociology (Ulrich Beck\u2019s The Risk Society<\/em>); and so on.<\/p>\n

    And then there\u2019s the inevitable question of whether we are selecting for influence or for continued relevance \u2014 for instance, whether Hardin\u2019s \u201cTragedy of the Commons\u201d should still be read without, at the very least, supplementing it with the many counter-arguments that have made his original argument seem so tenuous (see, e.g., Ostrom et al\u2019s Revisiting the Commons<\/a><\/em>); ditto with Lynn White, Ehrlich\u2019s early work, and so on.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    With all those caveats in mind, then, I would like to propose my own list of\u00a033\u2153\u00a0Environmental Studies Classics<\/strong>\u00a0(no relation to the wonderful Bloomsbury book series<\/a>).<\/p>\n

    It’s not so much a recognized canon as a canon and counter-canon combined, including some\u00a0works I think deserve much wider recognition. It\u2019s biased towards the interdisciplinary, historical, and political-ecological — \u201cgreen theory\u201d that reflects the growth of green politics more than academic environmental studies, and that prefers synthetic and holistic thinking about nature-society relations over the inspirational (eco-literature, ecopoetry, and the like). Not that the literary and inspirational cannot also be synthetic and holistic, or that it shouldn\u2019t count as \u201cenvironmental studies\u201d — just that that would be a separate list, for another day, and that it would be too difficult to come up with in any case, once we get to sifting through all the essays, novels, and\u00a0poems\u00a0in the world that effectively convey the interdependence of humans and the larger-than-human world.<\/p>\n

    In other words, once we agree that \u201cenvironmental studies\u201d is not<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0equivalent to \u201cU.S. environmental studies\u201d (and that it’s broader than “the environmental humanities”), we open ourselves up to a vast world of writing and culture. Still, the world we share faces some common dilemmas that have to do with learning to recognize and work with the tight intertwinings of human and nonhuman worlds, and the following readings, while all recognizable \u201chits\u201d within one field or another, contribute to working those dilemmas out. All have either been influential in at least some versions of the field of environmental studies or (by my account) they should<\/em> be influential.<\/p>\n

    Here goes…<\/p>\n

    \"cannon-shot\"<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    A Canon: 33\u2153 Environmental Studies Greats<\/strong>\u00a0(listed in roughly chronological order):<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species<\/a>\u00a0(1859) — Without Darwin (or someone else, like Wallace, to play his role in an alternate universe), there’d be nothing.<\/li>\n
    2. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action<\/a>\u00a0(1864) — I live in Marsh’s Vermont (a state radically changed — much more forested and green — since his day), so I can’t really not mention it. But it holds its own.<\/li>\n
    3. Vladimir Vernadsky,\u00a0Biosfera (<\/a>The Biosphere<\/a>,\u00a0first published in Russian in 1926) — Building on Darwin and Marsh,\u00a0Vernadsky first articulates<\/a> the global, and even cosmic, scope of the ecological vision.<\/li>\n
    4. Mohandas Gandhi,\u00a0The Story of My Experiments with Truth<\/a>\u00a0(first published 1925-28, India) — Environmental activism would not be what it is without Gandhi’s ideas and examples, and this first autobiography (covering the years up to 1921) conveys where that comes from better than any other book.<\/li>\n
    5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation<\/a> (1944) — It’s difficult to understand the capitalist\u00a0transformation of relations between humans and land without reading Polanyi.<\/li>\n
    6. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac<\/a>\u00a0(1949) —\u00a0Remains a classic, particularly for its articulation of a Leopold’s famous “Land Ethic.”<\/li>\n
    7. Rachel Carson,\u00a0Silent Spring <\/a>(1962)\u00a0<\/em>— If any book can be single-handedly credited with launching the modern environmental movement, it’s this. (Best\u00a0read with an analysis of Carson’s method, such as Lorraine Code’s Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location<\/a>.)<\/li>\n
    8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind<\/a> (1967) — Classic historical overview of the American conservation and wilderness preservation movements.<\/li>\n
    9. Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth<\/a>\u00a0(1972) — I include it only for its historical significance in influencing the field of environmental studies. Read it (if you will) alongside the 30-year<\/a> and 40-year<\/a> updates. Modeling remains all the rage, so it’s important to have a sense of its usefulness alongside its pitfalls.<\/li>\n
    10. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society<\/a>\u00a0(1972) — A powerful articulation of the\u00a0Romantic counter-tradition to industrial modernity. Captures what was best about the counterculture, which was so influential on the environmentalism of the 1970s.<\/li>\n
    11. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature<\/a> (1979) — It’s difficult to choose between Bateson’s many writings. This is his\u00a0last\u00a0book published while he was alive and contains a succinct overview of his “epistemology” for overcoming human-nature (and mind-matter) dualism.<\/li>\n
    12. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy<\/a>\u00a0(1989, based on his 1976 Norwegian original) — A distillation of the Naess’s philosophical writings on\u00a0“deep ecology,” marked by their sophistication and ambiguity (in comparison with some of what came out of that philosophical school later).<\/li>\n
    13. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy<\/a> (1982) — The most satisfying and capacious work by the founder of the “social ecology” school of radical environmental thought and practice.<\/li>\n
    14. Donald Worster, Nature\u2019s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas<\/a>\u00a0(orig. 1977, revised 1994) — Probably still the best single introduction to, as he calls it, the history of ecological ideas.<\/li>\n
    15. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space<\/a>\u00a0(1984) — Provided a crucial injection of Marxian political economy into environmental thinking, and did it provocatively and smartly.<\/li>\n
    16. Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment<\/a> (1985) — This\u00a0Canadian ecophilosopher’s book marks the first deep infusion of Continental thinking (especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but also Jakob von Uexkull, Adolf Portmann, and others) into North American eco-theory.<\/li>\n
    17. Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution<\/a>\u00a0(1985, rev. 2000) \u2013 For anyone with leanings towards oversimplified evolutionism, especially of the sociobiological “selfish gene” school, Oyama provides the most sophisticated antidote. A must read for the eco-biopolitics of the 21st century.<\/li>\n
    18. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900<\/a>\u00a0(1986) — Good for giving a sense of biocultural change writ large, by an eminent historian. Start here and avoid some of the pitfalls that\u00a0other popularizers, such as Jared Diamond and\u00a0E. O. Wilson, have fallen into.<\/li>\n
    19. World Commission on Environment and Development (Gro\u00a0Harlem Brundtland, chair), Our Common Future<\/a>\u00a0(1987) — As with The Limits to Growth<\/em> (#9 above), this is included for its historical significance in shaping international conversations around environment, development, and the future of humanity.<\/li>\n
    20. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science<\/a>\u00a0(1989) — Haraway\u2019s most thorough historical study, it chisels away at our inherited ideas of the human and the natural by showing how we can never get ourselves (society, economy, politics) out of the picture. What better place to do that than the hinge at which we try to separate ourselves from the rest of our relatives: primatology?<\/li>\n
    21. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality<\/a> (1990) — One of the launching points of the environmental justice movement, by an African-American sociologist whose research provided key insights to galvanize that movement.<\/li>\n
    22. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern<\/a>\u00a0(1991, Eng. 1993) — While its style of argumentation errs on the dramatic and\u00a0impishly provocateurial, here\u2019s where Latour makes the clearest case for a thoroughly transdisciplinary dismantling of nature-culture dualism. Still the best introduction to Latour’s thinking.<\/li>\n
    23. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature<\/a>\u00a0(1993) — Perhaps the most significant theoretical work from the ecofeminist branch of environmental philosophy.<\/li>\n
    24. Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind<\/a>\u00a0(1993) — A good introduction to Shiva\u2019s important Southern voice on ecology, biology, and science.<\/li>\n
    25. The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons<\/a>\u00a0(1994) — Still a cogent injection of political smartness into discussions of environment, sustainability, and globalization; and a good summary of one of the responses to Garrett Hardin\u2019s “tragedy of the commons” argument.<\/li>\n
    26. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River<\/a>\u00a0(1995) \u2013 A little book and a quick read, but immensely rewarding, from a leading environmental historian who thoroughly incorporates the thick historical entwining of nature and culture that so many others only pay lip service to.<\/li>\n
    27. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism<\/a> (1995) — Adds significantly to the global picture built up by Crosby (#18 above) and others.<\/li>\n
    28. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature<\/a> (1996) — First big splash of the interdisciplinary field of “environmental humanities,” and an important salvo in the “nature wars<\/a>” (the eco- wing of the “science wars”).<\/li>\n
    29. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South<\/a> (1997) — Another essential\u00a0contribution from Southern voices (see #24 above).<\/li>\n
    30. Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History<\/a>\u00a0(1997) — A cutting-edge, Deleuzian complex-systems analysis of the last thousand years of geological, biological, economic, and cultural change, this book deserves wider readership than it’s gotten.<\/li>\n
    31. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder<\/a> (2005) — Its central argument about the need for “experience in nature,” and it’s journalistic but synoptic style of making its case (with reference to scientific research), have been so influential among average folks that it’s difficult to argue against the\u00a0inclusion of this book.<\/li>\n
    32. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed<\/a> (2005) — Its problems are many and legion (among anthropologists, geographers, and others who study these things), but the case Diamond makes for the unnamed field of “collapsology,” or how societies collapse (ecologically) and how they could keep themselves from collapsing, is an essential argument for everything good that goes under the name of “sustainability” these days. (There is, of course, more than just the good, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize.)<\/li>\n
    33. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate<\/a>\u00a0(2014) — For my\u00a0earlier<\/a>\u00a0list, I specified that “classic” status required at least a decade’s digestion. This time around, I’m willing to grant “instant classic” status to at least this one book. It packs so much in, and generates enough controversy, to keep the topic alive for some time to come. (Another candidate for “instant classic” might be Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction<\/a>, but let’s leave exceptions exceptional.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      There you go.<\/p>\n

      Grad students, read those 33 books and you will be ready to write your comps.\u00a0Anyone<\/em>, read them\u00a0and you will be qualified to call yourself environmentally prepared (in theory, not necessarily in practice) for the 21st century.<\/p>\n

      (I’m sure I’m forgetting important books, for which I apologize. The list can, of course, grow indefinitely and your<\/em> book, dear reader, most certainly deserves to be on some version of it!)<\/p>\n

      But\u00a0if you’re like most people and don’t have time to read 33 books, but might have time for one — if it was short and sweet (making it the missing “\u2153”) — the one I’d recommend is Ramachandra Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History<\/em><\/a> (Longman, 2000). It could use an update, but if you’ll only read one book of all of these, then you could use an update, too… \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The following is a significantly revised version of an article I posted to the Indications\u00a0blog\u00a0(and\u00a0etc)\u00a0five and a half years ago. I was curious to see how much of it still holds (a lot, I think), so I’ve revisited it and expanded its proposed sort-of-canon, in the second part of what follows, into a list of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203,196],"tags":[286,16146,123617,291,25057,16147,123584],"class_list":["post-8051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-ecoculture","tag-asle","tag-canon","tag-canonism-anti-canonism","tag-ecocriticism","tag-environmental-humanities","tag-environmental-studies","tag-john-lane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-25R","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2134,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/05\/environmental-humanities-series-update\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":0},"title":"Environmental Humanities series update","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Consider the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series for your next manuscript... The new series poster is here. The Environmental Humanities Series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8785,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/06\/08\/state-of-the-eco-humanities-take-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":1},"title":"State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term \"Environmental Humanities\" has\u00a0caught on in ways that \"Eco-Humanities\" and other variations have not, but the debate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8637,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/03\/19\/what-we-ask-students-to-read\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":2},"title":"What we ask students to read…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Both\u00a0Open Culture\u00a0and The New York Times have reported on the Open Syllabus Project, which has tallied over\u00a0a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts. The project also provides a\u00a0cluster map\u00a0of these texts, which is probably less interesting (and more confusing) in its large\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5128,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/01\/environmental-humanities-the-challenge-of-multidisciplinarity\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":3},"title":"Environmental Humanities & the Challenge of Multidisciplinarity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"CALL FOR PAPERS: Environmental Humanities and the Challenge of Multidisciplinarity A Workshop at the 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, \u201cThe Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling \u2018The Three Narratives\u2019\u2014Art, Science, and Philosophy\u201d University of Cyprus, Nicosia July 2 \u2013 6, 2012 THEME OF\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11559,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/29\/eco-humanities-seminar\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":4},"title":"Eco-humanities seminar","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 29, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I will be making parts of my \"Advanced Environmental Humanities\" course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I'd like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/Juxtapoz_Marzorati1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/Juxtapoz_Marzorati1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/Juxtapoz_Marzorati1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/Juxtapoz_Marzorati1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7516,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/05\/18\/top-humanists-of-the-last-century\/","url_meta":{"origin":8051,"position":5},"title":"Top humanists of the last century","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A\u00a0theme that's been coming up in my conversations recently (including when visiting\u00a0UC Davis) is the question of the\u00a0\"humanities canon\": i.e., who are the theorists whose views have been most influential in shaping the humanities disciplines, especially over the last century or so? And more specifically, is there anything approximating an\u00a0\"environmental\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Foucault6","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/05\/Foucault6-190x275.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8051"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8197,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8051\/revisions\/8197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}