Owain gained an MSc (Society and Space) and PhD in Cultural Geography at the world-leading Department of Geography, University of Bristol 1993-1997. Conducting post-doctoral research at Bristol, Exeter, the Open University and other institutions, in a series of RCUK funded projects, we has studied and written about many aspects of nature-society relations including; landscape, place and memory; the environmental crisis; children’s geographies; and transformative theories of pragmatism and non-representation. He has conducted research projects on water and society (floods, tides, coastal cultures); trees, place and landscape; and childhood, memory, nature and place. He led a £1.5 million Art and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities project which involves eight UK universities, and numerous community partners and artists in four case study areas across the UK. This project sought to creatively explore and transform connections within and between communities, and communities and nature, in relation to water issues. Owain was appointed as the first Professor of Environmental Humanities in the UK in 2014 at Bath Spa University, and was deputy director of the Research Centre for the Environmental Humanities 2016 – 2019. He has published/co-published over 90 scholarly articles and five books; Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide: Embodiment, performance, practice (2023), with Anna Pigott, and Ben Parry; Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago: Imagining Islands (2018), with Ysanne Holt and David-Martin-Jones; Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (2017), with Michelle Bastian, Niamh Moore and Emma Roe; Geography and Memory: Identity, Place and Becoming, (2012), with Jo Garde-Hansen; Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees, and Trees in their Place (2002), with Paul Cloke. He has successfully supervised four Environmental Humanities PhDs with art practice.
Heather Green is an interdisciplinary visual artist, educator and Associate Professor of Book Arts and Printmaking at the Herberger Institute School of Art at Arizona State University. Her research examines more-than-human encounters in the intertidal and ecological narratives of abundance and loss on a small headland in the Gulf of California in Sonora, Mexico. Whether documenting the movements of the tide, interviewing fishermen, collaborating with scientists, or combing the shoreline—she aims to evoke a nuanced exactitude of place, attuning to its more subtle reaches through a practice of walking and mapping. Heather has shown her work regionally, nationally and internationally in Mexico, Spain and Uruguay, and is the recipient of the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona Visual Arts Award, the Arizona Commission on The Arts Artist Project Grant, and a Fulbright Scholar Award in Wales to work on Tidal Timespace in the Severn Estuary.
About the Exhibit.
Tides, especially macro (high range) ones connected to estuaries and mudflats, perform polyrhythmic writings and erasings; concealing and revealing the ghostly traces of the movements of creatures, materials and of the flowing water itself in the exposed sand and mud of inter-tidal areas at ebb tide. Each set of tracings, unique, is wiped away by the following tide and a new performance unveils a fresh set of inscriptions. As quintessentially liminal spaces, these landscapes provide a fleeting platform for entanglements with humans and non-humans—and each state of material becoming is haunted by what has recently been, and what is soon to become again. In this collaborative project, we think of these marks witnessed at low tide as palimpsests and capture them in plaster casts that record the still-wet, intricate patterns inscribed by invertebrates, currents, and other beings, mapping the diversity and signature of both Bahía Adair in Sonora, Mexico, and the Severn Estuary in the UK.
La Cholla — Bahía Adair
Arlingham — Severn Estuary
By examining these two landscapes side-by-side, we aim to instill a sense of reverence as well as a feeling of communal care through articulating the shared characteristics and striking distinctions of each site. Located in the Upper Gulf of California, Bahía Adair has the third-largest tidal range in North America (Flessa, Fürsich 1991) and is a sparsely populated wetland complex fringed with salt pans, freshwater springs, and multiple esteros (hypersaline inverse estuaries that occur in dry climates where evaporation exceeds inflow of freshwater). The Severn Estuary, fed by the Severn River, has the third largest tidal range in the world, and rich tidal ecologies and also cultures that have been cultivated for centuries. We hope that by comparing these two landscapes, the project can create an intriguing contrast and unique framework for bringing about awareness of climate impacts on estuaries world-wide, which look to be severe (Nienhuis et al, 2023).
Artist Books
Tide Sequence Books.
Our project also includes a set of artist books; for each site one that shows a timelapse sequence of the incoming floodtide over an hour and 45 minutes, and another that intertwines an A-Z lexicon listing ecological and historical narratives specific to each place, personal and communal memory in the form of childhood vignettes, with imagery of scripts and impressions left at low tide.
Accomplishments, Process and Progress.
The Bahía Adair portion of the project is nearly complete. Heather has been working with fisherman Rafael Peñuelas Machuca recording his childhood memories with his father in the early 60s, and diver Ernesto Gastellum who has taken her by boat or 4×4 truck to remote sites along Bahía Adair to make the casts.
For the final installation, the casts will float along the walls, their locations shown on a hand-drawn map, and the artist books will be laid out on a table for the audience to peruse. A silent auction for the individual casts and artist books will help raise money and awareness for a non-profit environmental organization CEDO Intercultural.
We will be working together on the second stage of this project at the Severn Estuary in spring 2024, working with Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Severn Estuary Partnership to record palimpsests on both the English and Welsh sides of the Estuary.
Artist Profiles
Meet the Visionary Artists Inspiring Change.
"Rhythm is to time what pattern is to space, and these need to be considered together. Tidal processes offer fertile ground on which to explore such ideas as they are so obviously temporal and spatial at once."
Lunar-solar rhythmpatterns: towards the material cultures of tides
⸺ Owain Jones
Explore more of this Exhibit
For more information, please visit:
https://www.heathergreen-art.com/tidal-timespace
https://www.heathergreen-art.com/tidal-timespace
Tidal Timespace
Imprints & Palimpsests
Heather Green & Owain Jones
Tides, especially macro (high range) ones connected to estuaries and mudflats, perform polyrhythmic writings and erasings; concealing and revealing the ghostly traces of the movements of creatures, materials and of the flowing water itself in the exposed sand and mud of inter-tidal areas at ebb tide. Each set of tracings, unique, is wiped away by the following tide and a new performance unveils a fresh set of inscriptions. As quintessentially liminal spaces, these landscapes provide a fleeting platform for entanglements with humans and non-humans—and each state of material becoming is haunted by what has recently been, and what is soon to become again. In this collaborative project, we think of these marks witnessed at low tide as palimpsests and capture them in plaster casts that record the still-wet, intricate patterns inscribed by invertebrates, currents, and other beings, mapping the diversity and signature of both Bahía Adair in Sonora, Mexico, and the Severn Estuary in the UK.
By examining these two landscapes side-by-side, we aim to instill a sense of reverence as well as a feeling of communal care through articulating the shared characteristics and striking distinctions of each site. Located in the Upper Gulf of California, Bahía Adair has the third-largest tidal range in North America (Flessa, Fürsich 1991) and is a sparsely populated wetland complex fringed with salt pans, freshwater springs, and multiple esteros (hypersaline inverse estuaries that occur in dry climates where evaporation exceeds inflow of freshwater). The Severn Estuary, fed by the Severn River, has the third largest tidal range in the world, and rich tidal ecologies and also cultures that have been cultivated for centuries. We hope that by comparing these two landscapes, the project can create an intriguing contrast and unique framework for bringing about awareness of climate impacts on estuaries world-wide, which look to be severe (Nienhuis et al, 2023).
Our project also includes a set of artist books; for each site one that shows a timelapse sequence of the incoming floodtide over an hour and 45 minutes, and another that intertwines an A-Z lexicon listing ecological and historical narratives specific to each place, personal and communal memory in the form of childhood vignettes, with imagery of scripts and impressions left at low tide.
The Bahía Adair portion of the project is nearly complete. Heather has been working with fisherman Rafael Peñuelas Machuca recording his childhood memories with his father in the early 60s, and diver Ernesto Gastellum who has taken her by boat or 4×4 truck to remote sites along Bahía Adair to make the casts. For the final installation, the casts will float along the walls, their locations shown on a hand-drawn map, and the artist books will be laid out on a table for the audience to peruse. A silent auction for the individual casts and artist books will help raise money and awareness for a non-profit environmental organization CEDO Intercultural.
We will be working together on the second stage of this project at the Severn Estuary in spring 2024, working with Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Severn Estuary Partnership to record palimpsests on both the English and Welsh sides of the Estuary.
We will be working together on the second stage of this project at the Severn Estuary in spring 2024, working with Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Severn Estuary Partnership to record palimpsests on both the English and Welsh sides of the Estuary.
It would be an impoverished sensibility if one did not feel, when on intertidal land at low tide, the strangeness of the same space at high tide. This is part of the wonder of estuaries and part of their vulnerability. And all this is overlain now by a darker future specter of climate change, sea level rise and storm surge induced erosion. Just as the mudflats become a palimpsest after the tide’s daily erasing of the cursive travel of snails and other scripted impressions, so too, do many man-made pursuits; the overwriting for development obliterates rich ecological stories and effaces local narratives.
These landscapes currently face many anthropocentric threats, some already erased, some haunted as imagined futures. The Severn Estuary has long been overshadowed by the prospect of radical reduction and even erasure by the building of a barrage. The smaller Taff Estuary within the wider Severn Estuary, in Cardiff, has undergone this fate. In Bahía Adair, rising sea temperatures are bleaching sponges and anemones, unregulated fishing practices are causing species decline (from intertidal invertebrates, reef fish, to the critically endangered endemic porpoise, the Vaquita), and in populated areas, condos, golf courses and off-road vehicles have greatly eroded or destroyed critical estuaries and intertidal habitat.
Ghosts remind us yet also point to our forgetting, and as such we seek to name the people, stories, vernacular traditions, and countless species that cohabitate in these tidal landscapes. “Untold land is unknown land,” states Lucy Lippard (1997)—names, maps and photographs are how we imagine communal history and identity. Attuning to them helps us remember and imagine the possibility of a different kind of livability. Tidal landscapes enact more than human rhythms, and to follow these rhythms, as Deborah Bird Rose (2017) describes, we need new histories and descriptions, crossing the sciences, humanities and arts.
For more information, please visit: https://www.heathergreen-art.com/tidal-timespace
North American Observatory Food Sovereignty and Syndemic Project
Background and context
For two decades, scholars in the arts and environmental humanities have been researching and teaching courses that focus on climate. More recently, they have been focusing on the links between climate, environmental injustices, food insecurities and health disparities.
Since the United Nations RIO + 20 Sustainability Conference in 2012, themed, “The Future We Want,” many community leaders and scientists have called for the integration of the humanities and arts into natural and sustainability sciences research and projects.
Humanities for the Environment has been meeting this call and innovating new projects since 2013. Each Observatory has focused on its own place-based challenges. In 2018, all Observatories agreed to focus on food cultures and food systems in an effort to scale up and unify the network’s efforts on this issue. Each Observatory launched a placed-based food-focused project to explore how humanities researchers are uniquely prepared to lead on issues surrounding food and food cultures.
Food Futures— Humanities and Social Sciences Approaches at the Asia-Pacific Observatory
2022 The International Conference on Food Futures
Food Smart Dublin
North America: From Dinner 2040 to Food Sovereignty and Syndemic
At the North American Observatory, HfE affiliates from Arizona State University began working on a new food-focused project in 2021. They had previously innovated a community-facing project, titled “Dinner 2040,” launched in 2013, which explored how Arizona might build a thriving future food system. In 2020, affiliates challenged themselves to rethink everything they knew about climate, food insecurities, and food systems after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. They framed their work as an indigenous-focused project informed by the concept of ‘syndemic,’ a term meaning ‘synchronous pandemics.’ Public health officials, doctors, and community leaders are using this term to examine the unequal and linked effects of disease, racism, structural inequities, climate injustices, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and rising extinction rates. As a concept, syndemic has also been taken up by humanists to contextualize the crucial contributions of the arts and humanities to scaled-up understanding of the links between disease, structural inequities and food insecurities to each other.
To build capacity, the team convened in the first year for reading groups, lectures, and workshops bringing in noted indigenous chefs and knowledge keepers from the Southwest and from New Zealand to read novels, watch films, and raise questions about how to think about the mutually intensifying links between obesity, malnutrition, toxic pollution and its links to human health. These activities were funded by ASU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, GFL’s Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Tracing Inequities and Mapping the Emergence of Food-sovereign Economies of Well-being
In the second year, they applied for and won a Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory seed grant under the title, “From Syndemic to Symbiosis: Tracing Inequities and Mapping the Emergence of Food-sovereign Economies of Well-being.”
Co-led by Rimjhim Aggarwal, Melissa Nelson, Joni Adamson, Joan McGregor, and Juliann Vitullo, the project team was also supported by ASU faculty and researchers, and HfE affiliates, Sara El-Sayed, Christy Spackman, Sally Kitch, and Mauricio Mejia. Other HfE affiliates supporting this work include Ilaria Tabusso-Marcyan, Joan Baron, Nalini Chhetri, Netra Chhetri, Maria Cruz-Torres, Alycia de Mesa, Hallie Eakin, Arina Melkozernova, Tracy Perkins, and Rebecca Tsosie.
The project built on several food-focused courses, co-taught by project leaders at ASU’s pedogogically-innovative Humanities Lab. These included:
- Spring 2023 Humanities Lab: “Indigenizing Food Systems II”
https://humanities.lab.asu.edu/indigenizing-food-systems-ii - Spring 2022 Humanities Lab: “Indigenizing Food Systems”
https://humanities.lab.asu.edu/indigenizing-food-systems - Fall 2022 Humanities Lab: “Justice through School Gardens”
https://humanities.lab.asu.edu/justice-through-school-gardens - Fall 2021 Humanities Lab: “Food, Health and Climate Change” https://humanities.lab.asu.edu/food-health-and-climate-change
- Fall 2018 Humanities Lab: “Re-envisioning Food Systems”
https://humanities.lab.asu.edu/re-envisioning-food-systems
In these interdisciplinary courses, students formed teams seeking to solve food challenges with humanities-led projects. (See the links provided above for more on student-led projects in each Lab).
From its earliest workshops and reading groups to its student-led projects and courses, Syndemic to Symbiosis has strengthened transdisciplinary scholarship and exchange between the research team and students and the external communities with which they worked. Specifically, the team worked with key Indigenous leaders in Arizona and New Zealand to research and explore the theory and practice of “economies of well-being” and the “Te Ha Waka” framework. The team is also in the process of analyzing the relevance and application of its findings for other BIPOC communities. Exploring the practice of “economies of well-being” has helped the team identify and propose solutions to linked epidemics, inequities and infrastructural injustices.
Project contributors understand that shortcomings in global food systems cannot be solved with technical fixes alone. This is the reason they are innovating approaches that seek sustainable change and resilient solutions that are humanities- and arts-led.
Moving forward, the team will seek additional funding to advance their work as they continue involving community leaders and innovators, farmers, chefs, indigenous and American Indian communities, Black and Latinx leaders, NGOs, artists, activities, writers and filmmakers tackling global syndemic. They also look forward to potential collaborations with other HfE Observatories which began to be explored at the Humanities for the Environment International Conference on Food Futures, Hosted by the Asia Pacific Observatory, August 31-September 4, 2022, Taipei, Taiwan.
Project activities, from most recent:
2023
February 15: Twila Cassadore Lecture to Humanities Lab. Apache Food Foraging and Cultural Well-being, Sponsored by Arizona State University’s Environmental Humanities Initiative/UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub.
2022
Humanities for the Environment International Conference on Food Futures, Hosted by the Asia Pacific Observatory, August 31-September 4, 2022, Taipei, Taiwan https://hfe-observatories.org/event/2022-international-conference-on-food-futures/
Reflections on the 2022 International Conference on Food Futures – Humanities for the Environment
April 20, 2022, Earth Day Lecture, Brian Yazzie, “Cooking in Two Worlds,” (Co sponsored by Arizona State University’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems, Institute for Humanities Research, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, the Humanities Lab, and the Desert Humanities Initiative. https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/environmental-humanities/events/rsvp/cooking-in-two-worlds-a-food-sovereignty-journey/
April 21: Indigenous Chefs Demo & Tasting Food Workshop featuring 3 award-winning chefs (Arizona State University’s Humanities Lab), Sponsored by the Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area, Melissa Nelson, Director
September 27: Indigenous Economies of Well-being Reading Group featuring Dr. Rachel Wolfgramm, University of Auckland, New Zealand, sponsored by the Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area, Melissa Nelson, Director
November 8th: Introduction to Maori Culture and Context with Dr. Melissa Nelson
November 15th: Intercultural Well-being Workshop with local and international scholars: At this event, we explored how we could build symbiotic platforms to enable the co-generation of economies of wellbeing. For our culminating workshop we were honored to have the participation of 8 Māori scholar activists from Aoteaora (NZ) who co-led (with local Native leaders) four breakout groups on o Weaving Intercultural Well-being into Economic Thinking (Led by: Octaviana Trujillo and Tania Wolfgramm) o Design, Art, and Innovation in Well-being (Led by: Wikuki Kingi) o Food Systems and Seed Sovereignty (Led by: Michael Johnson) o The Role of Performance and Dance in Community Well-being. https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:b19b4618-9d5e-3ae3-8449-5a44f412637e
2021
Oct. 27, 2021: Reading group meeting 1 on: “Regional Food Hubs as Catalysts for Inclusive Wellbeing Economies,” Hosted by ASU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative and HfE’s North American Observatory
Nov 17, 2021: Reading group meeting 2 (in collaboration with Slow Food): Robin Wall Kimmerer ‘s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Hosted by ASU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative and HfE’s North American Observatory
Table of Contents
Contributors
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Tidal Timespace
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UH Environmental Humanities Initiative
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Inter/Desert Dialogues
A virtual roundtable series at Arizona State University (ASU), brings together artists, writers, scholars, activists, land managers, and others to inspire respect for arid environments and the people, plants, animals, histories, and geologies that make them up.
About
Funded by a seed grant from ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research, this series explores the concept of the “inter/desert” as a way of understanding deserts as highly complex, culturally and ecologically rich environments.
In settler-colonial imaginaries, deserts have often been cast as barren, unpeopled, and/or unproductive environments in need of “improvement.” Those who work with and in these culturally and ecologically complex environments, however, document rich and varied understandings of arid ecologies. To that end, each roundtable in the Inter/Desert Dialogues series centers the creative, scholarly, and/or public work of three to five individuals as points of departure for discussing “desert futures” with a small group of virtual attendees. The panelists represent a range of fields, identities, and backgrounds, both within and beyond academia. Their diverse voices and perspectives underscore the complexity and rich, interdisciplinary potential of desert ecologies.
Topics for the four-part 2023 series include Attunements, Energy and Infrastructure, Desert Ethics, and Deserts in Sound and Image. It is our hope that these dialogues will inspire work being done in the desert and environmental humanities and culminate in future discussions and collaboration across both disciplinary and geographic boundaries.
*Funded by ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research Seed Grant with additional support from the Environmental Humanities Initiative, Desert Humanities Initiative, and College of Integrative Sciences and Arts.
Virtual Roundtables
Table of Contents
Contriburotrs
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Gary Reger is Emeritus Professor of History and Emeritus Hobart Professor of Classical Languages at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His research has revolved around Hellenistic economic history, Greek epigraphy, and the study of human activity in deserts across time and space. His publications include Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos, over 50 journal articles and book chapters, and four edited volumes, the most recent of which, Reading Aridity in Western American Literature (with Jada Ach) collects papers on the American desert Southwest. Two books are under contract: Writing the American Desert, essays on the American Southwest, and First There Is a Mountain, a long-term examination of the human geography of a mountain in southwestern Turkey. The award of a Fulbright Fellowship brought him to UWA and has made possible this symposium.
Megan Anne Todd, Program Lead for the Master of Liberal Studies program at Arizona State University, is a performance studies scholar and embodied movement practitioner, teaching across humanities, applied arts, organizational leadership, and project management. She earned her Ph.D. in Theatre/Performance of the Americas and M.S. in Exercise & Wellness (ASU). You can find her work published in the Journal of Pan African Studies, Theatre Journal, Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies and in the edited book, The Sonic World of Dance Film. Areas of scholarship include: arts and humanities as public practice, sustainability and health, as well as creativity and/as leadership. Her work centers collaborative, creative, and critical modes of inquiry and practice that generate pathways and possibilities toward a more just, equitable, and better world.
Jada Ach is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University where she teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies and Master of Liberal Studies programs. In 2019, Ach earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of South Carolina, and her research often combines insights from literary studies, the desert humanities, and land management history. She is the author of Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925 (Texas Tech UP, 2021) and co-editor of Reading Aridity in Western American Literature (Lexington Books, 2020). Jada co-organizes the Inter/Desert Dialogues series at Arizona State University and is the Humanities Director for Science the Earth, an Arizona-based nonprofit organization that specializes in connecting community members with research scientists, interdisciplinary scholars, community leaders, and industry professionals.
Ilaria Tabusso-Marcyan received her Ph.D. at UC San Diego and is Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on food and farming cultures from a comparative approach. She is interested in how grassroots movements related to food and farming are supporting and promoting resilient, sustainable, culturally and socially just systems. At Miami University (Ohio) she was acting-coordinator for The Institute for Food. She is the author of the monograph Landscapes of Resistance and Food Justice in Italy: New Organic Intellectuals (Lexington Books, forthcoming), co-editor of Contesting Extinctions. Decolonial and Regenerative Futures (Lexington Books 2021), and has published several articles on food and farming cultures.
Climate Justice and Problems of Scale
North American Observatory
The aim of the project is to build “scale literacy” (Horton 2019), to generate a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the relationship between the effects of climate change and the intensification of injustices in the social, political and cultural spheres. The participating partners will contribute local perspectives, and help develop new insights into how problems of scale both contribute to, and offer ways of combating climate injustice. The project will explore climate change as a social, historical, and cultural force that transforms all lives but does so in an uneven and often unequal fashion.
This project is part of an important collaborative project being led by the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI), which is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The project is funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Alongside the University of Pretoria, the project includes partners from five other institutions, namely the University of Texas at Austin, the American University of Beirut, Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney.
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Humanities for the Environment would like to recognize and congratulate Dr. Charles Travis, affiliate at the North American Observatory, for the publication of Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place, which he coedited alongside Francis Ludlow and Ferenc Gyuris.
Dr. Travis was interviewed by Fronteras, the Online Newsletter of The Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at UT Arlington, shortly after the book had been published in the Spring of 2020. This interview highlights the motivations and research that inspired Travis’ contributions to the book, as well as the role he believes humanities plays in the use of geographical information systems (GIS) and similar emerging technologies. The interview is a quick, but insightful read for those interested in any aspect of environmental humanities.
“The book…aims to provide a rapprochement between the narrative dimensions of historical investigation, and more positivistic approaches in the geosciences” (Dr. Charles Travis, in an interview with Fronteras, May 6, 2020).
The full interview can be found here:
A summary of, and purchasing options for, Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place can be found here:
Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis | SpringerLink
The ivory tower is a metaphorical place that suggests scholars are too high above everyone to be aware of what is happening on the ground. These individuals can follow the direct paths of their pursuits with very little consideration for the lasting effect of their actions. However, in the real world, to live a scholarly life unaware of how our academic theories have an effect on the ground leads to an unsustainable society.
The student organization Climbing Vines, organized at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus, was created in an attempt to make important academic knowledge more accessible to the public, and to students studying in the environmental humanities and sustainability sciences. The name of the club, “climbing vines,” metaphorically, raises questions about how we can bring knowledge down from the ivory tower so that it can have a practical benefit on the ground. Members of this club believe that environmental knowledge and action is more important than ever. “The humanities have a way of sharing information in a way that people are ready and able to hear it,” says Kimara Crichlow, secretary of Climbing Vines.
The environmental humanities is the study and analysis of the relationship between humans and the environment. This rapidly expanding field is drawing attention because of its relevance and application to interlinked social justice and environmental fields of study. There is no other club quite like this on campus. Students can attend discussions with leading faculty from ASU, learn from fellow club members, and explore interdisciplinary environmental humanities and sciences.
In environmental studies generally, “There is a lack of creating an effective relationship with information,” club founder and president Zane Encinas says. With issues like climate change, for example, “Numbers are not always capable of changing attitudes, perception, or behavior.” By focusing on the environmental humanities, this ASU Club provides more tools to engage with communities and inspire engagement with environmental and social justice thought and action.
A typical club meeting consists of engaging activities while discussing relevant environmental topics with other members or guest speakers. For example, Adriene Jenik is an artist and educator at ASU focused on environmental issues relating to the US desert. With her specialization in data humanization, she has recently developed visualizations to better display human impacts on the environment. The application of environmental humanities to a variety of studies, such as this, make for great topics of discussion.
As a club, Climbing Vines branches out into many fields making it a welcoming atmosphere to everyone. “[The environmental humanities is] representative of a sense of place that is at an intersection of various communities“ says Encinas. Rather than a traditional approach of simply informing one of how they can improve their worldly impacts, Encinas hopes the club will inspire change by drawing sustainable conclusions around people’s individual experiences and ideas. By incorporating applied sustainable thought, there is hope that more change will be catalyzed both inside and outside of academia. The club hopes to inspire and lead as the world works to transition to more democratic, sustainable, and just social and environmental systems.
Climbing Vines will be working to support the Humanities Lab, and the Food, Health, and Climate Lab at Humanities Week taking place October 18-22 across the ASU Tempe campus. With an entire week dedicated to humanities based presentations, activities, exhibits, panels and performances there is an event tailored for everyone. The goal of the Humanities Lab and this course topic is to encourage the recognition of current events, projects, and discoveries in the environmental humanities and climate sciences. In relation to humanities week, Crichlow stated “I hope that our participation in Humanities Week will give people an opportunity to understand how important the humanities are.” Forming a new appreciation of the environment through the humanities will make it less likely for you to be caught in your own ivory tower.
Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925
Jada Ach’s scholarship in Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 seeks to reevaluate the Progressive Era’s environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American West, Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental, national, and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land and oceanic management. Sand, Water, Salt investigates managerial engagements with dynamic ecologies in three particular Western environments: the arid deserts, the semiarid high plains, and the Pacific Ocean.
At different times, and to varying degrees, Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive, incompatible with Anglo-American settlement, and/or highly unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints, the United States has also intensely desired these “wasteland” spaces, perceiving them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. Sand, Water, Salt moves through a variety of novels, memoirs, and cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s, including L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Norris’s McTeague, Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, The Virginian by Owen Wister, Life among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca, as well as Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf and Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl.
Ach ultimately asks what we gain by looking back at fin-de-siècle American literature with a queer, ecological justice-oriented eye, a particularly invigorating conversation that uniquely uses the elements as foci.
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Hallie Eakin is a professor in the School of Sustainability and affiliated professor in the School of Urban Planning and Geographical Sciences. Her research focuses on social, institutional and political relations that shape human vulnerability to intersecting stressors, including climate extremes and climate change, and how transdisciplinary research can support efforts towards just and sustainable social-environmental transformation. Professor Eakin’s work has been largely based in Mexico and Latin America, addressing vulnerability and transformation in relation to farming, rural livelihoods, food systems, water scarcity and urban resilience. With colleagues at the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex, UK, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico,she has explored the potential for “Transformation Laboratories” to foster spaces for creative approaches to persistent sustainability challenges
Alycia de Mesa is a mixed race American of Apache and Indigenous of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, Mexico, Japanese, and British-German descent. She is a Senior Sustainability Scholar with ASU Global Institute of Sustainability & Innovation and a faculty instructor for the School of Sustainability teaching undergraduates in core sustainability topics and graduate students in sustainability leadership. Before teaching at ASU, she spent over 20 years in brand, marketing, storytelling and communications for start-ups, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies and authored two brand books for business audiences through McGraw-Hill (New York) and Palgrave Macmillan (London). She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Human and Social Dimensions in Science and Technology at ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Her research interests include Indigenous and people of color futures and emerging technologies effects on POC communities.
Juliann Vitullo is an Associate Professor of Italian studies, a Senior Sustainability Scholar, and Co-director of the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University. She has written on various aspects of medieval, early modern, and contemporary Italian culture with emphasis on the relationship between textual traditions and the material world, including economics, gender, and food studies. She currently is researching the history of the translocal traditions collectively defined as varieties of the Mediterranean diet and the different ways in which they have been translated and branded. Her community-based research and teaching emphasize the importance of preserving the cultural and ecological knowledge of indigenous foodways, including those in the Southwest where she lives and teaches, for a more equitable and sustainable future.
Lisa Yin Han is a critical media scholar and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research examines media infrastructures, scientific knowledge cultures, and the socio-technological histories of mediation in aquatic environments like the deep ocean.
Beth Roach is a tribal leader, a farmer and surfer, a teacher and historian, an entrepreneur, fundraiser and environmental activist. For over a decade, she has served on the Tribal Council of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and led environmental initiatives. In 2018, she co-founded the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers, an emerging benefit corporation, to protect endangered Indigenous seeds and waterways. From 2018-2020, Beth chaired the inaugural Virginia Council on Environmental Justice; in 2020, Beth launched a tribal coastal resilience initiative with a team of scientists, policy makers, and tribal communities to implement climate adaptation strategies within the shared waters of Virginia and North Carolina. As a public fellow for UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory, she is capturing water stories from indigenous perspectives to assist in climate resiliency planning.
For the Sierra Club, Beth is a fundraiser and program lead for the Women’s Earth Alliance and Sierra Club’s US Grassroots Accelerator. Her past work includes chief ranger of interpretation for Virginia State Parks, grants manager for the James River Association and climate justice organizer for Mothers Out Front. Beth earned her bachelor’s degree in public history from James Madison University. She lives along the inner banks of the Albemarle Sound with her partner, cat, and many wildlife critters.
We’ve all seen, and in many cases become used to, the novel behaviors driven by the coronavirus for the sake of safety and survival communities around the world. Signs in grocery stores limiting the amount of toilet paper one can buy, reliance on delivery services like Grubhub and Doordash, and general worry about being financially able to afford food are just some of the new considerations people, who may not have thought about these things before, now think about on a regular basis. However, these novel concerns are usually reported on from the perspectives of privilege. Suburban-living folks in the United States, for example, often have access to a multitude of different grocery stores, while people located in both rural and highly impoverished urban areas may not even be within driving distance of one. The pandemic has called attention to many issues that were less commonly discussed in the past which can be tied back to food, simply because everyone has to eat.
Since early September, a reading group at Arizona State University has been discussing food-related issues exposed due to the coronavirus. The group emerges from a 2013-2015 project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation called Dinner 2040 that focuses on designing the future of the world’s food systems, with a particular focus on arid lands food systems, such as that of the Phoenix River Valley. The organizers of the 2020-2021 reading group are Joni Adamson, Joan McGregor and Melissa Nelson. The group was sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU. ASU Students, fellow professors, artists and community members, some from other states, joined the group through the technology of Zoom which has become so prominent because of the pandemic. All were present and eager to discuss the topics of food, the environment, the humanities, and the present state of the pandemic.
Each member of the reading group sat in their own little digital Zoom square, some with a fun background that related to the environment, like a beautiful desert landscape, or a cornfield. All were convened to focus on the work of Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, a world renowned food sovereignty scholar and indigenous activist who had been scheduled as a distinguished lecturer at ASU earlier in March that had been cancelled due to the pandemic. Hoover’s lecture, rescheduled for October in Zoom, was titled “From Garden Warriors to Gastrodiplomacy: Farmers, Chefs and Water Protectors Working toward Food Sovereignty.” To prepare group members read articles and chapters from Hoover’s books, among other readings. Sponsors for the distinguished lecture included The Institute for Humanities Research’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, The Global Futures Laboratory, The Human Sciences Collaboratory, American Indian Studies, The Global Institute of Sustainability, The Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.
All readings focused on food sovereignty, defined in Hoover’s article “You Can’t Say You’re Sovereign if You Can’t Feed Yourself”: Defining and Enacting Food Sovereignty in American Indian Community Gardening (American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 41.3, pps, 31-70) as “(1) the importance of putting food producers and consumers, rather than corporations, at the heart of food systems policies; (2) the need to include the next generation in food production, as well as empowering food producers and artisans; (3) the importance of environmental, social, and economic sustainability; and (4) the need for transparent trade,, or a peoples’ right to sustainably-produced and culturally-significant food.” (Hoover) The research group compared this concept with the idea of food security, which encompasses the right to food in regards to peoples’ simple caloric requirements, but “ does not specify how, where, and by whom the food that all people should have access to is produced, contributing to a focus on food-related policies that seek to maximize food production while giving inadequate attention to who will benefit from where and how that food is produced.” (Hoover) The idea that such issues exist commonly within Indigenous communities was heavily emphasized throughout the group meetings, and continuously discussed both in readings by Hoover as well as by Indigenous members of the reading group with their own experiences and stories told to them by community members.
Food justice, as Hoover would later emphasize in her lecture, has been a concern of Indigenous peoples since the earliest stages of imperialism-driven displacement over 500 years ago in North America, which forced Indigenous people to adopt new foods and cooking methods without the cultural significance of previous traditional foods. In addition to being culturally insignificant, these new foods introduced high-calorie foods that Indigenous people had not encountered before, making present-day communities more prone to diabetes. Ignorance and intolerance continues to prevail towards Indigenous communities, through lack of access to culturally-significant and reasonably-priced healthy food on countless reservations. The system fails to value things that are critical for people and the planet.
In the presentation of her distinguished lecture, Dr. Hoover went into further detail regarding access to food for indigenous communities, highlighting the positive effects food sovereignty could have for these communities, such as lowering diabetes rates among vulnerable indigenous communities. She focused on the importance of food and seed systems within indigenous communities, which face challenges both previously and currently, such as heavily Westernized methods of agriculture, climate change, and lack of knowledge. Each of these issues, along with many more she listed, disproportionately affect Indigenous communities.
Though such challenges exist, Hoover also described the experiences and referenced the work of many Indigenous farmers, chefs, and food activists who have been impacting and leading the food sovereignty movement. She cited Mohawk community leaders who define and advocate for food sovereignty, seed rematriation (link) movements that bring indigenous seeds back to their people, and Indigenous chefs who not only cook and serve their traditional foods, but also include lessons and lectures about indigenous food and the important food sovereignty in the dining experience. These successful and positive movements work to empower Indigenous communities and raise awareness within non-Indigenous communities.
In the subsequent Q&A Dr. Hoover went into specifics about how the food sovereignty movement can continue with more, and even beyond, indigenous communities. Ideas such as traveling food labs and seed sharing banks were discussed in the context of the pandemic state, as well as applied to a future where COVID is hopefully under control. Hoover had already participated in countless movements directly involved with Indigenous communities and resource accessibility, such as the Standing Rock protests, and therefore had a firsthand account of what such action had the potential to accomplish. However, it was understood by the end of the lecture that the work is far from over, and in order to continue making a difference an important step we can take in the present is increasing the visibility of such movements.
Food is a necessity of life, and the Coronavirus has exposed how inflexibility and negligence within the government, and what it provides in terms of caloric nourishment, can lead to food crises. While the extremity of these crises may not seem apparent from the surface, lack of attention to food can lead to quantity-based agriculture techniques that harm the environment, unfairly unhealthy living conditions, and a loss of tradition, cultural identity, and sense of place under normal circumstances. The pandemic’s effect on food heightens and interconnects all three of these social justice, environmentalism, and food security related issues. Action through education can bring about the tangible change needed, and is certainly attainable through discussions as held by the ASU reading group, lectures as given by Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, and research as presented in the Dinner 2040 initiative. This understanding of food is needed in academic, community, and national levels, and though the issues may not personally apply to everyone, it will take the work of many to attain a better future.
