HumanNature series
From climate change and the sixth mass extinction event, to the pronouncement of a new geological epoch—the ‘Anthropocene,’ the age of humanity—we are increasingly being told that our contemporary period is one of incredible environmental change, and at the same time that human activity is playing an increasingly significant role in shaping the earth and its future possibilities.
In addition to being important scientific and technical challenges, these environmental problems are also profoundly and inescapably social: they are about how we organise our societies and our cities, how we approach questions of ethics and justice, how we find meaning and value in the world. In other words, they concern the deepest dimensions of our human nature, and in so doing perhaps call out for a reconsideration of what it might mean to be human in times like these.
Taking up these important themes, this lecture series will offer a series of talks by leading international scholars in the Environmental Humanities. This emerging, interdisciplinary, field of scholarship draws on the insights of history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines to explore the important roles that the humanities might play in addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our day.
Series Partners
This Lecture Series is jointly funded and coordinated by the Australian Museum, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, and the University of Sydney. The organising committee for the series is comprised of Thom van Dooren and Astrida Neimanis (Sydney), Emily O’Gorman (Macquarie), Judy Motion (UNSW), and Juan Francisco Salazar (Western Sydney).
This series was held at the Australian Museum from February 2018 - May 2019.
The series
Join Eureka Prize-winner Tom Griffiths as he discusses the historian’s craft and its central importance in our current period of profound environmental and social change. Focusing on some of the key historians that have influenced his own work, he reveals the situated nature of historical imaginations.
Exploring how Australian understandings of the past have taken shape amidst shifting cultural expectations, political imperatives, and scientific approaches, Griffiths ultimately asks: how have these historical imaginings and practices shaped our environmental possibilities?
Speaker
Tom Griffiths is the W.K. Hancock Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University.
How does giving and receiving take form in, and give form to, our living world? While most discussions of gift-giving focus on exchanges between humans, Deborah Bird Rose is also captivated by the many forms of connectivity and flow that are integral to ecological processes.
Drawing on her research with Indigenous people, Rose asks: what might it mean to understand gift giving as central to, and moving across and between, many systems of life; and what might it require of us, in this time of extinctions in which countless living forms and their possibilities for giving and receiving with others, are slipping away?
Speaker
Deborah Bird Rose is an Adjunct Professor in Environmental Humanities at UNSW.
How do different human cultures give shape and meaning to the idea of “climate”? Join Mike Hulme as he explores some of the many fascinating ways climates are historicized, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, re-designed.
Understanding these complex climate cultures is, Hulme contends, essential to any adequate understanding of the politics of climate change.
Speaker
Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Delve into the intriguing possibilities that emerge when art meets biology, as Oron Catts, world-renowned innovator at the intersection of science, nature and art, asks: what is life?
For more than two decades, Catts has been at the forefront of experiments in the manipulation of fragments of living systems for artistic ends. This lecture explores the role that art has played and continues to play in shifting understandings of what life is and does. What are the stakes—social, ethical, ontological— in manipulating living forms for artistic purposes? What are the consequences, both intended and not, of placing artworks/lifeforms into diverse cultural contexts, from the gallery to the museum?
Speaker
Oron Catts is the Director of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences, The University of Western Australia and a Professor at Large in Contestable Design at The Royal College of Arts, London (2015-2017).
Join Alice Te Punga Somerville as she explores the histories and possibilities of Indigenous gardens in the Pacific region.
Colonial projects have long been bound up, in a variety of ways, with the movement, growth and exploitation of plants. But these projects have also traded rhetorically on particular understandings of people’s relationships with plants, like the vein of colonial storytelling in which Indigenous people frolic aimlessly in nature while Europeans busily tame the landscape. But, despite these stories, the purposeful movement of plants is also central to many Indigenous histories and practices.
Drawing on scholarship and activism connected to cultivation by Indigenous peoples, this talk examines texts by Indigenous writers alongside historical and contemporary media texts about gardens and gardening to explore the diverse ways in which relationships (human and non-human) are mediated and nurtured through acts of gardening.
Speaker
Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa-New Zealand.
What does a “planthropocene”, a “vegetal futurity”, or even a queer botany look like? Join Catriona Sandilands on this adventure into the complex and fascinating worlds of plants.The idea of the “Age of Man,” aka the Anthropocene, is staked on the premise that human beings have come, at least since the Industrial Revolution, to control and influence the planet to such an extent that we collectively register, generally negatively, as a geological force. Sandilands complicates this very singular masculine, species-scale narrative of domination and destruction. Drawing from diverse stories of relationships between women and plants, Sandilands outlines a feminist botany that challenges the idea of the “Age of Man” as an epochal phenomenon, replacing the “Anthropocene” as the centre of attention with a more nuanced, feminist, multispecies understanding.
Speaker
Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, Canada.
Bruce Pascoe’s ground-breaking research completely reconsiders the notion of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians as hunter-gatherers.
Explore and challenge the colonial myths that have often underpinned efforts to justify dispossession in this fascinating discussion. Reading the diaries of early explorers, both with and against the grain, Pascoe retells Aboriginal history and argues that it is time to take a new look at Australia’s past.
Speaker
Bruce Pascoe is Bunurong/Tasmanian Yuin man and an award winning author and story teller. His most recent book is Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Magabala Books, 2014), which won both the Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers Prize (joint winner) in the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.Z
Princeton professor Rob Nixon investigates why growing numbers of environmental activists are risking their freedom and lives to protect the environment.
Environmental martyrs put their bodies and lives on the line, risking imprisonment, violence or burial in a shallow grave in the dead of night. Some activists remain anonymous, while others gain posthumous fame and power, their deaths becoming a rallying call for others to join the cause.
Speaker
Rob Nixon, Professor in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University and author of the award-winning Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, explores the surge in environmental martyrdom around the world over timber, water, land and mineral rights. Martyrdom is direct action in extremis, he says. But why are so many people sacrificing their lives? And what is the relationship between the fallen martyr and the felled tree?
Join Aboriginal poet and novelist Tony Birch, of the Moondani Balluk Academic Centre at Victoria University, to explore the multi-layered strategic and altruistic relationships required to combat ecological destruction.
In his urgent call to arms, Birch identifies the powerful roles that Indigenous ecological knowledge, environmental activism, scholarship and creativity can play in addressing the impact of climate change, particularly on vulnerable and disempowered communities suffering human rights abuses as a direct result. No less pressing, he argues, is the acceptance of personal responsibility towards forming respectful and humble relationships with country and the planet.
Speaker
Professor Tony Birch is a poet, short story writer and novelist, the current Bruce McGuinness Professorial Research Fellow in the Moondani Balluk Academic Centre at Victoria University, and in 2017, became the first indigenous writer to win the Patrick White Award. Tony has published key academic articles and essays concerning Climate Justice, Protection of Country and Indigenous Rights, and is currently researching and writing a book titled `The dead are the imagination of the living’: climate justice and connectivity.
Experience the award-winning eco-poetry of Craig Santos Perez from the University of Hawaiʻi, as he reflects on the vital role of Pacific literature in the environmental movements of Oceania.
An abiding source of ecological knowledge, Pacific Islander literature continues to play a powerful role in environmental justice movements in Guam, Craig Santos Perez’s ancestral homeland; Hawaiʻi, his current home, and across the Pacific. The Chamoru scholar, poet, educator and environmentalist shares his involvement with a range of humanities projects aimed at raising environmental literacy and performs his award-winning `Pacific Eco-Poetry’ engaging nature, ecology, militarism and climate change.
Speaker
Craig Santos Perez is an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and eco-poetry. The author of four collections of poetry, and co-editor of four anthologies, he is the first Pacific Islander to receive the American Book Award, and first Micronesian to receive the highest literary award from the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council. Dr Santos Perez has lectured and performed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the UNESCO Ocean Literacy conference, the Indigenous Book Festival, the Festival of Pacific Arts and the International Conference on Environmental Futures.
Header image: by Stefan Steinbauer via Unsplash