The Program on the Global Environment

Autumn 2009: Workshop on Culture and Nature

Please join the Workshop on the Global Environment for our Autumn Quarter series: Culture and Nature. Nature, wilderness, and environment tend to be interchangeable synonyms of the nonhuman biophysical world. Given different cultural understandings of the boundaries or even existence of purely cultural and natural domains, environmental and social processes might be seen as intertwined, mutually dependant, and mutually constitutive. This topic highlights research that examines conceptual, discursive, and analytical approaches to socio-natural orders. We anticipate a series of discussions that explore these dimensions of nature as an object or research and the tensions that arise from their intersection.

• October 7

  Approaching Archaeological Investigations from a Political Ecology Framework

  Madeleine McLeester and Melissa Rosenzweig, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

  With a growing public concern for the environment and an increasing anthropological interest in human environment interactions, archaeologists, who already study the historical construction of the record of remains, are well poised to contribute to critical scholarship on how power relations act on and through the environment. However, inroads into the integration of political ecology into archaeology have been slow in the making. Perhaps deterred by political ecology's focus on capitalist societies, the legacy of environmental determinism, or the logistics of environmental analyses, archaeologists have shied away from the full potential of investigations into the ramifications of mutually constitutive constructions of the environment. How, then, can archaeology more effectively analyze the dialectical relationship of social and environmental (re)production? And how can the artifactual record be deployed in understandings of the politics of ecology? This panel seeks to confront these issues and present research utilizing theoretical and methodological approaches that address the relations of power present in and part of the environment.

• October 29 (Thursday)

  The uses of Environmental History in modern Politics and development

  Susanna Hecht, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA School of Public Affairs

• November 4

  Poetry cannot save the earth: the problems and promises of Kenneth White's 'geopoetics'

  Jon Geltner, Graduate Student, Department of English

  The main purpose of this essay is to understand the work of the Franco-Scottish writer Kenneth White. Through a series of close readings from each of the three genres in which White has written (essays, travel, poetry), I explicate White's ideas and practices, and situate them relative to other approaches to ecological criticism, and other genres of literary interaction with the environment (broadly construed as city, countryside, wilderness, or whatever). Some similarities to Anglo-American environmental literature and criticism will be apparent, but I am arguing for White's literary merit primarily as a corrective to certain tendencies in the English-speaking world. In particular, I am arguing against the habit of imagining that literature has the capacity to make its readers better stewards of the environment, that it is located in nearly the same part of our culture as, say, environmental policy or the real science of ecology. As our engagement with White will reveal, the writer's job of work is much older, and much more radically dissenting than such a description of his influence would allow.

• November 19

  Combining Economics and Ecology to Address Invasive Species

  Reuben Keller, Henry Chandler Cowles Lecturer in Environmental Studies

• December 2

  Indoor air pollution from burning biomass: Implications for Maternal and Child Health in the Developing World

  Sola Olopade, Professor of Family Medicine and Medicine Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care, University of Chicago; Clinical Director, Global Health Initiative