Chapter 1
In: Imaginative Ecologies
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Abstract
This article places the discipline of environmental humanities in relation to Edward Said’s “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals” (2002) and Marybeth Gasman’s collection Academics Going Public: How to Write and Speak Beyond Academe (2016), arguing that the practice of environmental humanities scholarship and teaching must be viewed in the context of academic responsibility and accountability. During this age of global climate change, mass extinction, and various other environmental and humanitarian crises, it is particularly crucial for scholars in the environmental humanities to appreciate and act upon the societal relevance of our work, calling attention to important issues, tracing their historical roots, analysing communication practices associated with conditions that often defy easy description and narrative representation (too slow, too vast, too far away, too invisible), and probing the moral and spiritual dimensions of phenomena that seem to be primarily physical and political. In this article, I emphasize the examples of the Winter 2014 special issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment devoted to climate change and various pedagogical strategies for guiding university students and citizens to apply their voices (through academic writing and public testimony) to the urgent issues of the day.