Environmental Humanities as the New Liberal Arts   

Universities around the world are at a unique crossroads. Many institutions of higher education are facing daunting fiscal shortfalls and a crisis of confidence from a variety of stakeholders. Socio-economic barriers to higher education, combined with the current widespread scrutiny of the value of a university education by political and social pundits in the United States and elsewhere around the globe has placed the traditional liberal arts in the crosshairs of efforts to downsize or even eliminate what were once tried and true curricula in the humanities, social science, and the arts. At the same time, however, a university education grounded in the liberal arts, and open to people from all backgrounds, and has never been more vital to address matters of ecological, economic, cultural, and social survival on global scale.

This paper argues that the study of environmental issues through the transdisciplinary lenses offered by the Environmental Humanities is essential to addressing a variety of interconnected and omnipresent ecological crises. More specifically, the Environmental Humanities provides an opportunity to reinvigorate the traditional Liberal Arts by offering students—and it is hoped university and political leadership—with models to bridge long standing disciplinary divisions between and within the humanities and sciences, and other conceptual and geopolitical divides between “nature” and “culture,” Eastern and Western worldviews, the global North and South, settler colonialism and indigeneity, and a variety of intergenerational and interpersonal identities.  This paper will use as a case study the recent creation of an Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ESS) program at my home institution of Columbia College Chicago—a private art and media institution—to highlight ways to transcend academic silos and respond to the interest and passion of students to bring about meaningful ecological change through their creative and artistic passions. In the process, the ESS program can serve as a model to provide contemporary context to and allow for the reinvigoration of critical thinking skills from the liberal arts and sciences to forge student-centered pedagogies from a more equitable and inclusive lens so that a new generation of creatives can see themselves as change agents in a world desperate for solutions and reinvention.