The Groundwork and Impact of Environmental Humanities

If the environmental crisis is often described in terms of rising temperatures, collapsing ecosystems, technological innovation, and the steady fall out of the latter, a different conversation is taking shape at Duke — one that approaches climate not as a singular  “problem to be solved”, but as a dense site of historical, cultural, political, and societal entanglement.

Instead of being a set field of study, environmental humanities feel like a shift in how we see land and recall the past, while recognizing which communities suffer most from ecological damage. Researchers at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute are driving this change, each doing so uniquely.

For Saskia Cornes, Assistant Professor of the Practice at the FHI, environmental inquiry starts quite literally in the soil. As Director of the Duke Campus Farm, she positions the work of regenerative agriculture not only as organic practice, but as a mode of cultural engagement and historical reckoning.

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“The land we’re currently farming is post-plantation land,” she said. “It’s seen hard use in many forms over the last two-hundred years.” 

You can still glimpse echoes of the past through patterns of depletion and repair, but much of it lives in what she describes as “invisible traces.” By paying closer attention to overlooked histories, environmental humanities become a way of holding that history in place, refusing to see landscapes as blank slates or merely living systems.

Cornes challenges typical language of sustainability and restoration by asking harder questions: “What does regeneration actually mean — ecologically, but also culturally, or even spiritually?” Her students, many of whom do not arrive at Duke thinking of farms as inherently academic spaces, are asked to encounter land not as a resource, but as a layered archive.

Seeds are treated as storytellers, and soil as a repository of collective labor. In this framework, farming becomes an act of narrative as much as nourishment, one shaped by both present urgency and historical debt.

The farm, founded by students in 2010, grows tens of thousands of pounds of food annually, but Cornes is clear: it is not only about production. It’s about “shared agency” and “psychic resilience,” and about cultivating an embodied understanding of collectivity, especially in a time of climate change.

“It’s not one student’s three-hour shift that changes much of anything,” she says. “It’s being able to see yourself within the context of thousands of such shifts, to see yourself, and to see the soil, as part of an emerging lineage made up of these efforts.” That sense of continuity between students and teachers, humans and non-humans, as well as land and memory, is central to her approach.

Climate change and how we view the past

Where Cornes begins with land and pedagogy, Michaeline Crichlow, Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies, engages environmental questions through a long history of racial capitalism, colonial expansion, dispossession, and focus on global plantations. She is also co-convener of the Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB).

The lab hosts a graduate and undergraduate seminar, and has over the years invited a range of humanists, artists, and interpretative social science scholars from around the country and internationally to address select aspects of climate change. 

Its undergraduate seminar focuses on migration, and the sorts of displacement that it entails, brought on by Development, its promises, and its disasters. The CCDGB has published some of its revised presentations in the August 2025 issue of the Sage Journal, Cultural Dynamics.

Crichlow’s work doesn’t just critique how we talk about progress, but progress as a worldview; a way of organizing the planet through hierarchies of race, territory, and value. For her, the climate crisis cannot be abstracted from its human, and more than human, dimensions.

“You can’t talk about climate change and planetary disaster without talking about its other element: its racial element,” Crichlow argues.

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Her research is grounded in what she calls “colonial ecology”— a refusal to separate the domination of nature from the domination of peoples. From the early moments of colonial conquest, both land and certain human bodies were rendered extractable and subordinate, but most notably expendable.

That logic continues today, whether in the displacement of coastal communities, the environmental degradation of Black rural towns, or the global impact of waste and resource dumping. What Crichlow identifies is a persistent and violent idea: that some lives, and some ecologies, matter less than others.

She doesn’t aim to simply pick apart ideas but rather, through her critiques, offer ways to approach study itself. She supports innovative teaching strategies that situate the nearby and faraway as interrelated within a single historical process rather than inseparable.

It involves questioning whether we can truly look at specific examples, like life on Caribbean islands or in Black communities throughout the South, without also acknowledging the wider world’s influence through resource extraction and socioeconomic inequities.

“We're all in this matrix,” she says. “There’s no non-contradictory space outside of it.”

Through her philosophy, she argues what matters is how people navigate those contradictions and how students learn to see themselves not as autonomous individuals, but as participants in larger, unequal world developments.

Missing the forest for the trees

This same philosophy resonates with Gustavo Furtado, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, and whose work in the Amazon Lab unfolded through collaborations with filmmakers, scholars, journalists, and indigenous leaders. For him, the environmental humanities must also contend with knowledge itself. From how it is formed and legitimized to the ways it is transmitted and through what channels.

His approach resists the flattening of the Amazon rainforest into a singular environmental concern. Instead, he treats it as a contested field of representation, one that has been mapped, claimed, and narrated through colonial logic.

The Amazon Lab’s programming, from reading groups and film screenings to multilingual symposia, sought to unsettle those logics by creating spaces for other voices to be heard on their own terms.

One of those voices included Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman whose co-authored book The Falling Sky became a central text for the Lab. For Kopenawa, the forest is not a resource but a subject that is alive, relational, and resistant to abstraction.

Furtado points out that such a worldview often appears unintelligible to dominant environmental frameworks. “The premise of STEM is that nature exists as an object, regardless of our thoughts about it,” he explains. “But for many Indigenous groups, nature is made of subjectivities.”

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It is not about inclusion for its own sake when we engage with these viewpoints.  It’s about realizing the limitations of the environments we’ve been raised in and the potential for learning in different ways.

Environmental humanities emerge as a dynamic set of questions rather than a fixed field across these disparate but related projects. It is a practice that prioritizes relationships over mastery and insists on adding the question of whose knowledge complicates every clean solution.

Whether in the soil of the Duke Campus Farm, in the plantation histories of Development, or in the forested stories of the Amazon, each of these scholars is working to make environmental thought accountable to history and power.

And in doing so, they suggest that the real work ahead isn’t exclusive to new technologies, but in new ways of seeing and being in relation to the world we all share.