A conversation with Professor Taff on the importance of environmental humanities

As environmental awareness continues to spread globally, so does our anxiety and need to process what environmentalism means for our society. One of the ways we can understand environmental affairs is by looking at the connections between the environment and the humanities. This is not an area that is usually considered when thinking about our current climate crisis but is still vitally important in learning how we got to this point and how we might be able to fix the problems we have created. 

Assistant Professor of English Dyani Taff is one of the educators leading this conversation at the College through her class Environmental Humanities: Stories of Crisis and Resilience. 

In the course, Taff and her students look at how the environment and humanities intersect and how they are dependent on one another.  

Taff explained this connection, noting how science is often filled with “creativity, beauty, [and] individual bias,” which she says is the “province of the humanities.”  

In her course, Taff highlights  the importance of understanding history to understand our present. Many of the assigned texts  span different periods throughout history. According to Taff, they “provide a lot of ideas of how these histories could have turned out differently.” 

Much of humanity’s actions towards the environment today can be seen as a result of how people initially viewed nature: as a resource for personal gain and use. 

Through these texts, however, Taff suggests that there are alternative ways to understand humanity’s relationship with nature that can help us consider how new values can be formed around our current and future relationships with the environment.

Taff hopes that her students gain an understanding of the way that both science and the humanities are necessary and important to address the current climate crisis. 

“Long history is as important in understanding and addressing those crises as current knowledge,” said Taff.

She hopes that students leave the course with a sense of agency in terms of their own ability to contribute. “I hope [my students] can create something that goes out into the world … that educates or informs or that pushes [society] in new directions.”

The College recently expanded the opportunities available to students interested in the environment and humanities by adding an English major concentration in literature and the environment. 

Taff recommended that students interested in the work she is doing in her course check out the Environmental Humanities Initiative on campus. She also suggested resources such as the podcast “The Repair” from Scene on Radio and the book “Earth” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda Elkins-Tanton which merge the environment and humanities. 

In her work, Taff writes about the environment in tandem with the humanities and their relation to each other. Together, the two provide an opportunity to view the larger scope of what impacts the environment and contemplate solutions that consider the relationship between our society and the environment.

~ Eden Mayer `25