Humanities and the environment: ongoing studies at Yale University. From the news release:

The Environmental Humanities Initiative — a one-year-old university-wide collaboration that spans myriad disciplines and connects two historic strengths of the university, humanities and environmental studies — has had a “ripple effect” across campus.

The initiative aims to deepen understanding of how nature and culture are interconnected, says its lead faculty coordinator, Paul Sabin, professor of history and American studies. “Yale has quietly become one of the strongest universities in the country or the world in the environmental humanities,” notes Sabin. Dozens of faculty members study environmental topics from the vantage point of literature, film and media studies, history, anthropology and archaeology, religious studies, history of art, and other disciplines….

A new graduate seminar, “Readings in the Environmental Humanities,” also was offered last spring. Designed and implemented with leadership from graduate students, the course drew students from F&ES, the School of Architecture, anthropology, English, history, and other areas across the university.

[Paul] Burow is one of the students who planned the spring graduate seminar. “I don’t think I would be making a foray into historical archives, landscape art, and literary works, without the influence of the people involved in the initiative and the graduate seminar,” says Burow.

The initiative and course, says Burow, has instilled in him a deep respect for the value and complexity of different methods of humanistic inquiry. “I will never be a canny literary scholar to the degree that an expert in the field is, but I hope to be passable enough that it can influence my thinking and approach, and bring some of that magic into ethnography.”

One fundamental insight of the humanities that still has not fully permeated public consciousness, or even the natural sciences in many cases, says Burow, is that there is no tidy distinction between nature and human societies.