The Environmental Humanities: European Perspectives on How the Field is Addressing Twenty-first-Century Global Challenges
Steven Hartman
As an intellectual enterprise and as a scholarly community of practice the Environmental Humanities (EH) is a field still very much in the making. Its bounding structure continues to grow, undergirded by a common foundation (variously historical, philosophical, aesthetic, social critical and anthropological) that itself continues to branch out in ways that would have been unimaginable even two decades ago. New rooms and even wings of this EH house undergo augmentation by the year. This structure is evolving not only in response to newly shared and learned methodologies, theories and educational practices across established disciplines, but also in response to growing cultural, social and political cognition of the precarity of social-ecological systems in the 21stst century. The full potential of the Environmental Humanities as an evolving field lies at the intersections of endogenous influences and exogenous developments erasing lines of demarcation between the higher education and research sector, on the one hand, and fraught systems of life and death on the other. Extractive exploitation tied up in dominant systems of production and consumption are now widely perceived and understood as manifestly unsustainable. This lecture offers a brief tour of the Environmental Humanities in Europe, with a particular focus on environmental justice, material ecocriticism and integrated environmental humanities as humanistic disciplines and subjective areas intersect with and contribute to the field of Sustainability Science.
Perfect Strangers: Neanderthals and Modern Humans in Ice Age Europe
Trenton W. Holliday, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
We know from ancient DNA analyzes that via interbreeding Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) contributed genes to modern humans (H. sapiens) – genes that remain with us today. While this is now established fact, many unanswered questions remain: how frequent were interactions between these two species in late Pleistocene Europe, and what was the nature of these interactions? Answering this question is made difficult because of uncertainty surrounding which species is/are responsible for the European Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) industries, as well as questions surrounding the absolute dating of the latest Neandertals in Iberia. Here genetic data are discussed in light of the European archaeological record from ca. 54,000 to 40,000 years ago. In the end, we know that we are here and Neandertals are not, but is it possible to answer the question of why is this the case? This is one of the oldest and perhaps most interesting questions in paleoanthropology.
speakers
Steven Hartman
Steven Hartman is Founding Executive Director of the BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition in UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations programme. This role is based at Arizona State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is also Visiting Professor in the Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Iceland. Hartman has held senior faculty positions at several universities in Sweden, including Uppsala University, Stockholm University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Hartman's work addresses integration of the humanities in global change research and promotes collaboration among social and human scientists, artists, education specialists and civil society in efforts to meet sustainability challenges of the present and foreseeable future. Transdisciplinary approaches to convergent knowledge production unify many of its scientific, educational and collaborative projects with societal partners. In 2023 Steven Hartman was elected as a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Trenton W. Holliday
Trenton W. Holliday is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he has been on the faculty since 1998. He was awarded his BA in anthropology magna cum laude from Louisiana State University in 1988 and completed his MA (1991) and Ph.D. (1995) degrees in anthropology at the University of New Mexico. His dissertation and ongoing research interests have focused primarily on modern human origins and the fate of the Neandertals, although he has also published papers on hybridization in mammalian species, reconstructing human population size in the ancient past, and limb proportions, body size, and locomotion in fossil hominins, including the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy,” Liang Bua 1 (Homofloresiensis or “the Hobbit”). In addition, he has made contributions to the study of the recently discovered South African hominin species Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi. He has also excavated at Paleolithic sites in Portugal and France.