About Us

Welcome to the Environmental Humanities program!
 

We explore the cultural dimensions of how humans relate to nature.  If you wonder what art, history, faith, language, and ethics have to say about living compassionately and joyfully in our beautiful common home, our planet, this is the minor for you.

What is the Environmental Humanities?

The Environmental Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that explores how nature and human cultures interact. If the Environmental Sciences investigate the material factors that contribute to our ecological challenges, the Environmental Humanities ask how our participation in the living world is bound up—for good or ill—with storytelling, the arts, media, worship practices, historical legacies, philosophies, politics, social structures, and economic priorities. In dialogue with the sciences, we are digging into the cultural roots of environmental vitality and distress while co-creating just futures, starting here in Waco.

Why Study Environmental Humanities?

The Environmental Sciences can give us the vital information needed to understand what is happening to our planet.  The Environmental Humanities ask: why? And how do we, as individuals and communities, respond? An EH minor will allow you to investigate the complex answers to these urgent questions across a wide variety of disciplinary practices.

This versatile path of study prepares you for diverse callings—a lawyer practicing environmental law, a national park historian preserving both local history and ecological resources, a community organizer working for food justice in urban communities, a climate scientist sharing your findings with audiences of non-specialists, a pastor preaching on creation care, or a novelist imagining sci-fi green utopias, to name just a few.

And no matter where life takes you, an EH minor provides you with the time, tools, and experiences to reflect on your own engagement with the planet in ways that can transform your everyday life.