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CONFERENCE: Beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Justice and Global Ecologies |
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5/22/2009 8:00 AM - 5/23/2009 5:00 PM
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 Featuring Ursula Heise and Elaine Scarry.
In the global context, right action on the part of humans toward each other and the biotic community, what Aldo Leopold called the land ethic, is difficult to represent in political speech, in policy, and even in the imaginative realm of the arts. Like the troubled concept of the global, the concept of justice, as Elaine Scarry has argued, founders in the problem of imagining other people, distant people, strangers. As our species faces anthropogenic climate change, world water shortages and world famine, the twin projects of giving expression to a truly global ecology and to global environmental justice have never been more urgent. This conference aims to bring together individuals whose life’s work has been the study or practice of writing—literary historians and theorists, journalists and cultural critics, social scientists and environmental policy makers who have made the written word central to their understanding of how social changes are achieved. All will be asked to pursue a knotty question: are we up to the task of writing a global environment, a global sensorium that impinges upon us so intimately that we are forced to recognize its crises as our own? Can the culture of letters bring the biosphere into our embodied sense of the everyday? What we are interested in is the task of creating a social aesthetic, if we use the term in Ramon Saldívar’s sense to mean “those complex emotions, reflections, and sensations which give rise to a peculiarly poetic organization, responsive to the demands of history."
Click here to view the BEYOND ENVIRONMENTALISM conference website. |
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