Michael Livermore 0:11
Hi, this is Mike Livermore, and with me today is Willis Jenkins, who’s the John Allen Hollingsworth professor of ethics and the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on the Environmental Humanities. And he can often be found in transdisciplinary collaborations, tackling hard questions related to how humans understand and interact with the natural world. Willis, thanks for joining me today.
Willis Jenkins 0:38
Mike. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Michael Livermore 0:40
Just to get us started. I was curious, like, what brought you to this intersection of Religion Ethics in the environment where you’ve spent your career kind of thinking about these issues?
Willis Jenkins 0:51
Yeah, no, fair question. And, and I suppose, like many questions that come to mid career academics who have made kind of a transition, there’s a long story behind it, but the short of it is more or less that, you know, I trained in religious ethics with a focus on environmental issues in a kind of conventional way, you know, that is like, how did how did a few big Christian traditions reason historically about human environment relations? And what kind of implications would that have for contemporary environmental issues? And then, you know, my first job was that I was at Yale Divinity School with an appointment also in the forestry school, and I realized, I didn’t have a lot of really helpful interesting things to say to the people in the forestry environment school about particular problems, and, and yet, I thought that someone with my training should be able to, and so yeah, I really started focusing on just trying to get involved in not just the not to sort of like the cultural translation of, of issues, but really, kind of humanistic contribution to does to how problems are interpreted from the beginning how to design from the beginning. And, you know, coming and coming to UVA, and an Environmental Humanities position is really, really kind of opened that up.
Michael Livermore 2:10
Yeah, that’s great. And, you know, there’s a lot of different ways that I think we could we could take our conversation, but one thing that just kind of comes to mind, that sometimes troubles me when we talk about the humanities, is that it, it strikes me as a weird way of carving up the joints in academia, that I’m not sure that historians and philosophers have all that much in common with each other. And we put them under this rubric of the humanities. And do you think that that’s a category that’s worthwhile? Or is it just like all other intellectual disciplines that aren’t, you know, the sciences?
Willis Jenkins 2:46
Yeah, you know, Andres Clarence was an engineer, and he’s on the he’s on our environmental resilience institute, said, You know, I basically think of the university as engineering and everything else is religious studies within his way, which is what he was joking, of course, but it was also his way of saying, you know, humanities, social sciences, what it’s all just kind of like squishy non math is what–
Michael Livermore 3:08
Non quantitative. Yeah.
Willis Jenkins 3:11
Yeah, no, it’s a really good question. I, and I think, especially in this field, where there’s a sort of interdisciplinary interpretation of environmental issues, and we’re trying to think about how to, yeah, how to find collaborations of sciences and economics, especially sciences and economics, and also engineering and design, to some extent, Humanities becomes arts and humanities becomes kind of a box. And yeah, I think sort of two ways about it. I mean, actually, you know, I’m speaking directly from the experience of being on a panel, the President’s panel about how UVA should invest in resilience and sustainability yesterday, and I was the I was the lone humanities guy out of like, 20 people. And, you know, the questions were coming, kind of like, what should the what can the humanities be? What should they do? And on the one hand, I’m really happy to talk about the, the need for research that is attentive to a wide range of cultural interpretations. That is, you know, methodologically imaginative that can engage the arts and invite public imagination, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, I hear your point, I think it’s a pretty loose coalition from from people who really don’t share research methods.
Michael Livermore 4:21
Yeah. And it’s funny to think about this, because it’s also the social science. So I don’t think of the social sciences as as falling within the rubric of the humanities. Sometimes it gets put in there. But one thing I think is funny is, if you call a social scientist a humanist, they would get very angry. And if you’d call a humanist, a social scientist, they get very angry. And so I think that the fact that they get lumped together neither one of them likes that. So maybe that’s a way of saying that maybe the category doesn’t make any sense.
Willis Jenkins 4:49
Yeah, I mean, it may well not yeah.
Michael Livermore 4:53
But you know, on the environment, one of the things you know, that is especially fun about your work and some of your recent work, especially is, you know, trying to make these interdisciplinary transdisciplinary cross Humanities and Sciences collaborations work and, you know, generate product and not just, you know, be a panel or, you know, a talk session, but actually, you know, create real intellectual contributions and real intellectual progress. And so maybe, you know, it’s, it’s more illuminating to talk about some of these abstract academic issues in the context of real projects that you’ve worked on. So one that we have chatted about in the past a little bit, is this project on water. And this is a huge interdisciplinary group. It’s hugely interdisciplinary, the group is good sized. It’s not massive, but it’s hugely interdisciplinary in the sense of folks in the hard sciences. There’s a lawyer in the group, economics, engineering, religious studies, and so on. And I was curious just about what kind of how that that project got started, and what the project is about, let’s kind of start with that. It’s about it’s about water, water rights in general. But what what’s the kind of this specific interdisciplinary transdisciplinary perspective that the that you saw was missing, and that this group was kind of forged to help address?
Willis Jenkins 6:18
Yeah, so this group was a came out of an initiative from UVA environmental resilience institute, that was marine broadly themed on water futures, but there was a particular team, they wanted to work on water security. And I mean, this will get directly to your question about what what did the humanities do? I sit on the ERI board and, and and I played what is often my role, which was to say, like, well, what’s great about water security? Like why not a different concept? Like why not water justice? And why not water sovereignty? Look at all the look at all the ways of thinking about water that the discourse of water security excludes. And Karen, the director of the ERI kind of called me on it. She’s like, basically. Okay, smarty pants communities guy. How about how about you, co director team on water security, then? And, but that, but that does express what my worry was that some of the concepts that organize research, especially environmental change research that can be taken as common sense have a kind of unreflective normative frame to them. And it’s not so much. It’s not that I’m an ethicist. It’s not that I disliked the normative frame is that I, I want there to be, you know, responsibility for how the problem is framed right from the beginning. And then also, you know, in this context, it wasn’t, I mean, my my stance wasn’t that you can’t use the phrase water security. But let’s ask, to what extent can you begin to include some of the cultural valuations of water that have historically been excluded from international water security discourse? And so yeah, we really, we really tried to push the envelope on that.
Michael Livermore 7:46
Yeah, that’s it’s so I mean, in a way, there’s, there’s almost a kind of a philosophy of science element to some of this stuff. I mean, you get, I think, as a quote, unquote, humanist that gets pulled into these conversations, you could ask to play some different roles, again, in part due to the, you know, the kind of open ended nature of what we mean when we refer to the humanities. And so it’s a little bit about questioning concepts from almost from a scientific perspective to say like, are these the right ways of thinking about these problems? To make progress on them scientifically, but also, you know, normatively, you know, how we think about these issues? Are there unstated normative assumptions or undefended or undefendable normative assumptions. So, just to kind of get into the details of this project, you know, what is what is what, what is the concept of water security? You know, and how, how has it been used in? Like, what do we mean? Like, what, what is meant by that, and, and how is it structured, you know, scientific inquiry or kind of policy conversations?
Willis Jenkins 8:49
Yeah, so actually, we were, we were really fortunate to bring in probably one of the best authorities in the world on the history of the water security concept by Jeremy Schmidt. So he joined the team and really helped sort of frame its significance. But you know, I think just really, basically, it’d be fair to say that water security has been thought as securing the minimum quantity of water for, you know, what humans need, right? Like, in a yeah. In the most efficient way, generally. And so there’s this kind of constant, maybe maybe the main pole and existing water security discourse would be the tension between the efficiency of water distribution versus universality and making sure that every single human’s water needs are met.
Michael Livermore 9:41
Got it. So in a way we could Is it fair to analogize it to a concept like food security, or even like economic security when we’re talking about yeah, just the the idea that there’s human needs, and what matters is ensuring some stable and broad accessibility to you know, whatever the resource energy security could be another one.
Willis Jenkins 10:05
Yeah, completely. Yeah. And so then, you know, the other lead on this project is Paolo Dorico, who’s he’s a hydrologist. He’s the chair of Environmental Sciences at UC Berkeley. And his work is his work is really about the quantitative hydrology of water security as embodied in food. And so his big point is, like, look, so much of the water that humans need is not like the water that comes out of the tap, or that they need for we need for drinking and bathing. But really, it’s it’s most of the water we use, is in food, right? And so he’s really, he’s, his work is focused around quantifying flows of water that are implicit in food.
Michael Livermore 10:45
Yeah, so just to get into some of this conceptual space. So what is the difference between, you know, say, a concept like water security, which strikes me as deeply normative, really kind of on its face. But But maybe, but maybe, of course, having clear, scientific or engineering kind of implications, because we could talk, we could evaluate a system, or real hydrological system or a real built environment to ask, you know, what, uh, what are the consequences for water security of this of x, what we’re evaluating? How does that differ from using a frame, like water justice, or water rights in this evaluative posture of kind of taking what we know about the natural world, and engineering and science and so forth, and then kind of understanding whether we’re making good or bad decisions, which I take to be the evaluative posture.
Willis Jenkins 11:46
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would put it this way, what we wanted to do was create a quantitative model where it would be possible to visualize what water security looks like, under different value regimes. So that is to say, like, Okay, if you go all in on water security as being defined by universal human rights, you know, this is what this is what you get. Maybe the key, but really, the key thing here was, we wanted to find some way of expressing important values for water that, I guess you could say, careful, the water itself, like, what if the river is sacred, right? Or what if, though water has rights of its own? Or what if the ecological benefits services communities that are sustained by water are seen as you know, not just desirable, but let us say, like, foundationally important to a community’s identity, such that they should be bound up into water security? How could we how could we express that? And then, yeah, so that’d be that was the I think the key, the key innovate…innovative thing we’re trying to do so that you can begin to compare different ideas of water security within the same volumetric framework?
Michael Livermore 13:05
So you could ask, I mean, just just to, you know, a concrete example of where there’s different types of interests at play would be something like in the on the West Coast, there’s often conflict between agriculture and like, endangered species requirements. Exactly. Yeah. And so you know, the there’s, there’s frequently questions about what are the minimum flows necessary in a river or to protect like salmon spawning grounds, and, you know, the advocates for for the for the endangered species will have one set of water flows that they’re going to advocate for, and then the agricultural interests will say, No, we need this water, the salmon don’t need that much, or we shouldn’t care about the salmon at all. And, of course, in the US, there’s a legal framework to ensure the minimum water flows that are going to jeopardize the species. But we can ask things like, you know, is this protected? If the salmon have have some kind of right? If they’re, they have some interest that we ought to respect? You know, what, what does that look like? And I guess what it sounds like from the project that you’re describing, is that the goal wasn’t to answer those kinds of those kinds of hard normative questions. But just to say, you know, we can build a model that depending on how you answer those normative questions, then the model can tell you something about what waterflow should look like.
Willis Jenkins 14:31
Yes. And that that was the idea. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t an optimizing equation. There are equations in there, but they’re not optimizing. In the sense that if you plug in the values, and you get like the best answer, but it’s really, if you begin with some articulation of the values that inform, ostensibly a foreign inform your notion or a community’s notion of water security, this is the kind of volume trade offs you would get. And I’m gonna say so we’ve been talking I mean, this has been kind of framed like what can what the what can the humanities bring to environmental change research, but I experienced this also as a really salutary challenge. Because to me, in it from a more humanities based approach, because to work with hydrologists, you know, he’s, you know, Paulo he’s so interested, so, so open to philosophy really excited to redo environmental ethics. And so his question was, yeah, it wasn’t hard to convince him that we should that hydraulics, hydrology should take account of, you know, intrinsic value theories or Indigenous Studies theories. And his immediate question was like, okay, so what would be the what should be our proxy for that? Right, like, how much, how much water flow? Should we put for appropriately respecting, you know, the intrinsic value of a waterway? And then yeah, that that, then is a kind of, it’s forcing a kind of evaluative approach to really think in a quantitative way about how these values get expressed. And so of course, we picked a few proxies, you know, like, 80%, flow, 20% flow. But that’s the kind of I think that’s the kind of political work that, you know, ideally, a deliberative watershed community would undertake.
Michael Livermore 16:09
Right. And one of the things is also interesting about this, I think, too, is it highlights this intersection of values and, and science in a way that’s very explicit. And I think beneficial for that reason, you know, there are other environmental contexts where we kind of subsume the value choices into the scientific inquiry, we kind of pretend like what we’re doing is we’re just answering a scientific question, like, for example, you know, what, you know, what water flows are necessary to achieve water security? And then we go to a bunch of scientists and say, answer the question for us please, tell us and then we’ll, you know, we’ll develop policies accordingly. But as you point out, that’s a deeply normative question. And so we’re, it’s kind of almost inappropriate or unfair to kick that to the scientists and expect them to give us an answer, or at the very least, it puts them in an extremely awkward position. Because there are these embedded normative questions that we’d be much better served by, at least, you know, from a deliberative perspective by having the science answer, in a sense what the science can answer. But then, being more explicit about how that connects up to, to these deeper value questions.
Willis Jenkins 17:30
Yes, yeah. Completely. I always wince in empathy for the scientists when I hear politicians say, well, the science has said X, and so therefore, we must do Y, you know? And it’s really unfair. Yeah.
Michael Livermore 17:43
Yeah, it’s tough. And, you know, this comes up in climate debates all the time, you know, let’s just do what the science says. And it’s sometimes my friends, right? And it is frustrating. You know, I think there is a reason why some advocates and politicians are inclined to say things like that, which is they want to, they want to make it seem as though what’s going on is not a contest of values, but is instead, you know, just to just a simple question of fact. So in a, you know, get thinking of the context of the water rights research, you know, you could have this really fancy model where this, everyone kind of agrees on the science, which would be like Nirvana in today’s political discourse, right? So we’re like, okay, we all agree that this model is an accurate representation of water flows and that kind of thing. But what we really disagree about is the relative value of, you know, people’s property rights and agricultural interests, versus you know, whether the salmon have some interest that we ought to respect in their own right, versus, you know, traditional indigenous peoples relationships to this water. And that’s what we really disagree about. Now, what do we do? Right? Right. So what’s the answer? Like, what do we do? Have we been helped by the model? If what we end up ultimately recognizing is that we have deep, maybe insoluble values, disagreements?
Willis Jenkins 19:22
Yeah. Well, so it’s a fair question, especially given the state of our current Democratic capacity to have meaningful conversation across significant value differences. But if I can answer from my commitments I would say, I think that that’s in the long run better, to know, to know what where the differences lie, rather than kind of obscuring them inside of a insight of either an economic model or a scientific model, because they’re gonna come out eventually, right? I think it’s better. I mean, I think it’s better yeah, I would like to think it’s better for a pluralist democracy to figure out how to be a democracy amidst deep irreconcilable pluralism than to hide its conflicts.
Michael Livermore 20:09
Yeah, it’s interesting. Um, so just, I mean, I want to agree with you. But to to just play the devil’s advocate, you could actually imagine that, you know, that kind of the argument that runs well look, at some level, these, these are really deep disagreements. And we, again, kind of, as you said, we live in a pluralistic society, we want people to we like that pluralistic society, in a sense, right? We certainly like that our own rights to decide how to live our lives, and what counts for the good life. And we’re going to disagree with each other. You know, there are ways that we can frame questions that turn those disagreements into hot disagreements that get people angry and inflame their kind of identity and affiliation and are oriented towards in group and out group kind of ways of thinking about the world. And then there are ways of framing disputes that are jargon laden, technocratic and difficult to understand. And people just say, ah, that’s too, that’s boring. And I’m gonna go like, please watch sports and, you know, hang out with my family. And, you know, maybe we can and you know, you disagree with me, but I don’t even understand what we’re talking about. So let’s have a beer.
Willis Jenkins 21:21
Yeah. I appreciate–Mike I have a lot of sympathy for the technocratic view. Yeah. On the other hand, I think then it I guess, I think it can lead them to the kind of alienation that you see around climate, right. Like, a bunch of people are doing some stuff I don’t understand to, you know, whatever. It is, like, take my freedoms, or whatever Americans are saying now.
Michael Livermore 21:49
Raise my energy prices, right. I mean, in fairness, it’s like your if your energy prices are gonna go up, we should probably give you a good reason why that’s, yeah.
Willis Jenkins 21:56
Yeah. Right. And it shouldn’t require you to understand that integrated assessment.
Michael Livermore 22:03
Right, and the trust the experts, things get gets. Yeah, so that’s interesting. So the trust the experts thing gets thin. When we’re talking about like real world, implications on people’s lives, we want to be able to, but then again, just to again, continue to play devil’s advocate here, your energy prices are gonna go up. And we could say, well, the reason your energy prices are gonna go up is because we’ve made contestable value judgments about the relative importance of future generations versus current generations, you know, where you sit in society versus where other people sit in society, our responsibilities, and, you know, rights visa vie the global community, and we’ve made those decisions that are deeply value laden, and that’s going to determine how much energy prices are gonna go up, or mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo trust the experts, don’t worry about it. That’s why your energy prices are gonna go up. And, and yeah, I do wonder which one of those ultimately is more conducive to you know, again, just kind of getting along with each other?
Willis Jenkins 23:04
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, there’s not something that I am an expert in this sort of, like, cultural cognition that I mean, I certainly do think I mean, yeah, I’m interested. I don’t really know which way to go on that. I mean, I’m really interested in that question. I think, again, like, from my own intellectual commitments, the way I would like to answer is that, you know, you hope that that people can be motivated by their commitments, maybe, you know, maybe not like 100%, but enough that you accept a higher energy bill, because you acknowledge that you care for future generations or something like that. And I think that that’s plausible. I think I’m among those who are skeptical of, of, especially climate policy, and I guess, also water policy, always being delivered to the public in terms of self interest, you know, like, this will be better for you, because you’re gonna avoid some silly, terrible thing, or you’re gonna, you know, have a million green jobs or whatever. And maybe that but also, ask people to be who they want to be right? Like you want to you want to be like, there’s incredible bipartisan support about being the kind of people who care for future generations. Like that’s not really a controversial value. It’s quite controversial, like what it means, of course, but I would like to think that that’s a commitment that could lead to some practical policy implication, including that your gas is more expensive, right?
Michael Livermore 24:32
And maybe the thing is that we don’t I mean, ideally, we wouldn’t necessarily have to agree with the choices that are made, but we would what, because we’re not going to because we live in a pluralistic democracy, and the chances that my preferred policies are going to be the ones that are adopted are roughly one out of 330 million. And so, what I’m supposed to I think the way this is supposed to work is that I’m supposed to see to the choices that are made and recognizing partly because there are values but in part, you know, that are roughly commensurate with my values. I recognize them because the kind of values that people have, even if they’re not exactly the ones that reflect my relative weighing of different interests, but I recognize that there’s a democratic process that we all have a voice in. And ultimately what comes out of that is a view that, and I am committed to that democratic process because it respects my voice in some equal way. And I think one of the tricky things these days is that people have questions about that.
Willis Jenkins 25:30
Yeah. Well.
Michael Livermore 25:34
Yeah. So then, just the other part of this, that I was curious to get your thoughts on, of course, we’re talking about kind of, sometimes people refer to as sociological legitimacy right to people actually accept the, you know, the outputs of a political process. But there’s also kind of normative legitimacy like, is it actually defendable as a democratic practice to throw mumbo jumbo at people and, you know, as a way of getting them to be compliant, as opposed to explaining that the true grounds of, of our decisions?
Willis Jenkins 26:08
Yeah. Yeah. You know, so just refer back to this, again, this this panel that UVA had yesterday asked a number of us to reflect on the relation of climate and democracy, because that’s like, it’s an area they want to invest in. And so my little team of three people we were, we basically said, Well, it seems like the question here is, can democracy survive climate change? Or made to put a better like, are democratic societies possessed of the capacities to respond well, to climate change? Or is it like the kind of is it just so overwhelming the temporalities, so misaligned with you know, the temporalities of political processes, the incentive structure across generations, just so perverse, whatever it is all the things right, that democracy is just really ill equipped for it? And maybe you kind of need the the technocratic mumbo jumbo as a way of, of fudging it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I wouldn’t feel bad if I was making that argument. But I would certainly be open to hearing it.
Michael Livermore 27:10
If it’s true, it’s true. I mean, that kind of thing is empirical. Right. Right. Right. And we shouldn’t just, you know, and this is the tricky thing is to have our commitments, but we don’t want them to, we don’t want to engage in wishful thinking. Yeah. Right. Which is, which is tricky. Yeah. So so another really interesting project that you’ve been engaged in recently is this coastal futures conservatory. And I think of this so if the water rights project is about taking, let’s say, perspectives drawn from the humanities, and using those perspectives to help this project really highlight the underlying normative values that are driving conversations about a particular environmental question, water security in that case, and untangle the normative and the empirical and the scientific and the cultural. What I take the coastal futures conservatory is about, well, you tell me what it’s about. It strikes me as a little bit about translation, it strikes me as a little bit about, you know, a broadening the techniques of scientific inquiry in a way that’s more inclusive, but maybe you could just describe what the project is and then how you see how it relates to this broader science humanities set of issues.
Willis Jenkins 28:29
Yeah, so coastal futures conservatory is a kind of a little UVA startup funded by an internal grant that has been has been asked to think about integrating arts and humanities into Virginia’s really world class Coastal Research Program. So UVA leads a an NSF funded Long Term Ecological Research site called the Virginia coast reserve, along the eastern shore of Virginia, I mean, it’s just, it’s just a great place to study coastal resilience, the ecological dynamics of coastal resilience, because it’s the largest undisturbed barrier island system in the world, and also a place that is experiencing sea level rise at three times the global average. And so you just get lots of dynamics that are that it’s a great laboratory for for scientists interested in this and so knowing that, you know, wanting to build Environmental Humanities into environmental change research generally around UVA, this is a great place to think with and, and the staff and the scientists, they were really interested. They wanted to know like, how can we how can we have arts and humanities more involved here? And basically a lot of conversations with a music professor named Matthew Burner who specializes in Eco acoustics, we decided to call our project a conservatory, you know, School of Music and to foreground listening weighs in. And so that, you know, that means like, you know, listening across disciplines and listening across borders, but also literally listening and so, one of my favorite examples is, we sonify the data sets that are produced by the VCR scientists. So Matthew and his graduate students will take a data set, you know, like on water quality in, in a particular area and then basically translate that into a sonic signature, you know, take up huge CSV file and use machines to, to assign particular sounds to each data point, and then you can listen to it. And then of course, the you know, then they depending on your, your method of ecoacoustics, and Mike I know more about methods and ecoacoustics really would have anticipated, but depending on it, then you begin to work with that you might compose with it or manipulate it in some way so, so that it begins to sound a particular way. And so then when the public’s, you know, and I’ve also just experienced, you know, when you look at a visual graph of temporal data plotted over time, you take it in, in an instant, right, like, like that, like, you know, especially like, you know, carbon emissions over 50 years, or whatever. But if you’re, if you listen to it, you really have to attend to the temporality and to the change in it over time. Because you’re sitting there for what even if it’s just like, you know, 30 seconds, like you experience that in a, in a certain way you relate to attend to it. And I think it’s just, it, it invites a different kind of cognition. And so anyway, that’s one kind of listening. And then we’ll just, there’s other parts, there’s another other number of other components that’s conservatory. But we also kind of commissioned typical humanities based research from a story and literary scholars, and then that informs these kind of multidisciplinary performances that Matthew really orchestrates. So that an audience can come on, we’ve had a number of performances, an audience can come and experience a, you know, a concert, but you know, that it’s informed by coastal sciences, it’s formed by indigenous studies, it’s informed by ethics. And I, you know, I don’t know, I don’t have any kind of data on this, but what I imagined that we’re doing is that we’re inviting a broader range of imaginative cultural response to what we know about rapid coastal change.
Michael Livermore 32:22
Yeah, it’s real. And it’s so it’s so interesting. And I think, you know, I mean, one distinction, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on with respect to this project is sometimes in these conversations on on the humanities, and the environment, especially for folks who don’t necessarily have, you know, are new to the idea of thinking about the humanities, they almost can think of the role as being like, you would hire a communications expert. It’s a way of communicating science to the public. You know, and, and that’s fine. I don’t know that humanities scholars are who I would, I would tap for the, for that particular job.
Willis Jenkins 33:04
Not always known for being the most accessible.
Michael Livermore 33:08
I mean, these are people who literally write out what they’re going to say, before standing up at a podium and reading their essays. Right. And, and so, but what I’ve thought of, as a kind of an alternative to that is, is meet–sophisticated meaning making, it’s not about necessarily communicating as a pre as, you know, kind of a pre generated message and just figuring out how to, you know, get that message across. It’s this process of meaning making.
I’m just curious what you think of that alternative? And or if there’s, or you think that something slightly adjacent to that, or they’re totally different from it?
Willis Jenkins 33:47
No, I appreciate that. You know, I really resist the idea that, you know, the humanities are, should be involved in environmental change research to translate to the public yeah. A: because it’s a bad idea. And B, because, you know, I hope that we’re doing something more creative. And so in this case, I’m saying arts and humanities were really write music, really foregrounding music as a way in here. And say, I’m gonna give two examples of how involving the arts and humanities has, has invited meaning making, as you say, I like that. So one is, on the eastern shore, there’s a place a local museum called the barrier island center that is really devoted to remembering the last social life of the set of when the barrier islands off shore were settled. They were settled by by settler people, but after indigenous folks use them for through the 19th century, up until about 1933, when there was a series of hurricanes and they were just like, No, we’re leaving. So we left and then there’s this museum that’s dedicated to it. And so we among all these exhibits, about you know, what fishing was like and what the hotel was like and so on. We made these sound installations. So you so people could come in, and they could pick up headphones. And they would listen to Yeah, like a sonification of sea level rise over time or something like that right. And, and then next to it, there was just a very short little placard that explained the science that went into the data that was created. And just a note about how the sonification was made. And there’s nothing else said, you know, there’s nothing else be like, and look, sea level rise is really threatening the eastern shore, and you need to think about what this community is going to do, like no white paper kind of communication, right? And, again, unscientific response here. But the first of all, the opening was really well attended. And there was just like, a real excitement, like a buzz, you know, people put on their headphones, and they were, their eyes would widen, and they would kind of look up and smile, and like, I don’t know, what’s happening in their mind, but I just think, well, in some way, they are participating in the meaning making of what to make of the science of coastal change in this place. And they are connecting it right, you know, literally in the place of historical memory of a radical social change in response to coastal vulnerability. And I so I think, I just think that’s of a higher order now, like the next next step, like yeah, like I would, if we could keep this going, I would love to then find ways to invite and participate in more community meaning making along those lines, and, you know, we’ve done some things like we invite we did like a writing workshop and there was a, there was a artists workshop for local artists to do some stuff with the ghost forest there. And we have a I should say, we have a major indigenous led Indigenous storytelling project. So for indigenous experiences of coastal change, it’s kind of extraordinary. So all that is sort of inviting community meaning making I’d say, but then on the other, this other side of of what this is how this has changed the way that we researchers at UVA research the coast. So we also we have you know, about once a year we gather all the related researchers, sciences scientists, human humanists and artists and Matthew the musician does a he does a kind of ecoacoustics listening workshop. And he makes people go out and take this take microphones to field recorders and basically undertake meditative listening exercises in place. And I, the first time we did this, I was really worried. I just thought like this, this project is gonna fail right from beginning because the scientists are gonna think this is exactly what happens when you invite arts and humanities over, like, you start doing these like weird. Like, I don’t know, like contemplative listening like this not research, you know, right so Karen McGlathery, who’s like the lead scientist for this place comes back after half an hour of directive listing, and she says, every single researcher needs to do this exercise. And it was because she thought she would be bored. You know, like, I work here all the time, I’m not gonna learn anything. And she experienced it differently. She paid attention to different things. And then, like, we brought back recordings, just explain what we’re doing to people at UVA, and one of the one of the oyster reef scientists, Matt Ridinback listen to a recording of an oyster reef and he just was kind he goes, Huh, like, I bet we could build a way of I bet I can answer the questions I have about oyster reef vitality, basically by some acoustic metrics. And so we built this, well we didn’t, but the music is a music grad students and some of Matthews grad students built a, an acoustic monitoring thing, and they got some publications out of it about a and it was just, you know, you can’t can’t like kind of predict that. But it’s just when you’re invited to attend to something through a different disciplinary lens that it allows new kinds of research questions to open up.
Michael Livermore 38:49
Yeah, that’s a great story. And in a way, it’s almost like, I’m trying to think of an analogy, but it’s like, you worry about mono cropping in agriculture and one of the ways that we address that as we keep around heritage breeds and various things. And it’s almost like one thing you could think of is the humanities as a as a storehouse of kind of heritage breeds of intellectual inquiry. And occasionally, it’s good to just take some of those seeds and throw them out into the more monoculture ish disciplines and just disrupt them a little bit and sometimes good things come out of that.
Willis Jenkins 39:25
Yeah, that’s nicely, that’s that’s a good metaphor, Mike I’m going to use that one.
Michael Livermore 39:31
So on this, um, I think, you know, this, this notion of coastal change, and that you’ve been digging into here, and it’s a bit of a left field question, but something been on my mind recently that you may have some thoughts on from this experience. As climate change sets in one of the big questions that societies in here in the US our society, cultures here and around the world are going to face is this question of of retreat. We’re going to lose coastal lands, coastal lands are gonna really radically change. And this is a massive social problem, a cultural, political economic issue, this is going to be a very big deal. And we’ve seen, you know, just just just the leading edge of some of these questions show up, after you see a major storm, you know, come through, and then people will talk a little bit about do we rebuild? Do we not rebuild? What does that look like, and so on? And I wonder, you know, and then and, and what struck me when you were kind of telling the story of the, of the museum is, is there was a retreat there, right, there was a group that had a thriving community, it sounds like and then ultimately decided to leave in the face of environmental risks that they face environmental vulnerabilities. And then there’s a there’s a relationship between this kind of retreat and remembering. And and I’m just wondering if you have any insights from this experience about the broader set of questions of how to how to manage this I what I take to be just an incredibly difficult set of questions that we’re all going to start to really seriously face.
Willis Jenkins 41:08
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I’m gonna I’m, if I can just answer really generally, I would say, it’s going to be a huge site that needs really well informed, interpretive research because it’ll just the amount of cultural memory and loss that is happening already in the in, in, I guess, environmentally stressed, human migrations is massive. So that’s the put it the negative is also like, incredibly new forms of incredible new forms of cultural exchange and cultural flows. Right? So, you know, that’s going to make a real difference on sort of what ideas and practices and foods, you know, all that all that stuff, what goes where, and then how the places that have been left or remembered, I mean, just, you know, think about the repertoire we have of homeland and exile, and how it affects our ongoing our ongoing, you know, political life United States, but, you know, in various ways, different political as everyone, okay, so we’re gonna have a whole new generation of homeland and exile stories. We’ll have unknown political consequences. So that’s really, really broad. But when I think about the question of what’s going to happen along the coasts, just in the next few decades, I think, you know, here’s a real, here’s a place in which there needs to be multi method humanities involved research, because if you do, like, you know, if you do whatever it is, like saline incursion models, or something like that, you can get a sense of like, okay, where does the arable land gonna retreat to? And then maybe you can overlay that with an economic model, like, you know, what’s the what’s the most efficient way to retreat from these places, but none of that’s really going to match up with what people find to be culturally tolerable, or the stories that they’re going to tell about why they left, and what those stories are going to do later. And, you know, I can’t say that, like, if you involve a humanities researcher, that then you can answer those questions, but you can at least begin to let the other forms of research be informed by that.
Michael Livermore 43:05
You can start to track it and recognize that that’s one of the consequences of this. Yeah. Well, to shift gears a little bit, and to maybe bring some of the conversation to more of the religious studies side of your of your of your work. Another really fun, again, interdisciplinary project that that we both know folks who have been part of, is the work that you’ve done on on this kind of the sanctuaries or the sacred spaces around the world. Which sounds like a lot of fun. And also, very interesting research. So maybe, maybe, again, you could kind of introduce what that work is the sanctuary lab. And you know, what, some of the work that you’ve done there, and maybe how it fits into this, one broader question about religion, and how religious ways of thinking, interact with kind of environmental change, climate change, and the like.
Willis Jenkins 44:08
Yeah, so sanctuary lab, it’s another transdisciplinary experiment, and involves people from Arts Sciences, Humanities, interested in how planetary stresses are interpreted and experienced in places regarded as sacred in some way, by some community. And the idea there is that, again, you know, big global problems are going to be experienced in particular ways, you know, according to different particular inheritances, and some of the so I’m always kind of looking for a way into that. And one way in is to start with how places that are set apart in the imagination, and maybe also in politics as special are interpreted when they begin to change. And so actually, the first place we went to was Yellowstone National Park. And you might think, Well wait Yellowstone, I thought this was a, you know, a religion project, but it was great. It was Like taking the methods of religious studies to treat Yellowstone as a kind of secular sanctuary, nor place, it’s been sacralized by the American wilderness tradition, and it’s pieties and that when folks go there, they’re often invited to experience the place with that kind of regard, you know, a place that is set apart, and where the kind of the wilderness sublime can cure your soul. Well, well, and really a place as you know, in the American wilderness tradition, a refuge from the rest of society. So but now, so well you know, Yellowstone is like a crucible of climate change in North America, because it’s, it’s one of the places most vulnerable to fire. And we actually talked with the climate modeler of Yellowstone. And he, you know, his research, he, he had published research that showed that, that basically all of Yellowstone is projected to burn. And such I mean, burn at such a rate that it will not be able to sustain its forest with, I think, I don’t remember the his research, but I want to say 50 years. And so he presented this in like a, you know, austere scientific way, but he knew that we were from religious studies, or at least to directors from religious studies, and then he wanted to say what this meant to him. And he started talking about, you know, Muir and Emerson and how how, I think destabilizing it was for him to think that this place of pure nature was going to was that vulnerable. So, so then the idea so then we also took a different research team, including your colleague, Jon Cannon to Bhutan, a few years ago, and, and there’s a whole different set of inheritances and a whole different set of environmental stresses. And again, the idea was, okay, so here’s a, here’s a Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, with a with a real strong national culture around the form of Vajrayana Buddhism. And, and especially a particular tradition of sacred valleys. So what happens when sacred valleys are, which are protected, you know, by by with these political protections, but also spiritually protected through associations with particular local divinities and these elaborate monastic rituals that, that maintain spiritual protection of these valleys? So what happens when those valleys are, for example, vulnerable to glacial outburst floods from melting glaciers? Like, not so much like what happens to the valley, but what happens to the tradition of interpreting the valley as sacred and protected? And that was actually, you know, of course, it’s more complicated and bivalent than I can like really express in a concise way now, but the answer is lead towards Bhutan’s climate policy, which is, you know, they are they present themselves as as carbon negative, they have a massive conservation policy that is rooted in their interpretation of what the Buddhist heritage means for them. And I think they present themselves to the world as a as a as a sanctuary that’s deserving of international protection. So they’re kind of they’re drawing on a religious heritage to try to craft a place of political I don’t know, a political identity for them in, in, in a world in which climate change is a major flow.
Michael Livermore 48:09
Yeah, I can imagine that the different stories emerging out of this kind of interaction of, of sacred places, and climate change, especially when we, in the in the Yellowstone case, and in the tradition of very broadly kind of American wilderness environmentalism, of thinking of these places, as, as you say, refuges from city life and from you know, other people, and they’re kind of places where people don’t go and or where the traces of human beings are imperceptible. Right. And, you know, climate change obviously, disrupts that there there are no places in the world that are free of human traces. And does that does that if it’s if this is a word de sacralized, the space does that make it less sacred? I mean, certainly the story that you raised with the with the climate modeler, you know, taking and it’s one thing to say, oh, we’ll be inundating the New Jersey shore. And that’s really harmful, and it’s going to have these negative consequences and, and for some people, maybe that is a sufficiently salient example of climate change to be meaningful, but it’s perhaps a different story to talk about wildfires in Yellowstone a place that’s supposed to be free from, from human influence. Although that’s like, absurd, that’s a hugely managed space. But but in any case, I mean, it’s so seems like there are lots of complicated dynamics. There’s one is that these spaces can be used as a sense, highly salient illustrations of the profound changes that are on the horizon. But there’s also perhaps, you know, a complicated dynamic where some of the meaning is sapped out of these spaces because you know, when we see them embedded in, you know, the kind of broader industrial human landscape.
Willis Jenkins 50:01
Yeah, so actually, that there’s something like that dynamic is one that our teams have have asked themselves in one way or another, basically, will…places that regard themselves as sacred sanctuaries, as they are shaped more and more by big pressures that originate from causes, you know, outside of themselves, will will their character be maintained, it’s, um, I think it’s, you know, it’s especially fraught for the American wilderness tradition, of course, because if you have a tradition that you know, uh, places, is unmarked by humans, and that is also what makes it special, then that’s going to make it harder. I mean, it’s gonna make it harder to incorporate what looks like exogenous influences, or the constant pervasive hand of humans. But, you know, stepping back from the particular, you know, anxiety that that causes, I think it’s just really culturally interesting to mark what kinds of vocabularies of human humanity and nature, human natural systems will come out of that pressure. So you know, Yellowstone is this iconic place for American views of, of humanity and nature in a way that maybe the Jersey Shore isn’t quite. And that may, you know, make, you know, we everyone thought everyone around the nation follows, you know, its policy on wolves, or snowmobiles, or whatever, because it makes a difference for how we’ve imagined all of our environments. And so I was just to say, what is interesting to me about this project is it really focuses in on those like, those those real sensitive cultural landscapes, because it knows that the kinds of vocabularies and the questions that arise from there are going to be ones by which we interpret the rest of our, the well, not our, but in this case, um, for Americans, the rest of their like interactions with a climate change world, then I would say that, something like that is true, although it’s different dynamics. They don’t have the same, you know, wilderness set of human nature, binary exclusions, but something like that is true for the Bhutanese in their in their tradition of the Sacred Valley, the place that one goes for safety and enlightenment. Yeah. I mean, I would love it. In my ideal world, you know, you get great funding, and you create a whole set of, of research teams doing this for UNESCO recognized sacred sites around the world, in part because you also have a way of tracking these emerging vocabularies by which humans are simultaneously interpreting really rapid global environmental changes, but with all these really various cultural repertoires, and inheritances, you know, and I think that’s a that’s a point of that’s, that’s something that needs that we kind of need to do better with. So, you know, especially, like, in the big global reports, you know, there’s gonna be, there’s gonna be talking about societies and cultural transitions and so on. But the language is always so austere and imagines kind of, you know, humans universally interacting with the planet universally. But that’s like, of course, that’s not how it happens. You know, we’re all culturally embedded living in these stories possessed of our lexicons. And I think what if there’s one thing the Environmental Humanities kind of stands for ticks at His task is the need to be able to kind of pay real time attention to this, this, this cultural, these many million millions of cultural events that are happening as people just try to interpret these changes with whatever they have in hand.
Michael Livermore 53:36
Yeah, I mean, this is all fascinating. If there’s any donors or NSF program officers listening to this podcast, Willis Jenkins is the guy you should be in touch with. So I feel like I the last question is maybe the most abstract, I just feel like I have to get get your thoughts on this. Well, while I have having a thick, maybe many folks would be interested in in a scholar of environmental ethics and religion and climate change your thoughts, just generally on the political situation in the US and how religion intersects with politics and with the environment, especially in the partisan dynamic, incredibly unhelpful, partisan dynamic that we have in the US today. You know, obviously, we’ve been talking about the intersection of religion and climate change in the environment in a in a fairly nuanced way. And you know, in a very, kind of religiously pluralistic kind of mindset, but but I’m just curious it just generally, if you’ve learned anything in your work that illuminates some of the the ways that that religion in public discourse in the United States and how it interacts with other affinities geographic, partisan and so on, to produce this really unhelpful, dynamic and and is there any way that we can do anything about it?
Willis Jenkins 54:54
Yeah. Wow, okay. I wonder, Well, how long do we have? 5 minutes. Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, okay, so So I would say, Yeah, this is this is an active site of research. I mean, there’s kind of a generation of not very helpful research to try to answer the question of something like, Does being religious make you anti environmental? And that wasn’t helpful for a number of reasons, including that researchers weren’t always really clear what they meant by by religious. But there’s just recently there’s been, there’s been better research that’s come out around religion and climate change. And, as I, as I follow it, you know, a couple findings are one, it’s it’s complicated to disentangle religious and political identity, because in this country, you know, our polarization has involved the polarization of religious identities, right? So. But I think one, one thing we can learn is, well, let me tell you, let me just mention a story and then say something about what what I think is going on. So back in 2006, there was an evangelical declaration about climate change. And it was signed by, you know, everybody, right? Presidents colleges, all the big pastors and their people were on TV, like Falwell was on TV, you know, with Al Sharpton and and then just 10 years later, in 2016, Trump withdraws from Paris, and there’s silence, you know, nothing right. At the same time, and to that back in 2006, there was this Global Assembly of evangelical Christians that they’re called the Luzon conference, I think, that described climate change as one of the two gravest moral moral problems of our time, the other being human poverty. So you know, formally it looks like it’s a problem. And then and then 10 years later in United States, it doesn’t. So what happens? And sociologists are kind of uncovering the research is a couple of things that are happening. One is it’s pretty intentional, what do want to say like culture jamming, right, like, so especially, you know, white evangelicals were targeted by, by internal and external campaigns that attempted to, to kind of shame them into resolidifying their alliance with I guess you’d say the Republican Party, I think the Republican Party was worried that if it lost its evangelical base, that it would really lose its power base, like climate change was seen as a wedge issue. And so you saw, like these really kind of like, clearly very well funded programs that were that went after key pastors, basically saying that they were they were unintentionally losing their Christian identity, they were becoming pagan. They’re giving their kids over to being pagan. And so okay, so maybe that worked, maybe maybe there are other things at play, maybe it had nothing to do with it. But what you do see is that it’s not it’s not right to say that evangelicals don’t care about climate change. What it is right to say is that white evangelicals, who are US citizens are much less likely to care about climate change, but black and brown evangelicals, much higher climate concern. Meanwhile, Catholics, which on the whole have a relatively higher concern towards climate change, also split by race. So White Catholics are much more likely to be skeptical. Whereas Hispanic Catholics are not only more likely, they’re more likely than the American public in general. Right? So what role is religion? And, you know, playing like, what role is evangelical Christian beliefs playing there, it’s really, um, you know, you know, you can be open to, I would be open to hypothesis would say, Well, you know, not much, because it looks like, it looks like, you know, race and political affiliation is doing more work. Um, there’s some more nuanced work inside of that like about how what how religious affiliation affects how intensely and how the the climate views are held, and how open they might be to change. There’s also really interesting international work. And this is really thin, I mean, so much of the religion and climate change work is focused on the United States, and there just isn’t as much everywhere else, including the global South, but there’s some, you know, really interesting work that needs to be done comparatively. So just, for example, in Brazil, evangelicals are more way more likely to be climate concerned than others. And the reason for that, of course, is that evangelicals in Brazil, or they just occupy a totally different political space than evangelicals United States do. So that’s just to say, Okay, I just went on for a little bit there. But you know, religion does a lot of different kinds of really particular work in different contexts. And you really have to have smart research to attend to it. And I just, you know, here’s a place where we just need so much more great social science to understand because it clearly is playing a you know, a huge role.
Michael Livermore 59:40
Yeah, it’s super interesting. I think that the two things there that really just strike me, you know, the depth of the of the complexity of the situation, but also the, you know, that there’s other tails wagging this dog and, you know, maybe just out of a kind of a cultural proclivity, we tend to look to religion to provide explanations when maybe that’s at least in certain contexts, not really the main driver. But nevertheless, it’s still there’s hugely important issues around like, the very least help people understand these issues and talk about them and think about them.
Willis Jenkins 1:00:22
Yeah, like what you just said, like sometimes I sometimes I think, you know, religion may not be like a huge causal explanation, but it is often the explanation that people will give, you know, it’s what they draw on to tell their story about why they did what they did. Yeah.
Michael Livermore 1:00:37
Yeah, that’s very interesting. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Well, this has been a super interesting conversation.
Willis Jenkins 1:00:44
Mike, it was really fun. Thank you.
Free Range Podcast 