In addition to data: Why arts and humanities are crucial when thinking about earth stewardship

Background/Question/Methods

In Soil Not Oil (2008) Vandana Shiva analyzes the current ecological situation that is producing alarming devastation of the planet and an ever-widening gap worldwide between the rich and the poor. Of this situation, the solution to which requires an embrace of earth stewardship globally, Shiva states: "The choice we make will decide whether or not we survive as a species." I ask in this paper:  What will lead human beings to make the right choice? The methods I employ are those of the humanities:  critical reasoning, cultural studies, and textual analysis.

Results/Conclusions

Focusing especially on the need in the United States to reorient our relationship with the earth and all life on it so that stewardship rather than consumption defines our behavior, I argue that the question at hand is fundamentally one of ethics.  It calls for a paradigm shift, a moral awakening and emotional and intellectual transformation that can be aided by science and technology but, finally, fall outside their purview. Currently, attention goes overwhelmingly to technological advances and scientific "break-through." But that imbalance can encourage denial and continued exploitation of the planet. As the contemporary Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko has one character casually observe in the novel Almanac of the Dead (1991): "Don't worry. Because science will solve the water problem of the West. New technology. They'll have to." Drawing on the work of artists and humanists such as Simon Ortiz, Vine Deloria, Jr., Val Plumwood, Marilou Awiakta, Alice Walker and Wendell Berry, I will emphasize the indispensable role of creative work and humanities scholarship in achieving a shared ethic of earth stewardship because that work speaks to the human imagination-our ability to envision a more equitable and sustainable way of life-and our capacity for empathy, both with fellow human beings and with nonhuman life forms. While acknowledging that some artists and humanists impede the search for ecological sanity, I will build on the arguments and empirical evidence presented in my most recent book, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (2010), to stress the importance of enlisting arts and humanities perspectives-and particularly the moral provocation of both-as we embrace the global challenge of arriving at a shared ethic of environmental justice and earth stewardship.