Environmental Humanities

There are profound intersections between the environmental humanities and the psychological obstacles to compassion. The book Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (2015), which provided the original impetus for creating this website, focuses on several key psychological obstacles to awareness and sensitivity regarding mass atrocities, famine, climate change, the refugee crisis, and other major challenges in the world today—namely, psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy, and the prominence effect. A second important dimension of Numbers and Nerves is the work of writers, photographers, and visual artists to communicate information about these and other crises in ways that surmount or sidestep the above-mentioned obstacles to compassion, pricking readers, listeners, and viewers and enabling us to pay attention to these phenomena and care about them rather than merely feeling detached and overwhelmed. People who study these communication strategies in the context of human connections to geography, animals, and physical processes (such as climate) work in the environmental humanities.

The environmental humanities are a connected set of disciplines—such as ecocriticism, environmental history, environmental philosophy, and environmental religious studies—that offer powerful tools for understanding and responding to some of the greatest challenges we face in the world today, ranging from the humanitarian crises mentioned elsewhere on the Arithmetic of Compassion website to such ecological catastrophes as microplastic pollution of the planet’s seas and the mega-extinctions happening across the globe.

The research and teaching disciplines mentioned above have existed in academic circles for decades, but in the late 1990s, scholars, artists, and activists began to intentionally bring together the methodologies and vocabularies of these and other fields, including gender and sexuality studies and policy studies, to produce not only new scholarly results but increasingly engaged approaches to raising public consciousness, empowering citizens, and guiding decision makers. Historian Donald Worster wrote famously in his 1993 book The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination: “We are facing a global crisis today not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as possible, but even more, it requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them.”

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Over the past several decades, tremendous effort has gone into understanding not only the ethical dimensions of human relationships to the planet, but many other humanistic dimensions of the so-called “ecological imagination.” Environmental humanities scholars have knit together the social movement known as environmental justice with the theoretical and historical insights of postcolonial studies to explore the historical and ongoing processes that damage both natural environments and human communities. Ecofeminism and multicultural environmentalism scrutinize and critique the connections between social hierarchies and environmental injustice, while also illustrating the roles of gender, sexuality, and culture in supporting distinctive ecological identities and knowledge, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Some environmental humanities scholars are committed to understanding multispecies relationships (animal subjectivities, companion species, and human actions toward other species), while others focus on environmental communication and information management. Perhaps this latter area of research is particularly germane to the Arithmetic of Compassion website.

Although this is a diverse and rapidly evolving “metadiscipline” that encompasses multiple subfields, including various tools for gathering and interpreting and describing information, for the purposes of this website we will focus on three core ideas that seem especially relevant to the psychological concepts highlighted here:

• Slow Violence,
• Narrative Empathy, and
• Empirical Ecocriticism.
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• Nixon defines slow violence early in his book as a term to describe “calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven media” (6). This reference to the foibles of our individual and collective attention spans suggests that if people only made an effort to attend to unspectacular crises, they would appreciate and act upon these situations, but it’s actually not so simple, as we learn from the psychological explanations on this website. Still, attending to these crises is an important first step.
  The structural, large-scale, and temporally extensive forms of violence that Nixon details in his book and that have since engaged numerous artists, journalists, and environmental humanities scholars are extremely difficult to represent textually and for the human mind to grasp. Nixon describes this as a predicament of “apprehension” at length, arguing that “to engage slow violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend—to arrest, or at least mitigate—often imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the works of scientific and imaginative testimony” (14). Parts II and III Numbers and Nerves, devoted respectively to “Narrative, Analytical, and Visual Strategies for Prompting Sensitivity and Meaning” and “Interviews on the Communication of Numerical Information to the General Public,” are precisely linked to the challenge of apprehending and communicating various forms of slow violence, from genocide to deforestation to climate change. Many of the blog posts on this website, too, are efforts to employ the psychology of compassion as a means of helping readers apprehend current humanitarian and ecological crises.
  As we discuss in the Postscript to Numbers and Nerves, Nixon refers to a particular group of communicators as “writer-activists” because of their aim to transform “abstract information” about imperceptible crises “into viscerally, experientially meaningful discourse that might trigger in audiences the impulse to act individually or collectively” (Numbers and Nerves, 218–19). For Nixon, these writer-activists have the potential “to help us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer” (15). Often instances or processes of slow violence require technological prostheses (temperature gauges, satellite images, etc.) for humans to perceive them, and the readings from these gadgets take the form of quantitative data or technical models. Information about large phenomena, such as numbers of migrants or fluctuating populations of species, often takes the form of databases, which tend to offer minimal affective content—in fact, they are by design abstract and “rational.” Environmental humanities scholars such as Ursula K. Heise, in her book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), seek to discern the subtle narrative and symbolic dimensions of seemingly abstract representations of population data.
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• Other scholars, such as Mitchell Thomashow and Timothy Morton, have argued that vast, slow catastrophes are perceptible if we train ourselves to look for them. In Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change (2002), Thomashow asserts that “the threats and challenges of such problems as loss of biodiversity, global climate change, and habitat degradation can become more accessible and personal, to the body and the mind, so they are directly perceived and intrinsic to everyday awareness” (4). He offers numerous tools for “place-based perceptual ecology” (5). He also points out that “exemplary biospheric naturalists . . . hold in common . . . feelings of humility, praise, respect, and reverence for the grandeur of the biosphere. These qualities,” he continues, “are the foundations of compassion—an ethic of care for the fabric of biodiversity, for the whole Earth project, beyond the chauvinistic needs of the human species” (121). In essence, what Thomashow shares in his work—this particular book and others (and also on his website: www.mitchellthomashow.com)—is a platform for developing the mindfulness necessary for apprehending slow violence and natural processes. Although he focuses his discussion on perceiving ecological change, much of what he says can also be directed toward humanitarian crises and solutions.
  Along similar lines, Timothy Morton, in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), dismisses the idea that certain types of slow violence, such as global warming (he prefers this term to “climate change”), are remote and inaccessible. He writes: “I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, through some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces.” And he continues: “Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that ‘distance’ is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things” (27). The implication here is that phenomena such as global warming may not feel real or may not seem directly associated with our own actions in the world if they are thought to be far away and abstract. This same logic can be applied to social phenomena, such as poverty, racism, gender discrimination, and other problems, that may swirl around us every day, although we tell ourselves that these are issues from the news headlines that do not apply to us. As Morton states, “OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY MAY APPEAR” (27).
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• The concept of slow violence, which is receiving so much attention in the environmental humanities, has clear relevance to the psychological conditions featured elsewhere on the Arithmetic of Compassion website. This is a condition of insensitivity to important phenomena, requiring thoughtful strategies of representation and communication, such as stories and images, in order to bring information to life and give it meaning.

  Works Cited

  Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

  Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

  Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

  Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic, eds. Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data. Oregon State University Press, 2015.

  Thomashow, Mitchell. Brining the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. MIT Press, 2002.

  Narrative Empathy

  The concept of slow violence addresses the perceptual and communication challenges associated with phenomena that seem to exceed human scale in their size and pace (too small, too large, too rapid, too gradual to be perceived through human sensory capabilities). A related issue is that of emotional attachment or compassion. Even if we are guided to notice and comprehend on some level the physical and biological processes involved in anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction that exceed the “background extinction rate” (Kolbert, 15), it is extremely difficult for human beings to summon enough emotional sensitivity to care about these and other phenomena. This is true in the environmental context, just as it is in the context of mass suffering among human beings. When writers like Elizabeth Kolbert use storytelling techniques that offer vivid settings, characters, and scenes as a way of representing complex, abstract phenomena such as “the sixth extinction,” they are counting on the power of narrative to evoke empathy among readers. The same process of producing empathy through story occurs when stories are shared in person or through film, personal testimony, and other media.

  In her 2007 book Empathy and the Novel, theorist Suzanne Keen cites the idea of “mirror neurons” developed by cognitive scientists as the reason why “readers feel empathy with (and sympathy for) fictional characters” (vii). Lisa Zunshine quotes social neuroscientists Tania Singer, Daniel Wolpert, and Christopher D. Frith in her Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010): “[Mirror] neurons provide a neural mechanism that may be a critical component of imitation and our ability to represent the goals and intentions of others. . . . The growing interest in the phenomenon of empathy has led to the recent emergence of imaging studies investigating sympathetic or empathetic reactions in response to others making emotional facial expressions or telling sad versus neutral stories” (181). Zunshine emphasizes here that “our neural circuits are powerfully attuned to the presence, behavior, and emotional display of other members of our species” (118).

  Ecocritics such as Erin James and Alexa Weik von Mossner have broadened this claim to suggest, in various “econarratological” studies, that humans are also capable of feeling empathy for characters that are not human—that is, we can care about animals and even plants or other beings when moved by the language of story. This process results from our tendency to inhabit an imaginative space called a “storyworld” by narratologist David Herman (“Storyworld,” 569). As James explains in The Storyworld Accord (2015), imagining a storyworld “is an inherently environmental process, in which readers come to know what it is like to experience a space and time different than that of their reading environment” (xi). The work of Herman and James highlights the human imaginative capacity to inhabit realities well beyond the quotidian lives of readers, listeners, and viewers. Weik von Mossner tests the possibilities of “inhabiting nonhuman minds” (125) and feeling “trans-human empathy” in Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (2017), determining on the basis of recent work in cognitive ethology and affective science that “we do not only respond empathetically to heavily anthropomorphized animals, as we find them in Disney animation and related forms of fiction, but . . . our biological makeup also allows us to empathize with actual and un-anthropomorphized animals” (132). Markku Lehtimäki offers a foundational introduction to econarratology in his 2019 article “Narrative Communication in Environmental Fiction: Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.”