Sally Kitch - On Humanities and Sustainability
Sally L. Kitch is the founding Director of the Institute for Humanities Research, Regents' Professor of Women and Gender Studies, and a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University. Since 2008, she has co-directed a team of humanities center directors to develop an international project through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes on Humanities for the Environment (HfE). She is co-author of the “Sustainability and Social Justice: Key Principles” document that is the centerpiece of the project.
Transcript
My name is Sally Kitch. I am Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. I am a Regents' Professor of Women and Gender Studies, and I am a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at the Global Institute.
What is your sustainability expertise?
My expertise with regard to issues of sustainability is really the relationship of the humanities to the questions of sustainability that are on the table. People always say, so what do the humanities have to do with sustainability. Isn't this a matter of better technology? Isn't it a matter of figuring out how to clean up the air, clean up the water, more solar panels everywhere? And certainly that is part of the question. But I began to realize quite early in my investigation of this that we already have a lot of technology and we are not solving the problems.
How do the humanities relate to sustainability?
What humanists are interested in is that gap between what our reason tells us we need to do in order not to ruin the planet for human habitation and our behavior and our belief systems, and the way we go about solving problems.
Some of the places where sustainability scientists often begin, humanists regard as the symptoms of problem and not the deeper problem that needs to be addressed. So the gap between what seems so logical and reasonable about trying to solve the environmental problems that we have – the air pollution, water pollution, the clogged traffic, the overuse of fossil fuels, the inability to create clean energy resources and so on – those are the symptoms of the condition that we find ourselves in.
I'm very interested in seeing how we can rethink questions of risk. Where are the risks located? Now, what we like to do as a species, it seems to me, is we like to identify risks that are far away from ourselves. If we looked to our own behavior and thought more about the risks that we were taking with the environment, which with the future of our species, we might look at our activities very differently. So for me, that's what environmental humanities have to do with.
How will your work contribute to a sustainable future?
One of the things that I believe is possible in this moment of environmental crisis is to see the opportunities for growth in our species, for changing the way we do business, changing the way we understand our relationship to the natural world. That is, to see ourselves as part of the natural world. And to think about how our values are constructed, how our ideas of success and prosperity and growth and progress are all constructed around ideas that have actually blinded us to the real risks of the way we conduct ourselves.
So we need to expand our time horizons. We need to reassess what's actually risky behavior and the risky institutions that we've developed and think of ourselves in new ways. That's an enormous job. But it's a very important job, and we need more and more people engaged in doing it so that we aren't just working on the symptoms of the problem but we're actually working on the problems themselves.
Why ASU?
For me, ASU is definitely a place where you need to ask of your work, so what? Why does this matter? Why would anybody else care about this besides me or you, the researcher? And I'm constantly engaging humanists in that kind of question.
In 2012, we got a grant from Mellon Foundation to do a worldwide project on humanities for the environment. Through the Mellon grant, I have been working with humanists – and I've been working with humanists from a dozen universities at different levels of this project – to start using the words like outcomes and deliverables so that we can talk with people in the sciences and social sciences about what we actually produce and how we intervene in order to make these new narratives that I've been talking about, or structure different systems of value or different systems of political exchange so that we are emphasizing different aspects of human experience.
We are located here at ASU and we're here for a reason. I'm here for a reason. I came for this reason. And that is that we're interested in socially engaged public kind of work. We're interested in both taking responsibility for the problems that are out there and also looking and turning our work toward things that really make a difference. And so my Institute, the Institute for Humanities Research, is dedicated to that kind of socially engaged humanities based research.
And it has been a unique opportunity and something that I will never get over. This has changed my way of looking at my work and my colleagues work, really, altogether. Because in this subject matter, the time is of the essence. And we don't have time to waste. And we must think about the ways that we are actually making a difference. And we must be able to articulate those, and we must be able to bring people into those processes so that we are making our social engagement real and making it manifest so others can engage with us.
Why do you study sustainability?
Well, I do it from two directions. One is I think it's one of the most interesting intellectual challenges of our time. And as an academic, I like to address the most interesting challenges of our time. The other is because I'm a human being and a citizen. And I believe that I do have a responsibility to be part of the solution as well as part of the problem. I know I'm part of the problem, just like everybody else. But I would also like to be part of the solutions.
What is your sustainability expertise?
My expertise with regard to issues of sustainability is really the relationship of the humanities to the questions of sustainability that are on the table. People always say, so what do the humanities have to do with sustainability. Isn't this a matter of better technology? Isn't it a matter of figuring out how to clean up the air, clean up the water, more solar panels everywhere? And certainly that is part of the question. But I began to realize quite early in my investigation of this that we already have a lot of technology and we are not solving the problems.
How do the humanities relate to sustainability?
What humanists are interested in is that gap between what our reason tells us we need to do in order not to ruin the planet for human habitation and our behavior and our belief systems, and the way we go about solving problems.
Some of the places where sustainability scientists often begin, humanists regard as the symptoms of problem and not the deeper problem that needs to be addressed. So the gap between what seems so logical and reasonable about trying to solve the environmental problems that we have – the air pollution, water pollution, the clogged traffic, the overuse of fossil fuels, the inability to create clean energy resources and so on – those are the symptoms of the condition that we find ourselves in.
I'm very interested in seeing how we can rethink questions of risk. Where are the risks located? Now, what we like to do as a species, it seems to me, is we like to identify risks that are far away from ourselves. If we looked to our own behavior and thought more about the risks that we were taking with the environment, which with the future of our species, we might look at our activities very differently. So for me, that's what environmental humanities have to do with.
How will your work contribute to a sustainable future?
One of the things that I believe is possible in this moment of environmental crisis is to see the opportunities for growth in our species, for changing the way we do business, changing the way we understand our relationship to the natural world. That is, to see ourselves as part of the natural world. And to think about how our values are constructed, how our ideas of success and prosperity and growth and progress are all constructed around ideas that have actually blinded us to the real risks of the way we conduct ourselves.
So we need to expand our time horizons. We need to reassess what's actually risky behavior and the risky institutions that we've developed and think of ourselves in new ways. That's an enormous job. But it's a very important job, and we need more and more people engaged in doing it so that we aren't just working on the symptoms of the problem but we're actually working on the problems themselves.
Why ASU?
For me, ASU is definitely a place where you need to ask of your work, so what? Why does this matter? Why would anybody else care about this besides me or you, the researcher? And I'm constantly engaging humanists in that kind of question.
In 2012, we got a grant from Mellon Foundation to do a worldwide project on humanities for the environment. Through the Mellon grant, I have been working with humanists – and I've been working with humanists from a dozen universities at different levels of this project – to start using the words like outcomes and deliverables so that we can talk with people in the sciences and social sciences about what we actually produce and how we intervene in order to make these new narratives that I've been talking about, or structure different systems of value or different systems of political exchange so that we are emphasizing different aspects of human experience.
We are located here at ASU and we're here for a reason. I'm here for a reason. I came for this reason. And that is that we're interested in socially engaged public kind of work. We're interested in both taking responsibility for the problems that are out there and also looking and turning our work toward things that really make a difference. And so my Institute, the Institute for Humanities Research, is dedicated to that kind of socially engaged humanities based research.
And it has been a unique opportunity and something that I will never get over. This has changed my way of looking at my work and my colleagues work, really, altogether. Because in this subject matter, the time is of the essence. And we don't have time to waste. And we must think about the ways that we are actually making a difference. And we must be able to articulate those, and we must be able to bring people into those processes so that we are making our social engagement real and making it manifest so others can engage with us.
Why do you study sustainability?
Well, I do it from two directions. One is I think it's one of the most interesting intellectual challenges of our time. And as an academic, I like to address the most interesting challenges of our time. The other is because I'm a human being and a citizen. And I believe that I do have a responsibility to be part of the solution as well as part of the problem. I know I'm part of the problem, just like everybody else. But I would also like to be part of the solutions.