Expressions Presents: Environmental Humanities: Making Science Personal
By Hanh Ha
This article was originally published by the College of Humanities and the Arts in the summer 2024 edition of Expressions, a newsletter created by students in HA-187: Creative Team Practicum. The internship course gives students the opportunity to gain professional experience in writing, graphic design, photography, and video production.
Associate Professor of Spanish Cheyla Samuelson says addressing the most pressing environmental issues begins with exploring the similarities and differences between humanities and science. As climate change looms large and casts a shadow of uncertainty over the future of our planet, everyone can benefit from a deeper understanding of scientific concepts that impact us all.
“We’re living in a world where the humanities are radically devalued. STEM can lead us down some dark paths without human input,” Samuelson begins. “It’s hard to appreciate the impact of this unrestrained development of STEM without the ethical questions that really need to be asked.”
An important question then emerges from that thought process: How can complex scientific research be made more accessible to people outside of its specialized fields?
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences David Ensminger worries the wealth of knowledge contained inside scientific texts is out of reach for the people who would benefit most from its insights.
While scientific writing and communication are valuable aspects for academic discourse, they tend to lack accessibility. For many people outside of the scientific community, these texts can resemble a cryptic language, only understood by the initiated few. Ensminger says, “Scientists can learn how to communicate with people, as opposed to communicating just for science’s sake. Sometimes scientific writing is really dense.”
Samuelson says, “In scientific writing, they might be writing about terrible exposures to pesticides, cancer causing things. But there’s no affect, there’s no emotion.” When addressing environmental issues like pesticides, she believes in using forms of literature to emphasize the effects that can evoke an emotional response. For instance, poems can “speak of the fear of a mother for her child or the awareness of a daughter for her father and his illness.”
In the ongoing challenge to tackle environmental concerns, two SJSU departments worked together to actively address these concerns: the Department of World Languages and Literature and the Department of Biological Sciences. With Cheyla Samuelson as the forefront of the Sustainable Futures at Home project, the two departments have taken on some of the most pressing issues of our time. On May 10, on the second floor of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, a bilingual scientific reading event took place.
With this bilingual scientific reading event, consisting of Spanish and English, students showcased the works they’ve written in workshops, as well as read personal essays by Andrés Cota Hiriart, a Mexican writer and zoologist. Samuelson says, “We can’t change the global petrochemical industrial complex by ourselves. By having a public event, we can bring the knowledge we’ve gained forward.” This global industrial complex uses chemicals derived from petroleum and natural gas—synthetic rubber, yarns and polymers—which contribute to landfill pollution.
Combining literature and nature, Samuelson explains “LiterNatura” differs from “traditional writing in that there’s more science and critical awareness of environmental issues.” This concept opens the door to make scientific language more accessible by leveraging narrative storytelling techniques; it’s grounded in personal experiences and emotions while maintaining a deep understanding of nature and scientific realities. At its core, “LiterNatura” represents a bridge that connects scientific language and literary writing.
Inviting Cota Hiriart to campus allowed students to practice composing “LiterNatura,” choosing themes that relate to environmental challenges. Cota Hiriart took on the role of mentor by leading students through writing exercises to help them get more comfortable writing in this genre. Writing in either Spanish or English, students then tackled the relationship between humans and nature. The classroom workshops allowed students to explore this relationship of “rethinking our role as master of nature to try to put ourselves on more of an equal footing with other living creatures you know and even non-living entities,” says Samuelson.
Drawing parallels with “Don’t Look Up” (2021), a sci-fi movie that addresses climate change denial, Samuelson emphasizes the importance of narrative storytelling to instill conversation and action. She explains that the movie “took a lot of the actual situation of science and our cultural situation and turned it into something that people could plug into, allowing them to follow the narrative and feel the emotion.”
Emotions and narrative storytelling do not only apply to creative fields. These elements also play a role in making science communication more accessible to an audience. For instance, Samuelson invited a scientist into her classroom to talk about scientific articles related to pesticides to her students. Afterwards, Samuelson’s students read the scientific articles and cut the articles up to create poetry. She believes that “the listing of the chemicals and that austere, rigid scientific language mixed with very emotional, very personal aspects of people’s feelings about living in that context” becomes a way to “force scientific writing into a creative form.” By cutting up the articles and reassembling them into poetry, students infuse their emotional responses on the subject matter.
Ensminger believes that the historical inertia of scientific writing being fact-focused and devoid of human elements can contribute to the lack of understanding scientific information. Ensminger says, “Science doesn’t have to be impersonal. It doesn’t have to be stoic. That’s a detriment to science. And by communicating and involving people, in addition to their environments, not only is it going to make the sharing of that information so much stronger, it’s also going to improve our understanding of how what we do impacts the environment.”
Improving understanding about scientific writing will help people from different fields realize what they have in common, especially with regard to their use of the scientific method. Maya deVries, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, believes professionals across different fields routinely engage in the scientific method but under different guises. The scientific method is a way of finding out facts by testing and experimenting. She says that people in many fields test and experiment, “looking at conclusions in a broader framework, which is something [scientists] do. A lot of professions do this. They just don’t realize it’s also the scientific method.” Recognizing this shared methodology across disciplines highlights the influence of the scientific method. The scientific method becomes further enriched with elements frequently utilized in the humanities: emotions and narrative storytelling.
From connecting with emotions to action, hope does not become a fleeting emotion but a steadfast commitment. Having hope becomes a necessity when addressing environmental challenges and sustainability. For deVries, excitement leads to hope, which leads to action. She emphasizes the importance of ending conversations surrounding climate change on a high note because “if we don’t have hope, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
Ensminger says that “the more unsustainable we are, the more environmental challenges will appear that will affect not only humans but the wildlife around us as well.” For in the stories people tell, lies the power to ignite hearts, minds and movements toward a more sustainable future for all. He says, “science learns from humanities, humanities learn from science. Because whatever life stage you’re in, whether you’re a student or a professor, there’s so much we can all learn from just communicating with others.”
Samuelson agrees, pointing to the practice of “LiterNatura” as an example. “Integrating humanities in STEM fields is vital,” she says. “Whether you’re exploring environmental contamination, extinction, protest or hopeful solutions, narrative storytelling has the power to grab your attention, pulling you along as you learn.”
