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Plato wrote of his teacher Socrates invoking a prayer in a grove of Attica to Pan, god of nature: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.” A few centuries later, the writer Plutarch described the announcement of the death of Pan in the heyday of the Roman Empire. Thamus, an Egyptian pilot called by a mysterious voice while at sea, is told to announce the death of the god. “Looking toward the land, he said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement.”

Today the “death of nature” is proclaimed again by various scholars and environmental writers in different ways, not only in terms of environmental crisis, but in terms of efforts to redefine essential aspects of what had been considered to be the boundaries between human and non-human realms of life: Is a distinct notion of nature apart from humanity still a valid concept? Is the human mind related enough to the larger cosmos to be able to pattern (and in a sense contain) the realities of a physical nature of which it is part, as understood in the modern scientific field of ecology?

Such crises and questions, as the above quotations indicate, have not been confined to our own era, though in earlier times they were often explored, albeit perhaps less urgently, through stories or dialogues as much or more than through abstract or attempted empirical discussions. Aspects of modern scientific thinking, engaged with mythological animistic views of nature, can be found as early as the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. From Plato’s Academy in the fourth century BCE to the Cappadocian groves of the Christian thinker Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century CE, to the Afghan landscapes known to the medieval Islamic-Sufi poet Rumi, or in many global and indigenous cultures, the relation of nature to human thinking and spirituality lay at the core of premodern human cultures and traditions for millennia, in ontological and experiential (“anthropocosmic”) modes, as well as in a more intellectual and anthropocentric vein.

Twenty-first century global culture faces distinctive challenges, however, of integrating rapidly changing secular scientific views in biology and physics, new bioengineering technologies, and unprecedented human population levels and impact on the globe, with views of nature developed in Western disciplines of the humanities (including philosophy, literature, religion, mythology, and spirituality) across the past three millennia that still define a sense of self, identity, society, and relations with the physical environment in popular culture with global reach today. This effort is complicated by the division between cognitive and affective ways of knowing emphasized since the Enlightenment, which tends to remove our intellectual frameworks (even when empirically driven) from the experiential and participatory.

 This Humanities Institute series is designed in part to help inaugurate the environmental humanities emphases of Bucknell’s Environmental Center, which draws upon a network of existing strengths across departments. In the humanities at large, a host of new disciplines and approaches are gaining prominence in the focus on the challenges mentioned above, including ecocriticism in literature and ecophenomenology and environmental ethics in philosophy, and “religion and ecology” in religious studies.

Deborah Bird Rose of the Australian National University recently defined the challenge of adapting the humanities to what some scholars call a “posthumanities” world: “Our challenge in engaging in new ways of thinking and doing connectivity is to embed the human in the non-human, and to enlarge human conversations so that we may find ways to engage with, learn from and communicate our embeddedness in the world’s own expressivity and will to flourish.”

The question is what, in a “posthumanities” understanding of the world, is the role for the humanities, if any? And how, if at all, can premodern traditions inform our efforts to grapple with a host of issues, based as they are on the experiences of human beings in cultures and centuries from the past? In our postmodern era, amid the “mysteries” of quantum physics, are we re-sensitized to the validity of story as a means for humans to grasp aspects of nature that go beyond patterns of human thought in a posthumanistic age? Is one role for ecological humanities today that of re-engaging with traditional stories and discourses of cosmology/cosmogony, and their ramifications for environmental ethics and social justice, from a twenty-first-century “anthropocosmic” perspective?

In articulating a theoretical basis for a more activist environmental literary studies, Lawrence Buell has called for the humanities to help highlight alternate traditions within the Western past that can help shape a more ecologically aware view of the world today. Gregory Bateson has argued in effect that another role for the humanities is to help metamorphosize what he terms modern Enlightenment-Darwinian cultural views of “organism versus environment” and “survival of the fittest,” used to justify environmental degradation, into a focus on “organism-in-its-environment.” In any case, scientific discourse emerging from quantum physics and string theory will continue to change the discourse of ecology itself, augmenting that field’s biological roots by underscoring the re-emerging cultural significance of cosmology and mythology as story in the arts, attempting to engage the simultaneous reality of local fields and parallel worlds now presented to us by contemporary science.

Our series engages these issues from a variety of perspectives.

John Rickard,
Alf K. Siewers
Faculty Coordinators