Envisioning a Regional Environmental Humanities

Imagine school children, university students and local residents kayaking or hiking down the Susquehanna Corridor, walking the streets of rivertowns, or navigating the Valley in cyberspace. They encounter interpretive signage and data on-site, on-line, in-print, or through artistic storytelling, highlighting layers of culture engaged with the natural systems around them. Such guides reflect ongoing scholarly and creative projects ranging from oral history and archaeology to community service and school curricula designed to strengthen “sense of place,” cultural authenticity, and environmental health in a unique (and neglected) region of Northern Appalachia.

Partnerships between faculty, students and community members generate innovative cross-disciplinary and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Their work includes studies on an important eighteenth-century community of Native Americans and Moravian Christians near Sunbury, PA; on prehistoric Indian petroglyphs along the Susquehanna River; on mills and early American technological cultures from canals to lumber barges and railroads; on multiethnic rivertowns and coaltowns of the watershed; on the Underground Railroad along the Susquehanna and on community-focused environmental epidemiology; and on literary narratives of the Susquehanna from James Fenimore Cooper to Toni Morrison.

This reimagining of a region in scholarship, arts, and accessible interpretive materals and digitalized education resources is already beginning to happen in connection with the Nature and Human Communities Initiative and allied partners and projects at the core of the Susquehanna Valley around the Confluence, which is the regional neighborhood of Bucknell University.