Alessandra Pappalardi, Contributing Photographer

By: Alessandra Pappalardi

With the cacophonous chatter of climate crises, energy disparities and ecological challenges, the study of environmental humanities aims to bring a humanistic touch to science. 

Hosted in the Humanities Quadrangle on Wednesday, the Yale Environmental Humanities program’s “Welcome Back Panel” featured presentations by Maria Trumpler GRD ’92, professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, and graduate students Kevin Yang ARC ’24 and Charlotte Hecht GRD ’24. This panel focused on three microhistories unfolding in the midst of humanity’s consideration of the environmental sciences. 

Paul Sabin, professor of history and American studies and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities program, expressed his gratitude for those who came to support the event before turning over to the first presenter. 

“We live in a social world and sometimes there is an impulse to reduce it to technology and economics and law, but then we have to remember that we’re human actors making choices and making these choices because of ideas and beliefs and relationships,” Sabin said. “In order to understand those things, we need the humanities, and that includes various aspects of culture that help us think about what we imagined to be the right ways to live and what the proper relationship is to the environments around us.” 

Trumpler, who received a doctorate in history of medicine and life science from Yale, has been a member of the University community since 1983. 

Now a senior lecturer in the department of women, gender and sexuality studies, many of Trumpler’s academic interests concern the historical imprint of women in science and technology. 

In Trumpler’s presentation “Handweaving, Fibersheds, and Environmental Education,” she discussed that understanding “how women engaged with things in the past” can help inform our conception of women’s lives today. 

“So for example, some people think the life of a 19th century farm woman in New England must have been constant drudgery,” Trumpler explained in her presentation. “But if you actually go back and start engaging with the tools, engaging with the irons, engaging with the fabrics, engaging with the life as much as you can, you actually see that they handled objects that are very beautiful and very sensual.”

Taking time off from the academic setting of Yale, Trumpler explored a hands-on approach to better comprehend the daily activities of 17th-century New England women in her research. Aided by grants through the Environmental Humanities program and Whitney Humanities Center, she journeyed to Vermont to make cheese, bread and clothing as early American women once did. 

Explaining that history helps people in the present to make sense of progress and current values, she chronicled some of her daily activities, including the process of spinning her own wool and making a blanket, tasks she undertook for eight hours a day. 

With this newfound insight, Trumpler said she has turned her attention to fibersheds, traditional areas in New England that were once responsible for clothing all the members of a particular community with wool and linen. 

She now dedicates her extra time to trying to convince people, and in particular, women, to be more conscious with their clothing decisions, whether that includes mending or even creating new pieces to wear from the offerings of fibersheds. In spite of her efforts, Trumpler said she has found the task to be more difficult than expected, as she noted that modern women “love the number of clothes they have in their closet.”

Regardless, Trumpler remains optimistic in her findings. 

“There’s a sense of empowerment of sensual pleasure accomplishment,” Trumpler said. “I made a blanket entirely myself from this fleece, And so I think it illuminates aspects of daily life in the past that we tend to brush over.”

Kevin Yang next discussed the details of his project, titled “New Haven, Revisited,” which he conducted with fellow architecture student Fany Kuzmova ARC ’24, with funding from the Environmental Humanities program. Inspired by the School of Architecture’s Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, an assignment that, according to the project website, “allows professional degree students the unique chance to design and build a structure as part of their graduate education,” Yang and Kuzmova joined forces to address community development issues in New Haven.

Interested in urban renewal from the experiences of residents, the project partnered with a local high school to develop a three-part workshop on development issues, oral histories and a photo exposition, forming a “combined anthology” to represent New Haven, particularly in relation to Yale initiatives. 

The two hope to provide two deliverables with the culmination of the project, the first being a “guidebook,” or more of an architectural publication, as Yang explained, where they introduce the history of community spaces and the factors that helped support their successes. Yang and Kuzmova said they also intend to bring about an exhibition of the work they collected throughout the workshops.

Finally, Hecht presented the enlightenment she gained through reading the memoirs passed on by her great-grandfather, U.S. Navy Captain Bert F. Brown. A graduate student in American studies, Hecht is completing her dissertation, which sprung from the implications of the United States’ history of nuclear testing in different locations, including Nevada and the Marshall Islands, throughout the Cold War, and focuses more broadly on the U.S. nuclear industry. Little did she know that her own family tree also contained a surprising connection to nuclear testing.

Paging through her great-grandfather’s memoirs, she learned he was involved in nuclear tests. 

“This felt like a really crazy coincidence to me,” Hecht said. “It wasn’t something I knew about, I had no idea, and it really stuck with me as something I wanted to think about and explore, because here I was writing this dissertation about the environmental destruction, the social impacts of nuclear testing.”

As she detailed in her presentation “Unhomelike,” Hecht said she aimed to reconcile with her revelation through the humanities and a fund from the Environmental Humanities program and investigate “long legacies of brief action.” Mediating history through a personal lens, Hecht displayed images she felt were relevant to her grandfather’s story, including one of him alongside other officers and an image she took when in Utah, visiting the locations he once experienced. 

Both photographs had a distinctive blue tint, the product of cyanotype printing that she taught herself to conduct within her own home. Hecht informed the News that the pigment in the printing, Prussian Blue, when presented in the form of pills, serves as a treatment for radiation poisoning. She added that the medium she used was a gesture to the “violent history” her great-grandfather was involved in.

After the presenters concluded, the crowd adjourned for refreshments and chatter, launching into a discussion of broader issues. 

Lav Kanoi GRD ’24, the program’s graduate coordinator, told the News that there are numerous questions with strong social value, with underlying “philosophical impulses”. 

“How does one bring equity issues to alternative energy? In a sense, does the burden of environmental pollution again fall on poorer people, or poorer countries and so on and so forth? Questions like that are not really addressed from a technological perspective,” Kanoi said.  “Even in technological circles, what does one do with the new kinds of wastes that are produced as we shift to alternative energy forms and such?”

In addition to his role as graduate coordinator, Kanoi has been a graduate student at Yale since fall of 2018, studying anthropology in a joint program through the anthropology department and the School of Environment. 

Citing the creation of the Environmental Humanities program in 2017 as a contributing factor in his choice to join the Yale community, he noted the importance of adding humanistic perspectives to the environmental sciences. 

“What is my relationship to another human being to another animal to another life form? That relationship predicates so much about what I do in that interaction,” Kanoi said. “Do I cut down a tree? To do something that was planned in its place to use a part of it in so many different ways? Simplistically speaking, the Environmental Humanities allows us without a market compulsion to investigate these questions, to think freely.”

Kanoi said he hopes to see more students revel in the many coming events to be offered by the program, as detailed on their active calendar. 

Sabin later reiterated that the program, which serves as an umbrella for a number of other associated endeavors such as the Environmental Film Festival and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, welcomes all interested students.

“Environmental Humanities is broadly open to anyone who’s interested in thinking about the intersection between humanities and the environment,” Sabin said “Think about questions of culture, social, social questions, ethics, ethical questions. Those can enrich any other fields of study that people might have. So you don’t have to be in the humanities, but rather think about the relationship of the work that you do to these broader humanistic contexts.”

The Environmental Humanities program is open to all members of the Yale community and now offers a graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities.