Urban environmentalist Jenny Price gave a lecture at the UW on July 3 in an attempt to help students and others understand how a change in human behavior can become a way of addressing environmental crises. The goal was to bring together the perspectives of urban environmentalism and the hard sciences with the humanities.

The lecture is a part of the summer institute City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities, which is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The institute provides UW scholars the opportunity to connect with other academics and provide professional development across disciplines. Price is visiting the university from Princeton.

The lecture addressed how to help environmentalists understand why people think and respond to environmentalism the way they do, as a way to address climate change. As important as technological or scientific solutions are, these solutions lack the ability to address social behaviors as a means of creating social change.

Its a critique about 21st century environmentalism, Price said when discussing her work and the book she is writing: Stop Saving the Planet 8 Other Tips for 21st-Century Environmentalists.

I really want to emphasize right up front that Im not critiquing all environmentalists, she said.

The frustration between environmentalists and those most affected by the negative effects of climate change as well as environmental damage aligns with the growing distance between humans and nature. Lower-income communities often fall into this gap.

There is a long American tradition that nature is a world that is away from humans, Price said.

This social distancing alienates what is in fact intertwined in the life of the city.

Environment is the very foundation of our lives, Price said.

Environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike need to change the notion that the planet needs to be saved, according to Price. She explained that the language of saving nature does not help people understand the environment as the center of their lives. How resources are accessed, controlled, and allocated brings nature squarely into the framework of community, class, and social change, she said.

Companies often use green initiatives to emphasize their care for environmental change, a characteristic Price calls green virtue. The result, Price said, is a corporation that maintains a high and mighty attitude, shifting responsibility off of their shoulders.

The responsibility then shifts to the public buying the product. These are who Price labels virtuous consumers, or those who carry the weight of environmental problems. She calls this trickle-down environmentalism.

What Price pointed out is that the people who are contributing least to environmental problems are often given responsibility for solutions solutions that happen to be expensive. This leaves the public angry, Prince continued, and antagonistic towards environmentalists and environmentalism.

The big question that hung in the air during the lecture was simple: how to make the responsibility for sustainability that of the government and large corporations.

According to Price, if the solution is salvation then environmentalists are missing 93 percent of environmental activities. She tracks this thinking through actions, policies, and solutions.

The environmental movement has not yet penetrated the popular discourse, Price said. Yet the concept of nature is deeply rooted in the way humans think, and incidentally making the environment the focus of a growing conversation paves the way toward social change. In the long run, this means environmental changes.

Its really about sustainable cities. Price said, when discussing what urban environmentalism is.

Preserving areas outside of the city has been the primary focal point of traditional environmentalism to date, but within the realm of urban environmentalism, the focus shifts to the city and how to create sustainability within it.

The long-term goal is to make urban environmentalism a common course in universities, fully integrating environmentalists perspectives within the hard sciences with the humanities.

UW Italian and French studies professor Richard Watts is not an environmentalist. At least, not in the literal sense of the word. Watts work has focused on the post-colonial world and he explores the social landscape of the places that France colonized.

However, he is heading the City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities institute.

One of the things I realized [was that] environmentalism was a constant in this literature and cinema, Watts said.

The intersection between the two fields created an avenue for art to act as a means of environmental change. The future of the environment, environmentalism, the role of the humanities and higher education merges in this seminar.

These summer programs bring some of the best and most creative minds in humanities fields together in real time to examine important subjects in depth and then seed the results of this process in classrooms and lecture halls around the country. NEHs Director of Education Programs Carol Peters said in an email.

The City/Nature institute will be running from June 26 to July 14 at the UW. According to the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the institute will offer participants the chance to engage in the development of an undergraduate course syllabus that is interdisciplinary. Visiting scholars will explore this approach in seminars and discussions.

Reach reporter Hannah Pickering at news@dailyuw.com. Twitter: Hannah_Pick95

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Making 'greenness' human: UW lecture highlights environmentalism for the everyday student - Dailyuw