WHO: Tristan Brown (MIT), Or Porath (Tel Aviv University)
WHAT: The Challenge
In an era of accelerating climate change, environmental crises are not only physical but also cultural. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ecological disasters disrupt daily life, but they also unsettle the ways communities make meaning, organize power, and imagine the future. The challenge before us is to understand these crises not merely as scientific or technical problems but as deeply human experiences lived through the body, embedded in culture, and carried forward in memory and ritual. Without this broader lens, climate justice and adaptation risk remaining incomplete, overlooking the sensory, embodied, and long-term human dimensions of planetary change.
The project responds to this challenge by tracing the long human afterlife of environmental disasters, those moments when catastrophe gives way not to resolution but to slow, uneven processes of reckoning, repair, and remembrance. Rather than treating disasters as singular, time-bound events, this project explores how communities navigate their aftermath over years or even generations. It examines how people memorialize loss, reinvent ritual practices, rebuild identities, and negotiate new relationships to damaged landscapes. Drawing from a wide array of cases, from earthquake ruins and nuclear fallout zones to creeping crises like desertification, Ruination and Repair reframes disaster as a sustained cultural and political condition. This project is both an analytic and reparative intervention into the global conversation on climate futures.
WHY: Motivations & Intentions
Our aim is to bring humanistic inquiry into active dialogue with sustainability studies and environmental science. We believe that environmental realities cannot be separated from cultural meaning—ruin and repair are not just physical processes but embodied categories that structure political, ethical, and religious life. In an era of accelerating climate change, disasters do not simply end when the floodwaters recede or the fires are extinguished. Their impact lingers—in landscapes, institutions, rituals, and collective memory.
By situating environmental collapse within a broader cultural and historical frame, Ruination and Repair seeks to:
- Reframe cllimate histories around embodied human experience, cultural imagination, and long-term processes of recovery.
- Trace how different cultures confronted and lived through ecological catastrophe and whether sudden (earthquakes, nuclear accidents) or slow-moving (desertification, sea-level rise).
- Explore how metaphors of apocalypse, regeneration, mourning, and repair shape the ways humans respond to environmental crisis.
- Provide a more nuanced understanding of resilience as not only material and infrastructural, but also embodied, ritualized, and affective.
HOW: Methods & Tools
Project Development
- Ruination and Repair examines a wide range of environmental disasters including floods, earthquakes, industrial collapses, nuclear fallout, and slow degradation, and focuses on their long human afterlives.
- The project investigates how communities memorialize loss, reinvent ritual, rebuild identity, and restore cosmological or moral order in the wake of catastrophe.
- Cases span diverse geographies and time periods, connecting Buddhist temples, Indigenous communities, and post-industrial landscapes.
Community Building & Education
- Create interdisciplinary working groups bringing together scholars of religion, literature, anthropology, history, climatology, and environmental justice.
- Develop digital platforms for comparative exchange, including:
- A Digital Atlas of Ruined and Recovering Places
- A Pop-Up Climate Archive collecting public testimony, oral histories, and visual records of environmental devastation and response.
Exploring Cultural Practices
- Investigate how ritual, art, and religious practice have mediated ecological trauma and imagined repair.
- Explore how cultural archives, either textual, oral, archaeological, or ritual based, document resilience and shape communal identity across generations.
- Pay close attention to embodied memory, mourning practices, and spatial reimagining in the wake of disaster.
Policy & Public Engagement
- Produce policy briefs on cultural resilience, post-disaster identity reconstruction, and the ethical dimensions of long-term recovery.
- Build collaborative frameworks where humanities insights inform, and are informed by, scientific climate models, urban planning, and sustainability debates.
HOW CAN I JOIN? Activities & Events in 2026
- February 2026 – Inaugural GHI Forum on Environment, Sustainability & Planetary Stewardship
An interactive discussion exploring how cultural and historical perspectives on disaster and recovery can reframe debates on resilience, justice, and climate futures. - Spring 2026 – Global Dialogues: Ruination and Repair
A virtual seminar series bringing together scholars, community organizers, and policymakers to examine the long human aftermath of catastrophe and share comparative strategies of cultural resilience. - Ongoing – Digital Atlas of Ruined and Recovering Places
A digital humanities platform mapping sites of environmental trauma and community-led recovery, open to contributions from scholars, students, artists, and affected communities.
For further details or to get involved, please contact the project leaders.