Environment, Sustainability & Planetary Stewardship

Coordinators: Tristan G Brown (MIT), Or Porath (Tel Aviv University)

The Idea: Motivations & Scope

Humanistic inquiry has long examined humanity’s relationship with the natural world, but today’s planetary crisis such as climate change, biodiversity collapse, and ecological degradation, demands new frameworks that unite deep cultural understanding with practical ecological action.

The Environment and Planetary Stewardship pillar addresses this need. We investigate how communities across time and space have endured, adapted to, and been shaped by their environments, emphasizing that environmental realities are inseparable from cultural meaning, expressed in literature, religion, law, art, and ritual. These cultural forms not only structure perceptions of crisis but also shape collective responses to climate disruption and disaster.

This initiative is firmly interdisciplinary. We convene scholars in history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies alongside experts in sustainability science, energy systems, earth sciences, and policy. Our aim is to create a shared lexicon in which qualitative humanistic insight informs, and is informed by, quantitative planetary models. The goal is not only to document societies navigating ecological extremes but to generate transformative knowledge that reimagines stewardship, justice, and coexistence for an uncertain future.

This pillar insists that humanistic research is attentive to meaning, value, history, and ethics. It is essential to confronting planetary crisis. By connecting the sensory, catastrophic, and ethical, this pillar offers indispensable frameworks for understanding human experience in an era of transformation. Our work aims not merely at survival but at cultivating wisdom, justice, and resilient coexistence on a changing planet.

Guiding Questions

  • How have societies across epochs and geographies navigated profound thermal stress, ecological disaster, and resource collapse, and what patterns of resilience or failure emerge?
  • What cultural metaphors, such as heat and cold, apocalypse and renewal, ruin and repair and so forth, structure political, religious, and ethical imaginations of ecological futures?
  • What do long humanistic archives (textual, oral, archaeological, ritualized) teach us about resilience, equity, and climate justice?
  • How do landscapes marked by ruin and rapid climatic change reshape memory, ritual, and collective identity?
  • In what ways can humanities-based methods (narrative, ethics, interpretation) transform sustainability policy, adaptation, and mitigation debates?

Goals & Actions

  • Foster interdisciplinary research teams combining humanistic interpretation with science and policy to produce new insights
  • Publish comparative case studies and edited volumes on thermal adaptation, disaster memory, and ecological repair
  • Create digital and physical platforms (interactive atlases, podcasts) that translate scholarship into public storytelling and foster ecological literacy
  • Develop evidence-based policy briefs and white papers for governments and NGOs on energy equity and culturally informed adaptation
  • Build teaching toolkits and curricula for schools and universities to equip future generations with humanistic tools for environmental stewardship

Ongoing Work