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imaging environment:

Maps, Models, and Metaphors

Conference jointly sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Woods Institute for the Environment

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Conference Statement

Disciplines vary significantly in the ways they represent “nature.” Strategies for depicting local, regional, and global ecosystems—and their problems—range from statistics to poetics and from computer modeling to maps and paintings. This conference will bring together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences to explore the different histories and techniques of representing the environment on a global scale, and discuss the rights and responsibilities—individual and collective—that derive from this knowledge. Do underlying assumptions about nature converge or conflict in these differing techniques? Are interdisciplinary perspectives, especially those bridging the humanities and natural sciences, giving rise to new representations of nature?

Models of the natural world are profoundly shaped by cultural and political assumptions. Environmental disputes around the globe are driven by conflicts over different views of nature and particularly over the place of the human—inside or outside of nature. Alternative views of the human/nature boundary often translate into conflicting actions. At stake in these representations are thus material inequality and economic development, access to political power, gender, nationalism, indigenous status, and colonial legacies. What then are the ethical consequences of particular approaches to the representation of the natural? Which depiction of the actual or imagined history of a site should be the goal of our restoration efforts? And what insights about being human emerge from a re-examination of assumptions about the natural environment?

The relation between local representative strategies and the increasingly systemic and global character of environmental problems poses specific challenges and opportunities for interdisciplinary explorations. From the scientific perspective, we might think about the ways phenomena change in kind and not just in size when they are studied at different scales. From the cognitive and cultural side, we could ask how individuals locate themselves in a global environment, as well as how global systems can be adequately comprehended in works of art. The effects of globalization on the natural environment and its representations confront academic disciplines with the task of finding new approaches to charting the present and shaping the future. This conference will take on this challenge by reaching beyond disciplinary specificity to interrogate the very ways we figure the natural world, and the consequences of these figurations for our actions in the global environment.