03/05/2021
We have released a new episode today! Our guest, Lesley Green, an anthropologist in Cape Town, South Africa, talks about the critical role of doing environmental humanities from the South, and the need for a paradigm shift in the social and natural sciences.
How might humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists do "research that matters and matters politically" in the Anthropocene? Listen to our latest episode and receive some captivating thoughts from Lesley on the subject.
Lesley says, “One of my greatest hopes is that the work of the environmental humanities, globally, will be able to shift the knowledge frames that governing officials bring, because those are political and cosmological in themselves, as Isabelle Stengers has written so beautifully about cosmopolitics. So, to be able to say to an engineer, hold on a minute, you want to use cement, which has a 50-year lifespan to hold fracking liquids in one place and prevent them from mixing with an aquifer in perpetuity? Well, you know, that cement only is viable for 50 years before it needs to be replaced. And I know that, so what's wrong with this picture? You know, can you see that you have an unreasonable faith in cement? And so, does an environmental regulator who's making laws for regulating on the basis of, of thickness of cement or thickness of pipe or whatever, without thinking of, of the timeframe of permanence.”
