‘For me, environmental justice goes deep’

Christina Gerhardt, Clark’s new Henry J. Leir Endowed Chair of Comparative Literature, recognizes that today’s college students face what a colleague has termed a “polycrisis,” the confluence of systemic tipping points in historical and economic inequities, and climate change.

Yet, as she prepares to teach Introduction to Environmental Humanities this spring, Gerhardt does not plan to deliver the “doom-and-gloom narrative” that dominates many university courses and media covering climate change.

In her nearly three decades of teaching, researching, and writing in French, German, English, and a bit of Spanish, “to keep everyone from feeling despair as we talk about these issues,” she has focused instead on solutions.

“I end every class session by saying, ‘What can we do to address this issue?’” says Gerhardt, who joined Clark’s Department of Language, Literature, and Culture this fall, having previously been professor of environmental humanities, film, and German at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has also served as Barron Visiting Professor of the Environmental Humanities at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (2021-2022) and as senior fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich (2022). She remains a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously.

“I always tell students, ‘You don’t have to do it all. Just pick your beat and find your comfort zone in that beat,’ ” Gerhardt adds, whether it’s restoring wetlands, choreographing a dance performance, or organizing communities around ballot initiatives, as she once did in support of a San Francisco Nuclear Free Zone.

Focusing on ‘equity-based solutions’ to climate change

For Gerhardt, “the solution to the climate crisis requires an interdisciplinary approach.” For example, she points out that “nature-based solutions” — planting mangrove trees or restoring wetlands along coastlines — address just one element of a multidimensional problem that could be better solved with holistic thinking — and holistic solutions.

In illuminating how humans have induced climate change at the expense of the environment and vulnerable populations, Gerhardt believes that the environmental humanities — which brings together disciplines such as literature, art, history and film — must focus on “equity-based solutions.”

“What environmental humanities brings to the table is ‘the human’ and the history of how we got here,” says Gerhardt, editor of the ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment published by Oxford University Press.

“And if that’s what got us here,” she adds, “how can we avoid repeating those systems of thought and of inequity and do better?”

“What environmental humanities brings to the table is ‘the human’ and the history of how we got here.”

Christina Gerhardt

At Clark, Gerhardt complements her colleagues’ approach to the climate crisis and long-held interests in environmental humanities, which are being supported with fellowships established through the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities.

In November, she served on the panel “Teaching and Learning in the Environmental Humanities,” at an event hosted by the Higgins Institute. And together with English Professor Stephen Levin, she has gathered faculty in the environmental humanities, along with their coursework, to propose a track in the discipline. If approved, the track would complement Clark’s new School of Climate, Environment, and Society, set to launch next fall.

Having served as part of the team establishing the new school and on the search committee for its first dean, she looks forward to collaborating with others who seek to work across disciplines and identify solutions.

A ‘chorus’ of island voices in ‘Sea Change’

Gerhardt loves maps and geography, and another reason she was excited to join Clark is because it houses the century-old, world-renowned Graduate School of Geography, one of the academic units aligned with the School of Climate, Environment, and Society.

It is not surprising, then, to find maps created by cartographer Molly Roy throughout Gerhardt’s recent book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. The book builds on environmental science related to climate change, she says, “weaving together environmental studies and environmental humanities, geography and cartography, creative non-fiction and literary studies.”

In examining the effects of climate change on 49 islands around the world, from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) in the Arctic to Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, Gerhardt seeks to “take into account historical and present-day inequities and how the climate crisis is intensified by those historical inequities, and how they persist.”

In Sea Change, Gerhardt includes Indigenous languages, voices, and history — which required archival research and site visits. Each chapter starts with a timeline and typically ends with a poem or text by someone from the island. She describes the book as “ ‘polyvocal,’ as a chorus,” explaining that on the one hand, it bridges disciplines and on the other, it “tells not a top-down version of history but rather one that includes a range of voices from frontline communities.” Gerhardt worked closely with artists and cartographers to create Sea Change, conscious that “the history of atlas-making dovetails with the history of colonialism.”

To reach a wider audience, she “intentionally wanted to create a coffee table book,” she says. “I wanted people to say, ‘Oh, this is really beautiful,’ and then be pulled in to read a two- to three-page text about what is a grim topic. I call it a ‘spoonful of sugar’ approach because I try to end every single chapter like I do my class sessions — with a solution.”

The book has been well-received, drawing attention from the media. The New Scientist called it one of the “best popular science books of 2023,” and the Los Angeles Times described it as “a work of art.” Sea Change is a Silver Medal Award winner for both the Nautilus Book Award and the California Book Award.

Learning from climate activists in the 1980s

Sea Change grew out of Gerhardt’s love for oceans and islands, especially her time spent open-water swimming and sailing off coasts around the world, as well as her experience as an environmental journalist, including covering the annual United Nations (UN) climate negotiations. Her journalistic writing has been published in Grist, The Guardian, The Nation, Orion, and Sierra magazine. Building on this work, Gerhardt plans to design a Clark course that would combine policy and communications and include a trip for students to the annual climate negotiations, to be held next year in Brazil.

Low-lying islands most affected by rising sea levels are often overlooked, according to Gerhardt, but the annual UN climate negotiations —  held in Azerbaijan this past November — are “an opportunity to speak truth to power; an opportunity to look the most powerful nations, who are typically also the highest emitters, in the eyes and to say, ‘This is the impact of the emissions on our islands.’”

Global attention and focus on the “climate crisis,” however, did not start in the 21^st century, according to Gerhardt. “It’s a story that starts in the 1980s,” she says.

Growing up in West Germany, she had a front-row seat to the unfolding story when her aunt helped co-found the country’s Green Party, becoming, in turn, her city’s first Green Party mayor. Then, in 1988 came the testimony to Congress of James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, affiliated with Columbia University, explaining that the greenhouse effect was changing the climate. His sounding alarm was soon followed by environmentalist Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking 1989 book The End of Nature. (Along with Republic of the Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine and Grenadian diplomat Dessima Williams, McKibben wrote one of three forewords for Gerhardt’s Sea Change.)

“My aunt’s work was carried out in this context,” recalls Gerhardt, who went on to work with a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that oversaw the decommissioning of military bases in the Bay Area, reviewing environmental impact reports and statements that highlighted nuclear and other toxic waste contamination. One example included Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, a primarily Black neighborhood near the now-closed Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. She also attended protests of the underground nuclear testing on western Shoshone lands in Nevada, learning about the health and environmental impacts of such tests. Later, Gerhardt worked in communications for a Bay Area nonprofit that successfully protected the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay from development; it is now a state park.

Today, Gerhardt persists in delivering the message that humankind must take immediate and dramatic action for its own survival. “For me, environmental justice goes deep.”