AESS in Portland

The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) conference in Portland, Oregon has gone exceptionally well. The conference brought together scholars representing a number of different disciplines. I was fortunate to present papers on two panels yesterday (Saturday, June 20) that were quite diverse. The theme of the first panel was concerned with "new directions" in environmental studies and sciences. My paper served to introduce the idea of environmental hermeneutics and was well received.

In the afternoon I was on a panel that, once again, was concerned with "new directions," only this time the theme was specific to environmental justice. I spoke to the question of the narrative environmental identities of communities on the receiving end of environmental injustices and how narrative is a crucial tool for environmental justice activists who advocate on the behalf of these communities. The paper was the only philosophy paper on the panel and appeared to go by without much fanfare. In the Q&A, however, all the questions and discussion, regardless of which panelist these were directed to, kept coming back to the issue of narrative. In the end, communal narrative identities seemed to be one cohering element to the presentations. The session chair humorously concluded the panel with the words. "Paul Ricoeur wins."

Aesthetics and Hermeneutics: Complementary?

I recently gave a paper on how aesthetics might be a useful dialogue partner for environmental hermeneutics. My point was this: the philosophical discipline of aesthetics--broadly conceived as related to perception and sensibility, not simply a philosophy of art or of beauty--offers tools for understanding interpretation of place as text. To explain: environments are unique objects of interpretation, for at least a few reasons. Foremost, we are within environments in a way that we are not within a novel or painting. To interpret environments means to interpret something that includes us on several levels: physical, emotional, intellectual. Yet environments are somehow also different than us. Second, there is an explicitly sensual, embodied side of environments that is missing from our interpretation of a book or work of art. We might read any copy of Crime and Punishment and come to the same interpretation, but we cannot gather the same interpretation from each and every landscape or place as if they all represented the same thing called "environment."

Given these--and other--unique features of environments, it seems that aesthetics might give a needed complement to the work of hermeneutics. Aesthetics presents ways of understanding how we sense and perceive. It identifies values and qualities unique to such aesthetic experience. And finally it begins to reflect on how perception and interpretation are interrelated using a different vantage point than the hermeneutical approach to this question. In other words, I would argue that an area of inquiry that will significantly advance environmental hermeneutics is the interrelationship between hermeneutics and aesthetics as environmentally-focused disciplines.

Is this kind of interconnection between environmental aesthetics and environmental hermeneutics needed? Or does philosophical hermeneutics already offer a persuasive way to engage in our perceptual encounter with built and natural environments?

Environmental Hermeneutics at the NTPA and the AESS

Just this past April the University of North Texas hosted the 43rd annual meeting of the North Texas Philosophical Association. I was pleased along with Nathan Bell to present on a panel devoted to environmental hermeneutics. I presented my paper, "Environmental Hermeneutics: New Horizons for Interpretation" followed by Nathan's, "All Such Understanding of Nature: Gadamer and Environmental Hermeneutics." Both papers were well received as evidenced by an enthusiastic Q&A following. to view the conference program, go to http://ntpa.net/.

Environemental hermeneutics will also make a showing at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences conference, Many Shades of Green, to be held June 17-20 in Portland, Oregon on the campus of Lewis and Clark College. I will be presenting on two panels. The first will be my EH paper I presented at the NTPA. The second is a paper using the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur and bringing it into dialogue with environmental justice studies. Nathan Bell will also be presenting two papers in the area of environmental hermeneutics. The papers are posted on the conference website, http://www.aess.info/. and can be viewed by clicking on the conference link to the left, then going to "conference schedule" and clicking on the link for the full program. Nathan Bell's papers are on Friday and mine can be found on Saturday.

Environmental Hermeneutics Panel at the IAEP

At the Annual Meeting of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy in Montreal (6-8 November 2010), there will be a number of presentations related to environmental hermeneutics. In fact, the following panel will be devoted to the topic:

Environmental Hermeneutics Panel
Moderator: Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University
“Memory, Imagination, and the Hermeneutics of Place,” Forrest Clingerman, Ohio Northern University
“The Other-than-human as a Self: Ricoeur’s Solicitude in Environmental Hermeneutics,” Nathan Bell,
University of North Texas
“Landscape Hermeneutics and Gadamer’s Notion of Wirkungsgeschichte,” Martin A. Drenthen, Radboud
University Nijmegen

For more information, see www.environmentalphilosophy.org.

Zoosemiotics

There are a number of connections between hermeneutics and semiotics. A conference in Estonia, entitled "Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations," will provide an interesting place to explore these interconnections. For more information: .