What is CHE?
The environmental challenges we face today arise as much from human actions as from natural processes. Unprecedented ecological transformations, scarce natural resources, and vulnerable populations combine to create huge economic, environmental, and health disparities across the globe.
By situating environmental threats and disasters in their broader historical and cultural contexts, we gain crucial insights into events whose sources might otherwise seem entirely “natural.” The Black Death that swept Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century; the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s; the devastating Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004; and the catastrophic inundation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005: these and so many other disasters can all too easily look to be purely natural in origin if we fail to attend to the human histories and cultural contexts in which they are embedded. Only at our peril do we forget that nature, in all its myriad forms, is inextricably bound up with every aspect of human culture, economy, and politics. Furthermore, the differential toll of human suffering and loss wrought by disasters like the Dust Bowl or Hurricane Katrina reminds us that efforts to protect the environment cannot be separated from struggles for economic and social justice.
As the British literary critic Raymond Williams once wrote, “The idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history.” Closer to home, the UW ecologist Aldo Leopold famously declared that “Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.” UW-Madison’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) is dedicated to exploring the profound implications of such insights.
Some of the most exciting science and scholarship of our generation has focused on the entangled histories of nature and culture. CHE is at the forefront of such work. It brings together scholars and scientists from a wide array of disciplines to explore changing relationships between people and the environment over time. Because human interactions with the natural world are always mediated by institutions, politics, ideas, and values, an important component of CHE’s mission is to understand how knowledge, beliefs, political economy, and culture have shaped, and been shaped by, the environment.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is among the world's leading institutions promoting multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of environmental history broadly understood . Students can study this exciting subject in many different degree programs. CHE’s members include professors and graduate students ranging from the humanities to the social and natural sciences, in fields as varied as anthropology, ecology, environmental studies, forestry, geography, geology, history, history of science, landscape architecture, law, literature, rural sociology, and sociology. Our biweekly Environmental History Colloquium, along with a series of place-based workshops begun in January of 2007, offer welcoming opportunities for students and faculty to share ideas in a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary dialogue. We seek to learn from each other while building a flourishing intellectual community dedicated to studying environmental and cultural change over time.
One of CHE’s most important goals is to advance interdisciplinary graduate education and research. A CHE graduate certificate, currently under development, will offer students throughout the university a coherent set of graduate courses introducing disciplinary methods and perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as tools for understanding environmental history. CHE will offer new funding opportunities for graduate support to help UW-Madison attract the most promising students working in this area.
By providing a physical and institutional center for UW-Madison scholars and scientists who study the history of cultural and environmental change from a wide array of perspectives, CHE creates many more opportunities than have heretofore existed for sharing research and ideas across disciplinary boundaries. It brings coherence, stability, and support for collaborations both in teaching and research that have been forged over many years by faculty from the Nelson Institute, the College of Letters and Science, and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. In this, CHE nicely complements the research directions of other Nelson Institute centers such as the Center for Climatic Research and the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.
Finally, by supporting a wide array of lectures, discussions, and outreach activities, CHE offers a public face for academic scholarship with great contemporary relevance to debates about environmental policy, health, and justice.
Governance
Mission Statement and Strategic Plan | Constitution and by-laws