Cultivating Youth Environmental Stewardship through the Environmental Humanities
Jeffries, Imaya I.
2023
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Addressing the environmental crisis is of interdisciplinary concern. An anthropological approach identifies how certain cultural narratives inform the environmental decisions of governments, institutions, and corporations. This allows environmental destruction to be seen as a symptom of a problem, rather than the main issue itself, allowing for new and creative ways to approach environmental ... read morecommunication and solutions. The Environmental Humanities are concerned with how environmental problems stem from value and belief systems that define human-nature relationships. I propose the humanities are what can cause a cultural paradigm shift, changing how humans view and behave towards the environment.Children are experiencing disengagement with the natural world, the effects of environmental destruction, and environmental injustice, more than any other demographic ever before. The media children are exposed to is greatly impactful to their personal, relational, moral, and cultural development. To create environmental stewardship in the youth, one avenue is creating children’s media that communicates environmental messages. I thus wrote and illustrated a picture book of futuristic fiction on ocean destruction, degradation, recovery, and restoration called All Tangled Up. As an environmental humanities text, my book tries to show that these problems cannot be solved without the critique of such values and belief systems and by transforming them with imagination. There is importance to an approach of environmental restoration that gets in touch with humanistic creative ways of viewing and understanding the world (and ourselves).
Thesis (B.A.)--Tufts University, 2023.
Submitted to the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.read less - ID:
- 9880w572f
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