Ursula Heise

Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair of Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Previously an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (1999-2004) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University (2009-2012), she has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012) and served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (2011). Heise has held visiting positions at numerous universities and is currently the International Francqui Professor Chair at Ghent University in Belgium.

Among her book publications are Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (Suhrkamp, 2010) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

“Environmental processes, risks and crises are not only issues of science and technology, but have to do with society, culture, history and values.” For Professor Ursula Heise, this stands as the “fundamental idea” of the environmental humanities, the multidisciplinary field she has helped bring to global prominence in the last two decades. The Chair of Literary Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was distinguished with the 6th Biophilia Award for her pioneering research which, in the words of the committee, “has explored the varied shapes that environmental thought, narrative and activism take in different regions of the world.”

To understand the pivotal role of the humanities in addressing the environmental crisis, says Heise, we must realize that phenomena like climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation or soil erosion “actually look very different when you take into account different languages, different historical memories and different cultural frameworks of understanding. In this sense, she continues, “we cannot approach environmental problems without considering them as problems of society, culture and values.”

Heise has devoted much of her career to exploring how differing traditions of thought about nature in different languages and cultures influence ways of interpreting environmental challenges. This innovative line of humanistic research is, she believes, of paramount importance at a time when the future of life on our planet hangs in the balance: “If we want to successfully communicate about the environmental crisis and form alliances with people around the world to combat biodiversity loss or climate change or ocean acidification, we really need to understand these cultural differences.”

Born in Germany into a family she describes as “not particularly nature-oriented,” environmentalism played little part in her childhood and adolescent years. Her passion was literature and, after completing a degree in Romance Philology at the University of Cologne and a PhD in English and American Literature at Stanford University, in the early 1990s she took up an assistant professorship in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. It was then that she made a decision that would color all of her subsequent personal and intellectual life: “In 1995, I bought a parrot from a pet store. I feel a little ashamed of it today because I don’t think animals should be bought or sold. It was a female I called Michiko, incredibly vivacious and intelligent, and she changed my mind completely about what birds are. So I got really interested in them and shortly afterwards joined a birdwatching group. We would go into Central Park to watch and identify the migratory birds that land in the green areas of New York City. That then triggered a whole intellectual and personal transformation for me, where I became really interested in environmentalism and conservation.”

One consequence was that Heise switched her research focus from postmodernism and its impact in literature, architecture and the arts to the environmental humanities, a field where she has risen to become “a global thought leader,” in the words of the committee.

In her book Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2008), Heise put forward the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” as a form of environmental ethics combining engagement with the protection of nature on a local scale with an awareness of the global interconnectedness of all species and ecosystems. Building on the “Think global, act local” approach proposed by the biologist and humanist René Dubos in the early 1970s, she contended that in the globally connected world of the 21st century environmental ethics had to be based on zooming from the local to the global, and vice versa: “It is not enough to have a sense of place, of the local, because that just means that your trash might go elsewhere or that your most polluting industries might be located outside of your own idyllic and beautiful place. That will not help the planet as a whole. For me, a sense of planet and a sense of how things hang together and are ecologically connected on a global basis seems just as crucial for an environmental ethics as a commitment to place.”

The second milestone in Heise’s work hailed by the committee is her innovative analysis of the role of culture in biodiversity conservation, or – as she puts it – “the stories that get told about some species that are endangered and not others.” In her 2016 book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, she foregrounds what she calls “a very clear pattern”: the fact that it is vertebrate species that garner most of the attention, not just from the public and media but also from the scientific community. “Invertebrates get much less attention, and plants especially get ignored.”

To gauge the extent of this cultural bias, Heise took a closer look at the Red List of Threatened Species, a scientific inventory drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that guides conservation efforts worldwide. What she found was that while the 11,000 bird species listed had all been studied, as had all 5,700 mammals, the same held true for only half of the approximately 34,000 fish species. And the case of mushrooms was even more telling, with only 43 studied out of the 31,000 species on the list.

Aside from this analysis of cultural bias in biodiversity conservation, in Imagining Extinction Heise mounts a fervent defense of “multispecies justice,” a concept that expands the moral and legal consideration of members of a community that have claim to rights to all the other species with which we humans share our planet.

Finally, the Biophilia Award recognizes her lead role in the development of a broad worldwide network of environmental humanities scholars beyond the Anglo-American and European spheres, with multiple strands running through Asia and Latin America. This effort, she explains, responds to the application of an eco-cosmopolitan vision to her own research community: “The desire to escape the eurocentrist viewpoint came out of my interest in the way in which environmental crises are experienced and talked about differently in different cultures.” Thanks to her command of languages – she speaks German, English, French, Spanish and Japanese – Heise has involved herself in multiple publications and translations of works in the environmental humanities field, as well as helping to set up congresses, courses and seminars in countries like Argentina, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.

In sum, the awardee’s work, as the citation concludes, “has demonstrated how the humanities can and should join forces with the natural sciences, social sciences, policy, law, and digital technologies to increase our abilities to understand and meet the major environmental challenges of our time.”