CONTRIBUTION
Ursula Heise maintains that the environmental processes, risks and crises are not primarily or only issues of science and technology, but also questions of society, culture, history and values. This is the fundamental idea behind Environmental Humanities, a field to which the laureate contributed decisively. Under this light, processes like climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation o soil erosion look very different when one takes into account different languages, historical memories and cultural frameworks of understanding. For these reasons, Heise believes that environmental problems cannot be approached without considering them as problems of society, culture and values.
The laureate has developed an innovative line of humanistic research, exploring how different traditions of thought about nature in different languages and cultures influence ways of interpreting environmental challenges. In her book Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2008), she put forward the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism”. With it, she defends an 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.
From this dual local and global perspective, the “eco-cosmopolitanism” defended by Heise contends that a region’s social, historical and cultural distinctiveness must be part and parcel of environmental actions and campaigns.
In her book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), Heise puts the spotlight on the cultural bias in the attention that different species receive from both the public and media and the scientific community: vertebrate species garner most of it, while invertebrates and plants often get ignored. The researcher finds that the scientific community is not exempt from cultural influences and that it is easier to obtain funds for a conservation project involving big and charismatic species than other less well-known ones. This is why she makes 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.
Further, Heise has led the development of a wide network of environmental humanities scholars beyond the Anglo-American and European spheres, with multiple strands running through Asia and Latin America. The laureate has promoted multiple publications and translations of works in the Environmental Humanities field, as well as congresses, courses and seminars in countries like Argentina, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Lastly, Heise believes that a valuable contribution of Environmental Humanities is to help us imagine humanity’s fate in a way that is not necessarily apocalyptic or dystopian. This is why she especially values the way some current science fiction works are showing optimistic visions on the possible futures that are still accessible.
Laureate bio notes
Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair of Literary Studies in the Department of English and a professor in 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).
Among her editorial appointments, she is co-editor (with Chi P. Pham) of Environment and Narrative in Vietnam with Palgrave Macmillan, February 2024, editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave, co-editor of the Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016) and managing editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (2017), as well as a former co-editor of the Routledge series Literature and Contemporary Thought.
Heise is also co-editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature. The Twentieth Century; and author of numerous articles and chapters of literary studies on central figures of modernity, as well as writing the introduction and notes to a 2005 edition of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.
A co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), she is also a producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created in collaboration with U.S. public TV station KCET-Link.