Rachel Carson, "Moby-Dick", and the Necessity of Literary Study in a Climate Crisis

This talk draws on the life and work of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (1962), to show why there’s no way out of global warming without deep study of the humanities. Carson was an avid, lifelong reader of complex, imaginative literature in many genres, including the work of Herman Melville. Through her reading, she learned to grasp and explain ecological relationships, connections, systems, circulations, forces, and flows that escape direct sensory perception. Carson’s most important lesson for us now is that science and technology alone will not save us: ecological consciousness requires speculation and analysis, synthesis and critical distance, mediation and imagination—the forms of knowledge-making that have characterized literary studies since its disciplinary origins. This talk calls for more robust collaboration between STEM and humanities fields and makes the case that our planet’s warming is intimately tied to our capacities to interpret and value what we read.

Michele Navakas is Professor of English and Affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at Miami University, Ohio. She is a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar and award-winning author of the books Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023); and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Sponsored by Mead-Swing, English, Environmental Studies and Science, History, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and Comparative American Studies