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ABSTRACT
Research on human-environment interactions often neglects the resources of the humanities. Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee breaches in New Orleans offer a case study on the need for inclusion of the humanities in the study of human-environment interactions, particularly the resources they provide in examining ethics and value concerns. Methods from the humanities, when developed in partnership with those from the sciences and social sciences, can provide a more accurate, effective, and just response to the scientific and technological challenges we face as a global community.
KEYWORDS
interdisciplinarity, human-nature relations, Katrina, science policy
Introduction
Al Gore opens his film An Inconvenient Truth with satellite pictures of Katrina, aerial photos of the flooded lower Ninth Ward, and images of the displacement of the tens of thousands of Louisianans that occurred in late August 2005 in the city and area surrounding New Orleans. Gore claims both in the film and the widely released trailer that global climate change "is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue."
Although not exactly a scientific documentary, Gore's plea for attention to the impact of global climate change emphasizes human-environment interactions. The film trailer, for example, asks, "Did the planet betray us . . . or did we betray the planet?" While the film's answer is somewhat more sophisticated than this simple either/or, it is telling that despite his plea that climate change is a moral issue, Gore's film repeats an omission common to much of the literature on human-environment interactions, namely that this often interdisciplinary area of research nevertheless too often neglects the resources of the humanities, especially in the United States.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent more than a decade proactively cultivating interdisciplinary training and research. For example, their Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program funded their first awards in 1998 and was developed to "catalyze a cultural change in graduate education" by providing interdisciplinary backgrounds alongside disciplinary training and encouraging collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to produce scientists and engineers who become "leaders and creative agents for change." However, a quick review of IGERT grants reveals that the interdisciplinary backgrounds being catalyzed by these grants are typically either between the sciences (including the technical...