Yale Environmental Humanities was launched in 2018 as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world.
Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of courses at Yale — including the one featured here. Read an overview and explore other course features.
Frida Lopez, a sophomore from Houston, Texas, stood in front of an image, taken from above, of lush greenspaces, clusters of trees, and waterfront walkways. The view was of Shanghai Houtan Park, built on a site formerly occupied by a steel factory and shipyard along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Lopez explained that the park’s layered vegetation transformed a brown field into a flood-resilient park that “takes away or at least diminishes the environmental contamination and creates a more beautiful place.”
In addition, she said, the park design includes a one-mile-long terrace of wetland plants to filter the river water and make it safe for human contact. Her research partner, William Zhang, a sophomore from Chicago, noted that while the system can clean only a small fraction of the river, it nevertheless demonstrates how parks can perform some of the work of treatment plants.
Their presentation took place on the last day of this class, which surveyed the history of China’s close relationship with nature. After beginning the semester with documentaries on air, water, and soil pollution in China in 2015, they were concluding with an exploration of innovation in regenerative park designs in China.
Presentations on the last day of class showed how regenerative park designs are helping to clean up China’s environment.
The class instructor, Pauline Lin, a senior lecturer in East Asian Languages and Literatures, said in an interview that this approach to cleaning the environment fits within the broader story of China’s relationship with the natural world. Students examined changing human relationships with nature over time through early myths, Neolithic farming sites, imperial parks, private literati gardens, and Chinese landscape poetry and paintings.
Throughout the course, “they see China’s varying relationships with nature,” Lin said. “Landscape used to be such an important part of Chinese culture, and here they can see that it still is.”
Park designs that clean the environment fit within the broader story of China’s relationship with the natural world, Lin said.
Fostering that connection with nature was also central to the design of Luming Park, located on the Shiliang riverfront in Quzhou, said Annie Chian, a sophomore from Orange, California.
“One of the main elements to consider with this park is its impact on the local community,” she said, describing it as a popular outdoor space. The park designers sought to maintain the cultural context of the landscape by, for example, building pathways that mimicked original walkways through the property and keeping the natural elevation changes, she said — “bringing people and the natural landscape together.”
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2 min readContinue ReadingCourses across many departments and schools are deepening conversations about climate, humans, and the natural world.