ENST Brown Bag: Ecologically Critical Places

Join us for this Environmental Studies Brown Bag featuring Dr. Bryan Rasmussen, professor of English and faculty in environmental studies at California Lutheran University, specializing in the environmental humanities.

Ecologically Critical Places is a mixed-form book project that develops a theory of environmental storytelling through three case studies in California ecology: California condor conservation in Baja California's Sierra San Pedro Mártir, subsistence fishing along the Los Angeles River, and the overlapping claims of Indigenous sovereignty, toxic remediation, and wildlife conservation in the Simi Hills. Each site is what the project calls an "ecologically critical place" — a site of high conservation value where human and nonhuman communities collide, where the tools designed to protect these places tend to reproduce the injustices they claim to address, and where advocating for one community's interests often imperils another's.

The project argues that this incommensurability of justice claims poses not only an ethical problem but also a storytelling problem, because conventional environmental narratives, including environmental justice advocacy, impose resolutions that often foreclose competing justice claims. The three cases escalate in complexity and reflexive demand, tracing the breakdown of the researcher's ability to tell these stories without choosing sides, erasing claims, or reproducing the power structures under critique.

In response, the book pursues formal escalation to match the escalating complexity: from co-authored social science to personal essay to speculative or science fiction — each formal shift a response to the challenges of ecologically critical places for the storyteller who tries to inhabit them.

Hamilton Whole Foods will cater vegetarian wraps. Please bring your own reusable water bottle.
Co-sponsored by ENGL and AHUM