What a strange question to ask, you may think: Of course research helps change the world. Or maybe your response is: What a naive question, the world does not listen to academics—least of all humanists. I believe that the humanities do change the world and that environmental humanities are urgently needed both for intrinsic interest and for their contributions toward a better world. My recommendation is blindingly obvious but curiously neglected by most humanists: In order to have an impact we need to improve the language we use to describe our results and the implications they have.

At the 2008 conference of the Australian Historical Association, a roundtable of historians asked: “Can environmental history save the world?” The panelists called for more interdisciplinary and socially and culturally inclusive approaches that could engage with policy, connect people to place, and understand the complex processes that have led to the present.¹ Such statements of inclusive discourse and critical understanding are probably uncontroversial and will have almost universal support amongst academics.

The question becomes controversial if we ask how the humanities may concretely contribute to the shaping of future societies. Some people will argue that the role of the humanities is not to contribute to the construction of the world, but rather to be a critical voice against established truths. Others may say that while it would be wonderful to contribute, the world does not want to listen to academics in general and humanists in particular.

I believe such statements are unwarranted and self-fulfilling. This is not merely a question of giving up on public engagement; it is about the epistemology of the humanities. At the heart of the controversy about the role of humanities research is the question of whether the academic pursuit is fundamentally about a search for truth—forever imperfect as it may be. The postmodernist historian Ankersmit says squarely that the historian is not committed to the truth, but solely to narrative power. It’s a radical position and one that I reject: We cannot renounce the search for reality and truth without giving up our academic position and assuming the role of the artist.

The humanities are indeed a powerful source of change. We humans are motivated by what we believe, and humanistic thinking is one of the main sources of ideas and narratives that inform social action—for good and for bad. Paradoxically, postmodernist thought provides a striking example of the social impact of the humanities. The linguistic turn of the late twentieth century demolished positivist innocence and naïveté in the social and human sciences, and permeated the film and computer industries. In the twenty-first century popular thinking is characterized by design rather than tradition; We are no longer so preoccupied with how the world is but with how we can create something entirely new and unbound. The linguistic turn was therefore one of the humanistic world’s most important discoveries in the last generation. The problem is that the humanities in the postmodernist interpretation may become entirely self-reflecting: Scholarship may be a question only of how I choose to look at the world, how the world is reflected in me, or how can I look deeper into myself. Instead of just being critical of this development in the humanities and harking back to the positivist epistemology, we must recognize that there is no turning back. Humans have no tool other than language to comprehend the reality that is around us. The only thing we have as researchers are sensations and perceptions, empirical data and models, whether we are researching nanoparticles or dance. In this way both science and the humanities have taken the linguistic turn.

So if we must seek truth while knowing full well the contingent character of our results, how can we speak up with confidence in order to help make a better world?

The language of the expert is crucial to an audience of politicians and stakeholders. They want to know what is crucial new knowledge, how this expert knowledge may call on us to reinterpret and change our assumptions, and with what confidence they may build upon the knowledge. Such expectations may seem simple enough but many historians are loath to respond directly. Often we prefer to talk around a phenomenon, expand on context, and criticize assumptions. While such groundwork is vital to understanding a problem, it does not bring out what may be learnt from our research. Of course, sometimes our research only helps bring confusion to a higher level but every so often we succeed in clarifying our field of study. As researchers we may, however be so engrossed with the intrinsic value of our research that we are tempted to end our pursuits when we reach this happy moment of insight. Unfortunately, the request by our audience is often the embarrassing “so what” question—or, more positively put: What do we learn from this?

It is precisely the embarrassment of the question that shows that we need to hone our language as experts in environmental history. The question is completely legitimate, and finding it difficult or embarrassing to answer is an indication that we have not thought hard enough about what it is that we do. Most of us choose our occupation by circumstance and inspiration, and we pursue research questions out of curiosity. But most other people are curious about other things, and if we want them to appreciate our research we must be better at articulating the social value of what we do—even more so if, as in the case of environmental humanities, we believe that our subject matters.

One way forward is to improve our ability to talk of findings as in other scientific fields of inquiry. Findings are what you expect from an expert—not necessarily rock-solid evidence but an articulation of the best-informed evaluation of a problem and the implications of this insight. Findings come in many forms. It is a humanistic finding that children’s reading abilities are positively influenced by parents reading aloud to them. The finding is a result of researchers comparing parents’ practices and school children’s linguistic abilities in several countries and combining statistics with theories of learning. It is important to recognize that the humanities produce findings because this enables us not only to criticize the world but to help create a better one.

A finding is a different thing from a find as it involves comparison, interpretation, contextualization, and consequence. The find needs to be compared with similar finds in order to identify its unique character, and there is always an interpretation involved in a discovery, whether of a cultural marker or a microscopic life-form. The archeologist identifies changes in soil layer as the remains of a king’s stronghold only by combining knowledge of building construction, dating, and typologies with theories about past societies. Contextualization builds on the finding. The identification of an earthen
object is a find, the identification of the earthen object as a hill fort is a finding, and to understand hill-fort society we need contextualization. Consequence is what follows in intra- and extra-academic contexts: Do we need to revise our theory (in this case of Iron Age society), do we learn anything new (say, about the articulation of power across time), and what does this require us to do (for example, revise conservation policy)?

Environmental humanities help us understand how and why we choose to act like we do. We therefore also need to enhance our ability to draw lessons from our research. My simple point is that we can only do this when we articulate our findings as expert knowledge of specific relevance.

1. Sarah Brown, Steve Dovers, Jodi Frawley, Andrea Gaynor, Heather Goodall, Grace Karskens, et al., “Can Environmental History Save the World?” History Australia 5, no. 1 (2008): 03.1–03.24