Renaissance of the Earth

Team
Edie Meidav, Provost Professor, English (PI)
Marjorie Rubright, Associate Professor, English
Director, Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary
Renaissance Studies & Renaissance of the Earth
Evan MacCarthy, Five College Visiting Associate
Professor, Music & Dance
Director, Elements
Lena Fletcher, Chief Undergraduate Advisor &
Senior Lecturer, Natural Resource Conservation

Supported by SPARC Grant, UMass Amherst

A project with the University of Azores addressing climate change and sustainability that undertakes a qualitative research project located at the nexus of the environmental sciences and the creative, historical, and literary arts. 

We live in a time of great ecological threat, fragility, and human resolve. “If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Rising seas have created a particular vulnerability within the archipelago of the Azores, in which the average sea-level rise is projected to be from .25 to two meters by the end of this century, resulting in what multiple sources project will make conditions of survival, coastal or inland, at best complex, at worst perilous. Many of the half million Portuguese-Americans living in southern New England claim Azorean heritage.

This team takes as a core mission the importance of intercultural learning, and each team member has been deeply influenced by what we have learned by journeying beyond the islands of our disciplines. Working on Azorean resilience will provide this team a shared expansion of vision, allowing us at a crucial moment in our own history, and that of our planet, to share the best of what we believe to be our university’s core values – namely, interdisciplinary endeavors that address the most difficult issues of our time, cross-cultural learning that builds citizens of the world, and community engagements that enrich educational excellence as well as the communities we reach.