I am an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of English and Environmental Studies with a strong research interest is in the fields of American environmental and natural history writing. I have published critical biographies of Loren Eiseley (1983), Lewis Thomas (1989), and Wendell Berry (1995), along with numerous articles and book reviews. Currently I am working on a critical biography of Thomas Berry, author of Dream of the Earth and The Great Work. My studies are shaped by a dual interest in social and environmental ethics, which I believe are ultimately inseparable. My philosophy is holistic in that I am wary of the conventional subject-object, mind-body, body-soul, spirit-matter, or human-animal dualisms that have shaped Western thinking. From a postmodernist perspective, I am skeptical of our culture’s false optimism and its faith in scientific progress, but I am also dismayed by the emptiness and triviality of our popular culture. The ultimate purpose of the humanities is to encourage our students to become more fully human, not to become technological specialists or passive consumers.
I am particularly interested in the new synthesis of biology and the humanities proposed by scholars such as E. O. Wilson and Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in The Universe Story. I believe that our culture needs a new myth or comprehensive story that will incorporate the discoveries of modern biology, quantum physics, and cosmology about the origins and nature of the universe. This new story or new cosmology then needs to be culturally assimilated through a new global ecological awareness. In short, I believe that the global environmental crisis is the most significant issue of our age and that it must shape our awareness in the humanities. We must take our cultural metaphors from biology and from the great world religions rather than from our machines and technology. We need a new synthesis of ecology, economics, and the behavioral sciences to become our foundational study and help us learn how to live sustainably in the world.
Rather than remaining academic specialists, I believe that we in the humanities must become generalists again and dare to address the large issues of meaning and purpose that elude our age. We must offer a thorough cultural critique of the consumer culture and indicate where it fails to meet the demands of justice, equity, and fairness. We must acknowledge the spiritual dimensions both in our disciplines and in human nature. We must recognize that secular materialism is no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of our age. We must try to bear witness in our lives to the values we profess in the classroom. We must encourage students to look beyond the immediate material gratifications of our consumer culture to think long and hard about ways to create a more sustainable culture, more at peace with itself and with other forms of life on the planet. The multiple crises of our age reflect the spiritual crisis of our affluent western, consumer culture as it confronts the vast economic inequalities in the underdeveloped world and the growing signs of global environmental crisis evident in global warming and climate change.