By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
Environmental humanities, a minor introduced in 2023, has since developed its portfolio of connections and offerings. It incorporates the study of the humanities into an examination of climate issues, and now it sports a wider array of courses and funding to facilitate student engagement.
The university received a nearly $1 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency in November 2024 with the expressed purpose of addressing food insecurity on campus through the cultivation of the Baylor Community Garden. The grant will also support increased faculty involvement in environmental humanities courses.
Dr. Joshua King, professor of English and director of the environmental humanities minor, said the minor now encompasses several different areas of environmental study such as food safety, the climate and environmental disparities that exist between communities.
“Unless the humanities are speaking to these concerns, unless we have classes that are shaping future business leaders and politicians and policy makers and nonprofit leaders with these kinds of questions in mind, then I think we are missing a major component of our challenge,” King said.
King said the minor succeeds at providing students several different academic perspectives on a unified study of the environment.
“[Students] get that multi-leveled approach, in that case, between humanities and a social science class that is really impossible to have in a single course,” King said. “And that’s happening across the board with these different courses.”
King noted that a variety of departments and courses have recently presented environmental topics through lectures on campus, such as sustainability in costume design and butterfly migration.
“A number of [the courses] are in different ways associated with environmental communities that students can take, and have been also connecting student projects and learning experiences to the garden,” he said.
Dr. Elesha Coffman, a professor of history, now offers a course under the environmental humanities minor. The course, titled “U.S. in Global Perspective: American Food, from Maíz to Momofuku,” encourages students to consider cultural and environmental trends found throughout the history of food in the U.S.
“For their final project, students can choose any additional food and create a poster, presentation, artwork or whatever they wish,” she said. “Often, students make the food to share with the class.”
According to King, the Community Garden’s affiliation with the SCRAP Collective allows for the university to tailor its academic use of the garden to environmental issues within the Waco area.
“The whole effort is to tie all those things — education, growing food together, hands-on classes and community gardening, but also the more cultural approach that the environmental humanities brings — and tie student learning and projects to that on-the-ground work here in the community,” he said.
