Congratulations to Taylor McHolm, who just earned his PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy, with a focal department in English. McHolm just successfully defended his dissertation on “Representation Challenges: Literatures of Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene.” A leader in the environmental humanities since arriving at UO in 2010, he helped organize the Mesa Verde Literature and Environment Reading Group and co-founded the Environmental Humanities Research Interest Group. He also recently helped spearhead UO’s contribution to the DataRefuge Project, a nationwide effort to help preserve scientific and climate data on federal websites, which some fear that the Trump Administration will take off-line. Currently, McHolm is a Graduate Fellow with UO’s Office of Sustainability.
The Anthropocene, McHolm says, “names a moment in which localized environmental injustices became planetary.” Industrialized countries have long rationalized that environmental injustice is simply the price society must pay for economic prosperity. And yet literature and art, using what McHolm calls “insensible realism,” can challenge this assumption by representing the true impacts of discursive and material practices and by rejecting Enlightenment ideals of rationality and the logic of capitalism that have been used to justify white supremacy, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction in the Anthropocene. For many people, environmental injustices are physically, temporally, geographically, and/or socially imperceptible. By eschewing the accepted notions of rationality, literature and art can make those injustices visible and help us to imagine alternative environmental futures.
