Stephanie Bernhard

Modern Languages Association, San Francisco, CA

Enacting environmental justice requires both trust in, and critique of, knowledge obtained through the scientific method. For example, science has uncovered the role of carbon emissions in the ongoing climate crisis and can help communities plan to protect their most vulnerable members. But science is also responsible for countless injustices, from the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge not obtained through its methods to the exclusionary structure of its fields. How, then, should writers, environmental justice activists, and humanities scholars think through the twenty-first-century dictum to “trust science” or “trust scientists?” Where should our faith in science end, and where should our questions begin? How can we ally ourselves with scientists while critiquing science? How can we critique without falling into the dangerous traps of skepticism or denialism? To begin answering these questions, I turn to the works of two Potawatomi writers: the philosopher and activist Kyle Powys Whyte and the botanist and essayist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Both have roots in an Indigenous nation whose environmental epistemologies have been systematically marginalized by the settler state and establishment science. Yet both have also found ways to center Potawatomi knowledge in scientific conversations. Whyte spent years developing alliances with scientists (and chronicling the challenges of such relationships); Kimmerer became a scientist. Both thinkers, I argue, assess the benefits and limits of establishment science by reminding readers that scientists are fallible people, not cogs in an infallible scientific machine.

Modern Languages Association Convention, Chicago, IL

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, Davis, CA

In my book, I read the creation story as an account of the transition from a hunter-gather to an agrarian society, which would mean that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle signifies "leisure" while the agricultural lifestyle signifies "work." In modernity, meanwhile, people tend to think of agriculture as a development that "freed" many humans from the labor of spending their days procuring food. Yet a number of contemporary writers and thinkers across disciplines and genres are reconsidering this pro-agriculture stance and thinking back to the Adam and Eve paradigm. Within the last 20 years, for example, two books have been published under the title Against the Grain--one by Richard Manning (2004) and the other by James Scott (2016), both arguing, essentially, that humans made a grave error--exchanging leisure for labor--when we turned exclusively to agriculture for our sustenance. As my contribution to your panel, I would like to analyze the emerging trend of agricultural skepticism and consider how we might integrate it into a contemporary understanding of food systems while acknowledging that we will rely on agriculture--and agricultural labor--for the foreseeable future.