Yale Environmental Humanities was launched in 2018 as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world.
Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of courses at Yale - including the one featured here. Read an overview and explore other course features.
For her final presentation in this graduate seminar in architecture, Nico Cao created a cartography, or visual representation, of the damage caused by human-created microparticles, like microplastics. The challenge for her was mapping something that is "planetary and global in scale of impact despite being invisible to the naked eye" and can cause harmful contamination that "is permanent and irreversible," she explained to her classmates gathered in Rudolph Hall during the last class of the fall semester.
Among the ways she devised to model their prevalence was a digital collage of images showing the chain of contamination caused in Michigan, in 2022, by the illegal dumping of wastewater containing hexavalent chromium.
Another student, Camilla Paiva, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, explained that she looked for ways to capture the scope of deforestation in the Amazon region of her native country. She created a collage with swatches of paper with burned edges, a nod to the burning of forestlands, and colors and shapes representing illegal logging, clear cutting, and other harmful practices. To give a sense of how the loss of rainforests changes the texture of life there, she mapped the diminishing sounds of wildlife as lands are cleared.
This course grew out of instructor Joyce Hsiang's own work as a researcher and architect examining the impact of urbanization at the planetary scale.
