HUMANITIES – The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Jared Farmer is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the recipient of an NEH Public Scholars grant to support his forthcoming book, Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times (Basic Books). He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for his 2008 book, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. His last book, Trees in Paradise, told the modern history of California through the history of its treescape.
HUMANITIES: You call yourself a “geohumanist,” which is what exactly?
JARED FARMER: Well, it’s a nifty Instagram handle! Seriously, though, I devised this neologism to succinctly express my deepest scholarly commitments. “Environmental historian” never sounded quite right to my ears. I wanted a single word that worked multiple ways. First, a word that put Earth first, literally, not in an antihuman or even ecocentric sense but in simple recognition that this perfect planet is precedent to humanity. Second, a word that suggested that geoscience is essential to the humanist project—and vice versa. Third, a word that implied that global warming, global governance, and geoengineering are unsolvable problems without the humanities.
Read the entire interview at: HUMANITIES