Bringing together scholars and practitioners focused on culture, ecologies, and environmental action from across the Bloomington campus, the Environmental Futures team investigates how the arts and humanities address how we understand, affect, and can respond to environmental risks and possibilities through culture, art, and history. Our collaborative work is driven by a commitment to environmental justice, and to the inherent relation of ecological attention and ethical action. 

Through a series of reading groups, speakers, exhibits, and performances, we will consider what deep knowledge of the past and imagination of possible futures might offer our ecologically precarious present. We are interested in how ethical, aesthetic, historical, religious, and philosophical reflection on the relation of humans to the more-than-human world can enrich civic conversations about environmental justice. We collaboratively study how art, literature, and media both engage and transform environmental awareness and action. And we explore how arts and humanities research, practice, and education can contribute to a more equitable future.  

The team has been working to enhance course offerings and tracks at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the environmental arts and humanities in coordination with the BA in Environmental and Sustainability Studies. Last year, the team focused on waste and wastelands, with a series of symposia, reading groups, and experiential excursions, "Walking the Wastelands." The team also collaborated with the Institute for Advanced Study to host the yearly Bloomington Symposia, which in the Spring of 2025 invited interdisciplinary conversation on the topic of "Ecologies" with scholars from across the University. 

This year, we are focusing on thinking and creating with plants. As part of this initiative, we organized an exhibition "no_innocent_landscape" at the Process Gallery in Maxwell Hall, are sponsoring a series of "Cross-Pollination Lunches" that highlight ongoing work in the Plant Humanities and Arts across campus, and developing an interdisciplinary, multi-media project called "A Hoosier Herbarium."