On Thursday, January 22, Yale Environmental Humanities hosted its annual Humanities in Action Panel, featuring presentations from recent grant recipients of the Environmental Humanities Grant Program, which provides funding for public humanities projects broadly related to the environment. The program, now in its sixth year, has awarded more than sixty grants totaling nearly $100,000 to encourage students and faculty to develop creative ways to engage the wider public with issues in the environmental humanities. A five-year report on the activities of the Public Humanities grant program since 2020 is available here.
This year’s panelists—Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Federico Perez, Karinne Tennenbaum, and Kathleen Quaintance—were all 2025 grant recipients. They shared overviews of their projects, all of which aim to open the fields of the humanities to diverse, non-specialist audiences, and discussed how grant funding supported their respective initiatives.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies, opened the panel with a presentation entitled “Storying Kahana Through Kuaʻāina Digital Resource Management.” Hobart’s project is a community-based effort to better educate the general public about the historic and contemporary struggles of Kahana Valley and its kuaʻāina (rural residents) in the State of Hawaiʻi. This community lives within the bounds of Ahupuaʻa ʻO Kahana State Park, Hawaiʻi’s only designated “living park.” Created through a unique arrangement in the late 1960s, the park requires its residents to complete 25 hours of cultural programming per month in exchange for their state-managed leaseholds. With assistance from the Environmental Humanities Grant Program, Hobart organized a community listening session in which residents engaged in structured discussions around immediate and long-term desires, the types of documents most desired for a digital archive, undesirable outcomes of such a project, and outstanding questions and concerns. Overall, Hobart emphasized that “Storying Kahana” responds to community desires for greater self-determination and control over their narrative.
The second panelist was Federico Perez, a joint-degree candidate at the Yale School of the Environment (MEM) and the Jackson School of Global Affairs (MPP). In his presentation, entitled “Edges of Survival: Jaguars, People, and Fragmented Forests,” Perez offered an overview of the intertwined impacts of climate change and human-induced habitat fragmentation on Colombian jaguars. He explained that habitat fragmentation—the process of dividing continuous habitats into smaller, isolated patches—is driven by deforestation, smallholder agriculture, and urbanization, leading to biodiversity loss and long-term ecological instability. These changes have particularly impacted Colombia’s jaguars, which are highly vulnerable to fragmentation due to their large spatial requirements and reliance on stable prey populations. Perez used his grant funding to finance a conservation-focused film aimed at educating public audiences in Colombia and beyond about the need to protect jaguar populations and the ecosystems they inhabit. To date, the funding has supported field expeditions to document jaguar habitats and to interview Indigenous community members, highlighting their role in conservation. Perez’s film seeks to increase engagement among local communities and stakeholders, with the goal of garnering support from policymakers for the creation of protected biological corridors across Colombian jaguar habitats.
Karinne Tennenbaum, a senior undergraduate in Yale College pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology on the Biodiversity and the Environment track, delivered the third presentation, entitled “Cranes of Yale.” Inspired by a Gifts of Art program at Michigan Medicine, Cranes of Yale is an inaugural collaborative effort among the Taking Flight Project, the Yale Birding Student Association (YBSA), and the Yale Japanese American Students Union (JASU). With funding from the grant program, Tennenbaum’s project sought to bridge art, culture, and science through a month-long initiative emphasizing the intersection of traditional origami and global crane conservation. She explained that, according to Japanese legend, folding 1,000 origami cranes grants the folder one wish. Cranes of Yale set out with two wishes: to bring birds back and to connect people with birds. The project organized an origami crane workshop at the Poorvu Center, drop-in folding sessions at Bass Café, a crane conservation workshop at the Yale Peabody Museum, and culminated in a competitive scavenger hunt for 1,330 origami cranes—the final result of the workshop and folding sessions—hidden across 27 buildings on Yale’s campus. Participants followed a list of “Golden Crane Clues,” concluding with an awards reception at the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center. Winners received tote bags, water bottles, gift cards, notebooks, student-made artwork and embroidered apparel, Cornell Lab of Ornithology courses in nature journaling and shorebird identification, binoculars, and field guides to the birds of Eastern and Central North America. Overall, Tennenbaum explained that grant funding helped bring students, clubs, and organizations together while raising awareness about the world’s declining bird population, which has decreased by nearly one-third over the past 50 years.
The panel’s final speaker was Kathleen Quaintance, a PhD candidate in the History of Art. Quaintance’s presentation, entitled “From Sowing to Sewing: Pigments in Context,” outlined a joint project managed by the Yale Textiles Working Group and the Yale Sustainable Food Program that seeks to make the art and science of natural dyeing accessible to students, faculty, and community members. Quaintance highlighted the pressing need for education and training in material literacy—an embodied or tacit form of knowledge learned through hands-on engagement with materials and making processes—in an increasingly digital age. Grant funding for From Sowing to Sewing has helped ensure the continued stewardship of an indigo patch at Yale Farm, which has now yielded blue dye for two harvest cycles. Quaintance has also partnered with faculty across disciplines, including Chemistry, English, and History of Art, to introduce students to the art and science of indigo cultivation and natural dye extraction, practices that have shaped textile production across the globe for centuries. Overall, Quaintance aims to continue learning from the variable rhythms of indigo harvesting and to share that knowledge and experience with the wider New Haven community.
Each presentation underscored the expansive, accessible, and urgent research being conducted in the environmental and public humanities at Yale. The panel concluded by inviting audience members to consider submitting proposals for the Spring 2026 Environmental Humanities grant cycle, which is now open. Submissions are due by Friday, February 13, at 1:00 p.m. For more information about the program, past grant recipients, and application instructions, please visit the Environmental Humanities Grant Program website: https://environmentalhumanities.yale.edu/public-humanities/environmental-humanities-grant-program.