2026 Environmental Humanities Grant Recipients

 

 

This project is a physical archive of New Haven’s road salt, published as a zine with elements of fine art printmaking, that will be distributed to the community. The publication will explore the range of salt treatments applied to New Haven’s surfaces, including indexing color, sound, and shape, the patterns of distribution (mechanical and human), and the afterlives of salt exposed to water (snow melt), pressure (feet and cars), and tracking (into buildings, onto rugs, across train cars). The zine will be distributed to the New Haven Public Works Department, the Yale School of Architecture, the Yale School of Art, the Haas Arts Library, and the New Haven Free Public Library.

 

 

Terra Nosa (Our Land) is a feature-length documentary (approximately 60 minutes) that examines food sovereignty, ecological care, and rural resilience through the daily life and work practices of two small-scale agricultural collectives: Coleccionistas de Semillas (Drados) and Equipo Mimá (Allariz) in rural and depopulated Ourense, Galicia, Spain. Through interviews with members of each collective, the film will explore the impact that global warming, political interventionism, and mass agriculture have on their lives, and the ways in which they (personally and collectively) navigate them. The documentary plans to be a critical reflection of the depopulation of Galicia, the fast-paced capitalistic food production system, and the alternatives found within small collectives. 

 

 

The goal of this project is to chronicle and celebrate a decade of New Haven Climate Movement’s (NHCM) hyperlocal climate organizing, public education, and youth leadership work in New Haven from 2016 to 2026 through the creation of a publicly accessible archive. Through the collection and display of NHCM’s protest art (banners, signs, painted canvases), campaign fliers, posters, and pamphlets, the project seeks to educate local audiences about NHCM’s role in shaping the city’s approach to spurring climate action through the passage of several resolutions and financial investments. It will also create a history timeline of the NHCM that will be supplemented by oral history interviews with founding members, as well as current and former interns, volunteers, collaborators, funders, community stakeholders, and elected officials. 

 

 

Sounding Sustainability: Materials and Ecologies in Musical Instrument Making (SOS) is a collection-based exhibition and public humanities project that traces the environmental histories of musical instruments through their materials. Focusing on CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)-regulated tonewoods such as rosewood and pernambuco, as well as ivory and tortoiseshell, the project acknowledges extractive, unsustainable practices while highlighting contemporary efforts toward more responsible making, including replanting initiatives and alternative materials. A museum installation, public roundtable, and Google Arts & Culture exhibition will bring together Yale faculty, students, instrument makers, and New Haven youth to explore how musical sound is entangled with forests, species, labor, regulation, and global politics and peoples.

 

 

Pacific Time is a three-part, short film anthology series exploring nuclear afterlives across geographies and generations. Moving from Fiji to a New Zealand glacier to New Year’s Eve in Tokyo, the films trace how atmospheric fallout, archival signal, and collective memory from the Castle Bravo tests converge in the present. Through the image of a disrupting broadcast, fractured transmissions, and moments of suspended time, this project examines how the nuclear age persists not only in landscapes but in bodies and media systems. Blending experimental narrative with documentary textures, Pacific Time reimagines historical residue as something still approaching in the Doomsday Clock, while revitalizing autonomy and narrativity in nuclear-affected communities, from Bikini to Las Vegas.

 

 

This project will produce a pilot and two additional initial episodes of a 12-episode limited podcast documenting the rapid global expansion of Earth Jurisprudence and Rights of Nature. The series features in-depth conversations with the foremost leaders shaping this movement, including Indigenous authorities, legal innovators, activists, artists, scholars, and policymakers across continents. Drawing on ongoing, embedded fieldwork and long-standing research relationships, the project captures this transformation as it unfolds in real time. Through narrative storytelling, field recordings, and original music, the podcast translates cutting-edge environmental humanities research into an accessible public platform. 

 

 

The livelihood networks of the understudied vast, mountainous Sino-Tibetan middle ground were shaped by cross-regional and multiethnic trade routes, many of which also served as pilgrimage paths around sacred mountains, lakes, and forests. The roads functioned as liminal spaces connecting people’s lifeworlds: they are simultaneously pipelines for subsistence, carriers for mobility, mediators of social relations, paths to belief, and ladders connecting life and death. However, they are all quickly being abandoned. This project aims to salvage and render legible the diverse and meaningful route systems of vast frontier Tibet by combining embodied trekking with oral history, and to build an online, publicly accessible map database, together with a photography exhibition.