2025 Environmental Humanities Grant Recipients

2025 GRANT RECIPIENTS

A Rarer Earth: Value and Visibility in Indonesia’s Peatlands
Layna Chen, School of Architecture

This project is an open-source web archive that investigates how economic, social, and political forces have shaped the conceptualization of peat. Although peat is valued as a carbon reservoir through Western environmental discourse, this reconstruction continues to disregard other forms of knowledge. Within the web platform, I will foreground local and indigenous conceptions of peat while analyzing how the conception of peatlands have been limited within narratives of the Indonesian state, who have constructed it as an agricultural void, and international organizations, who see it only as a symbol for climate change. The open-source platform will foreground the potentiality of these marginal narratives and function as a repository for future counter-narratives of peatlands.

Storying Kahana Through Kuaʻāina Digital Resource Management
Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

This 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). This community lives within the bounds of Ahupuaʻa ʻO Kahana State Park, which is the State of Hawaiʻi’s only designated “living park.” A unique arrangement created in the late-1960s, the park’s residents must complete 25-hours of cultural programming hours per month in exchange for their state-managed leaseholds. As people who often feel over-surveyed and under-supported as an anomalous entity within the parks system, Storying Kahana responds to community desires for greater self-determination and control over their narrative. This project will ultimately culminate in the creation of a digital community archive, accessible to residents, and a public-facing educational platform for visitors to the park.

Somewhere Between the Mountains and the Ocean
Sophie Lamb, Yale College

A multimedia project combining a documentary film with interactive mapping to trace how water moves through Teton County, Wyoming. Set on the continental divide below the Teton Mountain Range, the water that flows through this county feeds the Snake and Green Rivers, which feed the Colorado and Columbia Rivers, which hydrate almond orchids in California, golf courses in Phoenix, and potato farms in Idaho. It is for water that the county exists; the town’s main industries are skiing, fly fishing, and rafting, and for that, the rivers and snow are worshipped as small gods. The project will be centered around a farm in Teton County, which collects rainwater runoff for crops, and will be guided by a central question: what does it mean to live at the headwaters of a rapidly drying nation?

Working with Tailings: Brick Sidewalks
Jiayue (Echo) Li, School of Architecture

This artistic and educational project explores improving urban landscape such as sidewalks with special bricks made with repurposed mining waste materials. It builds on my research design project, which investigates the lithium mining landscape and calls for attention to the visibility of industrial supply chains. A key argument of the thesis is that as architects, we should address political ecology through design and material selection. The bricks made with tailings would be a prototype for such a manifesto.

Training Lands
Adam Nussbaum, Yale College

In collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, this project will present a photo installation on the Skaggs Urban Training Complex in Guam.

Edges of Survival: Jaguars, People, and Fragmented Forests
Federico Perez, School of the Environment

This project combines documentary storytelling, interactive media, and an exhibit to illuminate the intertwined impacts of climate change and human-induced habitat fragmentation on Colombian jaguars. By foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, conservation research, and policy discussions, it spotlights how the jaguar’s plight reflects both natural and human pressures on tropical ecosystems. Through short videos, in-person forums, and a digital platform, the project breaks down scientific concepts while capturing the cultural significance of these forests and their apex predators. Ultimately, it aims to spark a broader public commitment to restoring wildlife corridors and building ecological resilience.

From Sowing to Sewing: Pigments in Context
Kathleen Quaintance, History of Art

The Yale Environmentalist
Hailey Seo, Yale College

The Yale Environmentalist is the only student publication at Yale dedicated solely to the environmental humanities. We seek to engage with the environmental humanities as a powerful art form and tool for combatting the climate crisis in meaningful ways. Our project is a sustained one that publishes printed literature on a once semesterly schedule. These publications are composed of literature spanning prose, poetry, personal stories, essays, and more. The publications also showcase student art and photography in accompaniment to the literature. This upcoming publication hopes to incorporate a writing competition into the edition to increase readership interaction. We will publish our publication both in print and online in order to have an archival resource to establish our legacy. We hope this expansion will help further our reach to an international audience who can access our content on a web-based platform.

Rwanda Study Tour Showcase
Stefania Sibille Grandez, School of the Environment

Every year, five Yale of Environment students have the opportunity to travel to Rwanda for 3.5 weeks to learn about Rwanda’s conservation strategies. Through a presentation and a photography exhibition, this event will showcase Rwanda’s different conservation and restoration models across its four national parks. From savannah to mountain rainforest, Rwanda has proven to be a leader in conservation efforts in the region and the world. However, the country also faces many social and ecological challenges where innovative solutions are being planned or tested. One of Rwanda’s lessons learned is the importance of involving local people in their conservation strategies, which has led to interesting conservation-related social programs. Last year, master’s students from the University of Rwanda also participated in the study tour and will provide their local insights and share the impact of the 1994 genocide on conservation.

Cranes of Yale
Karinne Tennenbaum, Yale College

According to Japanese legend, if you fold 1,000 origami cranes you will be granted one wish. We have two wishes: bring birds back and connect people with birds. Over the last 50 years, we have lost nearly one-third of the world’s birds. Inspired by a Gifts of Art program at the University of 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). It seeks to bridge art, culture, and science through a month-long program emphasizing the intersection of traditional origami and global crane conservation. The project culminates in a competitive campus-wide scavenger hunt for 2,025 origami cranes.