What’s in a Term? ANY DISCUSSION OF HOW THE HUMANITIES CAN CONTRIBUTE TO SUS- TAINABILITY OR HOW THE HUMANITIES ARE SUSTAINABLE MUST BEGIN with what critics of the sustainability concept have called its cul- tural deicit: academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of what sustainability is and might be. Sustainability is most commonly understood in economic terms, as production that respects ecological carrying capacities. Because the sustainabil- ity concept is “squishy,” in Bill McKibben’s words, it invariably drits toward the more pragmatic project of sustainable development, the goal of which is keeping modernization viable—a goal dubious to many environmentalists as well as to cultural critics (102). In an era when the rhetoric of crisis dominates public conversation about political, social, educational, and environmental afairs, the term sustainability can seem anemic. Its emphasis on long-term plan- ning and stewarding of resources has none of the dramatic appeal of apocalyptic visions of a world in which all human and natural ecolo- gies are in collapse. For many environmental critics, it is a term that in some sense fails to account for the necessity of drastic changes in how resources are protected, much less distributed, and it relies too heavily on protecting the very state of afairs that got us into trouble in the irst place. For its critics, and even for its reluctant supporters, it is a term about managing anxieties that shuttle between local and global concerns, individual and corporate responsibilities. In her recent essay “Aesthetics of Sustainability,” the German artist and critic Hildegard Kurt issued a clarion call, arguing that the “future viability” of sustainable development depends on its rap- prochement with humanist education and the arts, with symbolic and aesthetic creative practice (238). We want to introduce a new term, the sustainable humanities, to suggest that sustainability and the humanities have always been compatible projects. While the sustainable humanities include the work of ecocritics and environ- mental critics, it refers more broadly to the ecological value of hu- STEPHANIE LEMENAGER is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has affiliate appointments in environmental studies and comparative literature. She is the author of Manifest and Other Destinies (U of Nebraska P, 2005) and lead editor of Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011). In 2012 she won the UCSB Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She is completing a book about the cultures of petroleum in twentieth-century North America. STEPHANIE FOOTE, associate professor of English and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana, is the author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Amer- ican Literature (U of Wisconsin P, 2001), the editor of two reprints of Ann Al- drich’s classic 1950s lesbian pulps for the Feminist Press, and a coeditor of Histo- ries of the Dustheap (MIT P, forthcoming). She is at work on several projects that bring together her interests in American studies and environmentalism, includ- ing one on the intersection of sustain- ability and the ideal of homesteading and another on the rise of class as an identity in the late nineteenth century. theories and methodologies The Sustainable Humanities stephanie lemenager and stephanie foote [ PMLA 572 [ © 2012 by the modern language association of america ]