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Alexandria Brown ���Ĵ�ý�18 says environmental humanities pointed her toward life as a
journalist and environmental justice advocate.

Alexandria Brown ���Ĵ�ý�18. © 2020 MLIVE Media Group. Used with Permission.

When Alexandria Brown ���Ĵ�ý�18 returned to the Flint, Michigan, region after graduation, she went home with a purpose: to tell the stories of how Flint residents were facing manifold challenges.

A former manufacturing hub for the auto industry and an impoverished city with a majority Black population, Flint was still reeling from the 2014 decision by city leaders to draw water from the highly polluted Flint River. Added to that catastrophe were the living conditions resulting from a longtime economically distressed city run by state-appointed emergency managers, not representatives elected by the people.

The state government���Ĵ�ý�s response to what happened in Flint was a result of systemic racism, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission ultimately concluded. Once back in Flint, Brown began writing for two local publications, Flintside and Flintbeat.

���Ĵ�ý�My journalism was focused on the city of Flint from a ���Ĵ�ý�solutions journalism���Ĵ�ý� perspective. You���Ĵ�ý�re working on covering how people are solving these problems and in what ways they���Ĵ�ý�re responding to these issues.���Ĵ�ý� Such an approach ���Ĵ�ý�can draw attention to the intricacies of how people relate to their environment,���Ĵ�ý� she says.

Brown grew up in the Flint suburbs as a bookish child. ���Ĵ�ý�Books were a transformative portal for me,���Ĵ�ý� she says. She arrived at Rochester as a Handler Scholar keen to study literature and to explore the past, becoming a double major in English and history. But it was her eventual declaration of an environmental humanities minor that she says has had an outsized influence in shaping her life plans.

Environmental humanities melds humanities methodologies with the study of ecological issues. An area of growing scholarly interest, it���Ĵ�ý�s a relatively recent addition to Rochester���Ĵ�ý�s curriculum. The was established in 2017, with Brown in its first cohort of students. ���Ĵ�ý�It offers an interdisciplinary understanding of the environment,���Ĵ�ý� says Brown. ���Ĵ�ý�I think the program does an excellent job at bridging these worlds between the humanities and STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]. I���Ĵ�ý�d be in class with students from so many disciplines���Ĵ�ý�biology or chemical engineering or anthropology, and everybody is coming to the table offering their thoughts and perspectives on these major themes.���Ĵ�ý�

As someone raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian household, Brown says her experiences as a university student shifted her perspective dramatically.

���Ĵ�ý�Coming to college obviously can crack that world open for you in a lot of ways. I started becoming committed to finding the realities of things outside of myself, or at least trying to face them.���Ĵ�ý�

Her religious instruction had taught her that the Earth existed for human use. Her environmental humanities classes altered her view. ���Ĵ�ý�We weren���Ĵ�ý�t talking about the environment as something outside of ourselves but as something we were participating in and had effect over.���Ĵ�ý�

Her family���Ĵ�ý�s conservatism had taught her to be wary of ���Ĵ�ý�tree huggers,���Ĵ�ý� she wrote recently in an autobiographical essay on the environmental humanities program���Ĵ�ý�s website. And race played a role in the distance she once felt from environmental questions, too. ���Ĵ�ý�Environmental issues seemed even more out of touch for me as a Black person. Nature was wilderness. A location of sharecropping labor, King Cotton, and strange fruit. It was a landscape of struggle.���Ĵ�ý�

Gradually, she began to see connections between environmental and human exploitation, worldviews that ���Ĵ�ý�sanctioned elements of humanity and elements of an environment being for our use exclusively.���Ĵ�ý�

Seeing literature as a gateway to learning about the environment in courses taught by the environmental humanities program director, Leila Nadir, ���Ĵ�ý�piqued my interest,���Ĵ�ý� Brown says, and nonfiction texts���Ĵ�ý�such as Elizabeth Kolbert���Ĵ�ý�s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt and Company, 2014)���Ĵ�ý�got her thinking about other ways of telling stories. Her participation in a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Rochester over the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota gave that thinking a practical shape.

���Ĵ�ý�I went. I took my camera with me that I won from a talent show, and I started taking pictures. I made a Facebook post about what I���Ĵ�ý�d seen there, and I realized that what I was doing���Ĵ�ý� recording these events, being a witness to these things���Ĵ�ý�was an actual occupation known as journalism,���Ĵ�ý� she says.

It���Ĵ�ý�s important to look beyond the headlines that a disaster like Flint���Ĵ�ý�s water crisis produces to see the complexities of the problems that underlie it, Brown contends. ���Ĵ�ý�I think the instinct is to focus on the hype of any crisis and to essentialize that problem���Ĵ�ý�almost to its own detriment because then you get to the point where you���Ĵ�ý�re dehumanizing the situation, dehumanizing the circumstances, and you���Ĵ�ý�re also doing a disservice to the intricacies of what makes a city a place that can become vulnerable to something like that in the first place,���Ĵ�ý� she says.

Nadir calls Brown���Ĵ�ý�s work in Flint an ���Ĵ�ý�inspiration���Ĵ�ý� to current environmental humanities students. ���Ĵ�ý�Her writing and activism demonstrate not only how deeply environmental problems are intertwined with social justice issues but also how to translate humanities degrees into meaningful postgraduation work.���Ĵ�ý�

These days, Brown is working with the , where she has accepted the position of Energy Democracy Justice Storyteller. She has also contributed to the organization���Ĵ�ý�s work as an energy justice interviewer, talking with people in Detroit and in Michigan���Ĵ�ý�s Upper Peninsula about their experiences with their energy providers.

For a lot of people in Michigan, a state surrounded by four of the world���Ĵ�ý�s five Great Lakes, environmental questions are tightly bound up with water issues, Brown says. The data collection process she���Ĵ�ý�s contributing to has been eye opening, teaching her about energy justice and demonstrating the strong feelings many people have about their energy providers.

It���Ĵ�ý�s the unending learning process that attracted her, and still attracts her, to journalism, she says, and it���Ĵ�ý�s what she found in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, too. ���Ĵ�ý�The point is to be constantly learning, constantly making connections, and having conversations with people who are not only different from you but also have a different wealth of understanding.���Ĵ�ý�