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The Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) is an incubator for new research and creative collaborations on storytelling, communications, and media that contribute to sustainability and environmental justice. We are a diverse network of faculty and students from across disciplines who explore how today’s environmental challenges connect to longer histories of imagining and telling stories about the natural world. At LENS, we begin with the idea that these challenges are as much cultural and political as they are scientific and technological – the core idea of the Environmental Humanities.
Environmental changes are perceived, understood, and experienced in divergent ways depending on different languages, social structures, cultural practices, knowledge systems, and historical memories. The Environmental Humanities investigate these sociocultural foundations of ecological change. LENS specifically focuses on research, teaching, and public engagement around the narratives and visions that different cultural communities create to understand and communicate environmental crises and possibilities across a variety of media.
The projects LENS undertakes aim to:
As a hub and incubator for the Environmental Humanities, LENS forms part of the interdisciplinary community at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES).
Cover Image credit: Lauren Strohacker and Kendra Sollars, Animal Land, Installation at UCLA, October 2016
Grand Theft Eco: Environmental Futures of Los Angeles is a creative film project that repurposes the game engine and design of the video game Grand Theft Auto V to explore possible eco-futures of Los Angeles in the year 2050.
In Season 3 of the podcast of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, we speak to activists, experts, and artists working toward just futures for California’s Imperial Valley, Indigenous communities…
In 2021, LENS partnered with the Labyrinth Project, a collaborative urban anthropological inquiry into nature in Los Angeles, to produce a series of episodes based on the Labyrinth team’s fieldwork…
The new podcast from UCLA's Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies shares stories of environmental justice and imagination in California and beyond.
Season 1 of LENS.cast features two episodes about environmental justice in Los Angeles. In episode 1, we explore the history and future of Los Angeles’s remarkable trees. California is more than…
With support from voters, Los Angeles County is investing billions of dollars from Measures W, H, A, and M in clean, safe water, housing and homeless services, parks and open…
California state parks are a tremendous, potentially underutilized resource to promote youth health. More than half of young people under 18 in California live within the “visitorshed” of one or…
LENS has partnered with KCET, the nation's largest independent public media company to produce engaging, research-driven environmental stories.
In 2014, California voters approved a $7.5 billion bond measure to fund water quality, supply, and infrastructure improvements. Prop 1 included significant provisions to prioritize investments in disadvantaged communities. For…
LENS Magazine, hosted on Medium.com, is home to essays, photography & art, criticism, stories, theory & practice and interviews curated by the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Medium.com is…
“Nimble Foods for Climate Chaos” is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between environmental artist and NYU faculty member Marina Zurkow, Los Angeles chef duo Hank and Bean, and LENS faculty director Allison…
Although the last year brought much needed rainfall, California is still facing a long-term drought. In many parts of the state, crops and farmland remain under stress and the state’s…
Global climate disruption is affecting the planet in ways never experienced in human history. LENS is collaborating with the UC Office of the President to produce a series of six…
The California coast is reaching a tipping point of becoming out of reach for many Californians.
In 2006, California voters approved Proposition 84, a bond measure authorizing $5.4 billion in spending on projects to improve parks, natural resource protection, and water quality, safety, and supply. Most…
Los Angeles has one of the worst reputations in the country when it comes to parks in metropolitan regions. But that could change on November 8, if voters approve Measure…
Holoscenes is a multi-platform artwork colliding the human body with water. The work includes performance installation, video, photographic, and print components. The Anthropocene Suite is a quartet of projections featuring…
Current rates of species extinction exceed the evolutionary background rate, and some biologists claim we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. Imagining Extinction…
Cities have recently begun to attract the attention of ecologists and biologists as ecosystems whose functioning is not as yet well understood. Urban ecosystems combine ecological processes with social practices…
This ongoing project catalogues the many stories in circulation today about patented, transgenic seeds as well as the apparent alternative of open source, public seed collections. By “stories,” the project…
When large parks are built in historically marginalized urban areas, they can contribute to “green gentrification,” a process involving increases in housing prices and the influx of new, wealthier and…
Published Work | 2017 | American Literary History
permalinkPublished Work | 2017
permalinkPublished Work | 2016
permalinkPublished Work | 2016 | PMLA
permalinkPublished Work | 2016 | ASAP Journal
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