Ursula Heise honored by BBVA Foundation for global influence in environmental humanities

Sean Brenner | October 24, 2024

Ursula Heise, a distinguished professor of English and UCLA’s Marcia H. Howard Professor of Literary Studies, has earned an international honor for her leading role in advancing the field of environmental humanities.

Heise received the Biophilia Award, which is presented annually by the BBVA Foundation and carries a prize of 100,000 euros.

The award’s selection committee lauded Heise for, over the past two decades, having “explored the varied shapes that environmental thought, narrative and activism take in different regions of the world.”

In a statement, the foundation noted that the results of Heise’s scholarship have been global in their influence. And her work delves into an incredibly broad array of mediums — journalism, nonfiction, film and fiction to graphic novels, video games and web content — and disciplines.

“What I put particular emphasis on is how environmental changes that look similar or identical across regions from a scientific or technological perspective — deforestation, soil erosion, plastic waste, species extinction, pollution, climate change — turn out to look very different when they’re approached from different languages, historical memories and cultural contexts,” Heise said.

The honor is particularly meaningful to Heise, she said, because it brings attention to the importance of the work being done in environmental science by scholars outside of STEM fields — for example, ensuring that social and economic justice concerns are prioritized in tandem with advances in climate science.

“Environmental studies at UCLA, and other universities, continue to be very dominated by the natural sciences,” she said. “I hope the Biophilia Award helps to showcase the extensive amount of research on environmental issues that has been done in the humanities and qualitative social sciences over the last 50 years, and to make UCLA’s environmental studies more genuinely interdisciplinary inside the university and more effective in supporting social and environmental change outside it.”

Heise is also the director of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies, or LENS, which is a part of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Among her most recent projects was co-leading a team of faculty and students that produced “Grand Theft Eco,” a series of three animated short films adapted from the Grand Theft Auto video game.

Heise said she intends for her winnings to be split among three recipients: half will go to LENS to support students working in any area of the environmental humanities; and 25% each will be directed to the Bird Conservation Fund and the Sociedad Española de Ornitología, a leading bird conservation organization in Spain.

“I’ve been a passionate birdwatcher and pet bird keeper for the last 30 years, and I’m very happy that this award gives me the opportunity to support work to conserve and restore biodiversity in various areas of the world,” she said. (In a September interview for UCLA Newsroom, Heise discussed the importance of birds in her scholarship and her life.)

Heise received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, when she was a professor of English at Stanford University. She is the sixth winner of the Biophilia Award and the first whose primary affiliation is with a university. Previous honorees were BBC journalist Matt McGrath, the British newspaper The Guardian, Agence France-Presse journalist Marlowe Hood, American journalist-writer Elizabeth Kolbert and the digital media organization Mongabay.