Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Professor Ursula K. Heise receives the BBVA Foundation’s 6th Biophilia Award for pushing forward the formation and implementation of the field of Environmental Humanities at a global scale.

For two decades now, the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), “has explored the varied shapes that environmental thought, narrative and activism take in different regions of the world,” in the words of the committee deciding the award.

00:09 An academic vocation inspired by an animal's wit
01:02 An innovative field of research approaching the environmental crisis from the humanities
01:58 'Eco-cosmopolitanism': an environmental ethic to connect the local scale with a planetary consciousness
03:28 Protected vertebrates and neglected plants: cultural biases in biodiversity conservation
05:08 Optimism and pessimism towards the threats that endanger life on Earth

Learn more about the awardee: biophilia-fbbva.es/en/galardonados/ursula-heise-2

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