Kyle VanHemert is one of five newly named DENIN Environmental Fellows for 2022–2024. These competitive fellowships are awarded to UD doctoral students whose research bridges science and society.

VanHemert is unusual among DENIN Fellows in that he’s not pursuing a science degree. He’s working toward a doctoral degree in history through UD’s Hagley Program in Capitalism, Technology, and Culture.

His research focuses on the early stages of environmental politics in the United States after World War II, specifically the White House Conference on Natural Beauty hosted by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in May 1965. VanHemert’s research suggests that the conference and the activities surrounding it were the pivotal development in the emergence of “the environment” as a political issue. VanHemert wrote in his application for the DENIN fellowship that this conference was the moment “when an expansive ‘concern for environment’ had arrived on the national agenda but had not yet narrowed into ‘concern for the environment’ as we think of it today.”

With his immersion into the period, he said, “I came to see that this notion of ‘the environment’ wasn’t really in circulation yet” before the conference. “Folks in the ‘60s were sort of groping their way toward a new category of politics that had to do with pollution, urban planning, highway beautification, littering, all sorts of eyesores and quality of life issues that hadn’t been lumped together in one category before.” Through a deep dive into the primary sources of the period, when he was “trying to commute into the past on a daily basis,” VanHemert watched the modern concept of “the environment”—the ecological environmentalism we’re familiar with today—take shape over the course of several years in the 1960s.

“It was not foreordained that the environment took the shape that we think of it today,” VanHemert said. “It was the contingent outcome of a process of collective definition by which people sorted, ‘Okay, what issues go in this category? What gets left out?’ It could have been otherwise.”

VanHemert finds current-day relevance in his historical discovery that the concept of the environment is “only about as old as the Beatles.” He explained, “It’s a powerful lesson that the shape of environmental issues today can and will change, and recognizing that helps us see that our own environmental challenges are not set in stone.”

He continued: People are now starting to realize that building things, such as dense housing and transportation that can move people off of carbon-intensive modes of transport, can actually be good for the environment. This is a reconceptualization of environmental issues. “Looking at how that process happened historically, the first time around,” he said, “offers a really powerful vantage on what’s happening around us today. There’s a range of trajectories ahead of us, and we can only dimly perceive them. But looking through historical examples gives you a sense of the shape of possibilities.”

VanHemert relishes being at the nexus of change as people begin to take seriously the idea that meeting the urgent and wide-ranging environmental challenges we face today will require not just scientific knowledge but interdisciplinary thinking. “There’s a place for historians,” he said.

VanHemert earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2009 from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in history from UD in 2018. For several years, he wrote about technology and design for various print and online publications, including CNN, Wirecutter, and Wired magazine, where he served as senior associate editor.

But then, motivated by a desire to “have a better body of knowledge to draw on about the world, about history, about society, and politics and the economy and everything else,” he decided to pursue entry into UD’s Hagley Ph.D. program.

VanHemert said that his advisor, Arwen Mohun, Henry Clay Reed Professor of History, has been an incredible mentor in introducing him to this world of ideas and facilitating wide-ranging curiosity.

“I’ve been surprised,” VanHemert said, “as I’ve gone through my program, about just how powerful it can be to develop a historical imagination. The process of learning what it is to go into the past, to try to suspend your preconceptions about what you’re going to find, and to let the past be what it is, and try to understand it on its own terms, it’s just been a remarkably mind-expanding experience for me.”

VanHemert is also the recipient of a University Graduate Doctoral Fellowship Award and the Munroe Graduate Student Teaching Award.

He is the father of a three-month-old son. “Having my first child has been the challenge of all challenges,” he said. “I’ve been surprised that having the baby has had a productive effect on my approach to the work itself. It sort of forces you to get down to brass tacks and get something out there for the world to see.”