Fall 2025
By Jenna Perrone

When “SPILL” premiered in Houston this past spring, it wasn’t staged in a traditional theater and it wasn’t staged by a traditional director. The documentary-style play, written by Leigh Fondakowski, dramatizes the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and the devastating oil spill that followed. It was presented in the black box theater at Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts, directed by Weston Twardowski, a lecturer in Rice’s theater program and associate director of the Center for Environmental Studies.

To bring a play like “SPILL” to Houston — the heart of the U.S. oil and gas industry — was a bold move. But for the CES, bold is the point.

“This is a smart play for this place, that is working diligently to not just take the easy stance but which says you have to think about the holistic nature of these complicated money issues, which is a space we at CES thrive and love to operate in,” said Twardowski.

That space — messy, cross-disciplinary, often uncomfortable — is exactly where the CES lives. Housed in Rice’s School of Humanities, the center isn’t interested in tidy answers to climate change or clean boundaries between fields. Instead, its work is grounded in dialogue between scientists and artists, historians and engineers, students and community members.

“Theater is a fundamentally interdisciplinary practice,” said Twardowski. “It’s a collaborative art form. It’s an important skill set for these big, thorny, wicked problems that we’re trying to deal with in environmental studies.”

Founded in 2019, the CES is the latest evolution of two earlier Rice initiatives: the Center for the Study of the Environment and Society, established in 2002 by professors Walter Isle and Paul Harcombe, and the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, piloted by professor Dominic Boyer in 2013. While the CES builds on that foundation, its approach is more explicitly transdisciplinary and unapologetically rooted in the humanities.
 

Theater is a fundamentally interdisciplinary practice. It’s an important skill set for these big, thorny, wicked problems that we’re trying to deal with in environmental studies.

“I reject the notion that the arts and humanities don’t have an important role to play in this conversation,” said Twardowski. “But we are far more accepting in acknowledging that science also has a role to play. I don’t think that there’s any part of us that imagines the conversations around the environment don’t demand an all-inclusive, transdisciplinary approach.”

That inclusive ethos has shaped the center’s public programming, including a popular series of lunchtime panels that spotlight faculty, artists and advocates from across disciplines.

“There hasn’t been a good forum on campus for faculty to talk easily about environmental issues across disciplines,” said Randal Hall, interim director of the CES. “One of the things we’ve been doing at the center is a series of lunchtime panels and conversations that are pretty casual but have tackled tough problems about how to communicate across disciplinary boundaries.”

Hall, the William P. Hobby Professor of American History, teaches courses on environmental history but first came to the field through another lens. “My engagement with the larger questions around the environment began with an interest in economic history that gradually began to overlap more and more with environmental questions of resource management,” he said.

That kind of disciplinary drift is exactly what the CES hopes to encourage. Its mission isn’t to solve climate change with a single set of tools but rather to complicate how we think about it in the first place.

“One of the explanations of what we do that I keep returning to is that we make all of the questions around environmental issues more complicated,” Hall said. “There are no easy solutions, there are no purely technological solutions, and without addressing the history, we can’t hope to solve anything related to environmental challenges or climate change.”

For Twardowski, the center’s work is grounded in narrative — not just storytelling, but the deeper structures that shape how communities understand risk, responsibility and resilience. “The center’s objectives,” he said, “are fundamentally questions around how we understand society, people, human interactions with the environment and the kind of stories that make sense to different communities and can reach different audiences.”

Beyond panels and performances, the CES recently sponsored a manuscript working group for Rice graduate students and faculty engaged in environmental research. Participants workshopped their in-progress manuscripts over the fall semester, then invited outside experts to provide feedback in the spring.

But the long-term goal, Twardowski said, is as much about space as scholarship: creating a community on campus that’s equipped to face an uncertain future.

“It’s very much about remembering that the places we build fundamentally impact our health in infinite ways,” he said. “I think we’re uniquely well-posed to remember and to remind folks that places we build and inhabit shape who we are as people.”