From law to analysing time deeply: How one course changed a worldview

When lawyer Sara Varda St Vincent enrolled in a course called Deep Time, she didn’t expect it to completely reshape how she viewed the world. “I was looking for courses about time,” she recalls. “When I found Deep Time, my brain exploded at every lecture. It was the first time I encountered Environmental Humanities – and it shifted my perspective on many things.”

What is Environmental Humanities?

“Environmental Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that combines the humanities with environmental and social sciences to understand the relationship between humans and nature,” Sara explains. Rather than seeing nature as

Sara Varda. Photo: Personal

something separate from us, Environmental Humanities challenges that very assumption. It asks: How do we live, think, and act - as part of nature, not apart from it?

A creative space for new perspectives

Sara has a law degree but has continued studying various independent courses alongside her work.
“I love learning new things, not only for professional reasons but also out of curiosity. Independent courses allow me to explore new fields while working full-time. Some have been directly useful in my job, while others are more about joyful exploration.”
The Deep Time course, she says, deepened her understanding of how we perceive time.
“It made me realize we can experiment with different temporalities instead of being slaves to one fixed way of thinking about time.”

An award-winning essay on time and legacy

Sara’s final essay for Deep Time examined humanity’s paradoxical relationship with time.

Image: AI-generated with DALL-E (OpenAI).

“We’re obsessed with it, yet blind to both the past and the future,” she says.
Based on the course essay, she wrote a literary nonfiction essay, in which she imagined archaeologists studying our remains a thousand years from now - asking what they might find, and what we might think if we imagined their gaze on us. This essay went on to win an honorary mention in an essay competition, and will soon be published in the Finnish-Swedish journal Fredsposten.

From law to environmental justice

Sara’s legal background gives her a unique perspective on Environmental Humanities.
“Law is like society’s mental infrastructure - it defines what’s right, wrong, important, or valuable. It both shapes and is shaped by culture,” she says.
This insight led her to become active in a campaign for recognizing ecocide as an international crime.
“Ecocide law challenges the destructive assumption that nature is just a resource. It says there’s a real boundary, and crossing it is a serious crime.”

Why study environmental humanities?

For Sara, one of the field’s greatest strengths is its creativity.
“It combines perspectives in new, sometimes surprising ways. It’s an incredibly creative space - and creativity is exactly what the world needs right now.”
She believes students from all backgrounds, whether law, science, technology, or the arts, can benefit from engaging with Environmental Humanities.
“It helps you think critically, connect ideas across disciplines, and question basic assumptions about how the world works.”
Her advice to future students is:
“If you feel even a spark of curiosity - apply! Today’s big, hairy problems require more creative, curious, and multifaceted minds.”

Quick facts

Name: Sara Varda St Vincent
Current role: Lawyer and interim consultant (own firm)
Previous studies: Law
Favourite moment in the course Deep Time: Anthropocene Lab where each student brought an object representing the Anthropocene and shared its story.
Recommended read: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Essay publication: Fredsposten (December issue)

Theme

Last updated: November 6, 2025

Source: THe Faculty of Humanities

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