The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, I think it’s fair to say that it contains a loose consensus on global ecology, climate change, human activities, and the future. That consensus could be summarized as follows.
- The situation: Science may always be contested, full of internal debates, and never final, but the science on climate and global ecology is by now robust and well established. It confirms that human industrial activities have led to ecological and climate destabilization of sufficient intensity that coming years and decades are likely to feature more and more extreme weather events, more and more migration emergencies, and more and more boundary conflicts and resource wars. Each of those is already happening today, and the lack of concerted action on climate change is making them all the more probable tomorrow.
- What to call it: How to best characterize this situation is unclear. Terms like “environmental crisis,” “eco-crisis,” “climate crisis,” and “global mega-crisis” or “poly-crisis” have been used for years. Today the term “Anthropocene” has become popular, but many EH scholars think of that less as the name of a new epoch (and certainly not the glorious epoch hailed by techno-utopians) than as a condition or even an event, potentially in the same class of mass extinction events as the ones that ended the Cretaceous (famous for its dinosaurs), the Triassic, and several other periods and eras in Earth’s history. Hopefully ours will not be similarly devastating.
- Prospects: For humanity to survive this crisis intact, and to flourish afterward, will require that we quickly develop better forms of ecological cohabitability – the ability to cohabit the planet with the ecological allies and companions that we need in order to thrive. This will require a fundamental reorientation of how humans live, toward lifeways that are much better integrated with their ecosystemic relations at local, regional, and global scales. The science and know-how for doing this are mostly within our grasp; what’s missing is the collective will.
- The politics of collective buy-in: The transition to an ecologically viable world is also unlikely unless our values and practices become more just, equitable, and inclusive. We need to get the majority of humanity on board, which means respecting cultural differences, supporting science and environmental education, and shifting policy away from short-term gain (which privileges the wealthy at the expense of everyone and everything else) and economic “growth” (with its skewed measurement of value) toward cooperation, long-term resilience, and socio-ecological regeneration.
Each of these points could be expanded indefinitely (or at least into a course), with debates arising around the role of specific factors — such as capitalism, colonialism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, “human nature,” optimism versus pessimism, idealism versus materialism, and plenty else.
I’m sometimes asked for a good introduction to the environmental humanities. Of the various texts that are now available — including readers and “companions” from Routledge (this one and this one) and Cambridge and critical introductions like Emmett and Nye’s — I think my favorite, for its scope and its accessibility, is J. Andrew Hubbell and John C. Ryan’s An Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2022).
Comments and suggestions welcome.
