Environmental humanities
Environment |
|
The environmental humanities (also ecological humanities) is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology,[1] and environmental communication.[2] Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.[3]
Emergence of environmental humanities
Although the concepts and ideas underpinning environmental humanities date back centuries, the field consolidated under the name "environmental humanities" in the 2000s following steady developments of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in humanities and social science fields such as literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, and anthropology. A group of Australian researchers used the name "ecological humanities" to describe their work in the 1990s; the field consolidated under the name "environmental humanities" around 2010.[4] The journal Environmental Humanities[5] was founded in 2012 and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities[6] in 2014, indicating the development of the field and the consolidation around this terminology.
There are dozens of environmental humanities centers, programs, and institutions around the world. Some of the more prominent ones are the fully funded[7] Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah, the oldest environmental humanities graduate program in America,[8] the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) at LMU Munich, the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, The Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, The Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger, and the international Humanities for the Environment[9] observatories.
Dozens of universities offer PhDs, Masters of Arts degrees, graduate certificates, and Bachelor of Arts degrees in environmental humanities.[10] Courses in environmental humanities are taught on every continent.[8]
The environmental humanities did not just emerge from Western academic thinkers: indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist thinkers have provided major contributions. These contributions include challenging the human-centered viewpoints that separate "nature" and "culture" and the white, male, European- and North American-centric viewpoints of what constitutes "nature"; revising the literary genre of "nature writing"; and creating new concepts and fields that bridge the academic and the political, such as "environmental justice," "environmental racism," "the environmentalism of the poor," "naturecultures," and "the posthuman."[4]
Connectivity ontology
The environmental humanities are characterised by a connectivity ontology and a commitment to two fundamental axioms relating to the need to submit to ecological laws and to see humanity as part of a larger living system.
One of the fundamental
The situation is complicated, however, by the recognition of the fact that connections are both non-linear and linear. The environmental humanities, therefore, require both linear and non-linear modes of language through which reasoning about justice can be done. Thus there is a motivation to find linguistic modes which can adequately express both linear and non-linear connectivities.
Axioms
According to some thinkers, there are three
- The axiom of submission to ecosystem laws;
- The axiom of ecological kinship, which situates humanity as a participant in a larger living system; and
- The axiom of the social construction of ecosystems and ecological unity, which states that ecosystems and nature may be merely convenient conceptual entities (Marshall, 2002).
Putting the first and second axioms another way, the connections between and among living things are the basis for how ecosystems are understood to work, and thus constitute laws of existence and guidelines for behaviour (Rose 2004).
The first of these axioms has a tradition in social sciences (see Marx, 1968: 3). From the second axiom the notions of "ecological embodiment/ embeddedness" and "habitat" have emerged from Political Theory with a fundamental connectivity to rights, democracy, and ecologism (Eckersley 1996: 222, 225; Eckersley 1998).
The third axiom comes from the strong 'self-reflective' tradition of all 'humanities' scholarship and it encourages the environmental humanities to investigate its own theoretical basis (and without which, the environmental humanities is just 'ecology').
Contemporary ideas
Political economic ecology
Some theorists have suggested that the inclusion of non-humans in the consideration of justice links ecocentric philosophy with political economics. This is because the theorising of justice is a central activity of political economic philosophy. If in accordance with the axioms of environmental humanities, theories of justice are enlarged to include ecological values, then the necessary result is the synthesis of the concerns of ecology with that of political economy: i.e. political economic ecology.
Energy systems language
The question of what language can best depict the linear and non-linear causal connections of
See also
- Animal studies
- Anthropocene
- Bioprospecting
- Bioregionalism
- Biosemiotics
- Climate justice
- Cultural geography
- Deep ecology
- Ecocentrism
- Ecocriticism
- Ecofeminism
- Ecomusicology
- Ecosemiotics
- Environmental history
- Environmental justice
- Environmental philosophy
- Green politics
- Political ecology
- Posthumanism
- Sexecology
- Social ecology
- Systems ecology
- Value theory
Notes
- ISSN 2201-1919.
- ^ Milstein, T. & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2020). Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840
- ^ "The Environmental Humanities at UCLA". Retrieved 2019-09-25.
- ^ OCLC 978286393.
- ^ Environmental Humanities
- ^ Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities
- ^ "Funding & Financial Aid - Environmental Humanities Program - University of Utah".
- ^ a b O’Gorman, Emily, Thom van Dooren, Ursula Münster, Joni Adamson, Christof Mauch, Sverker Sörlin, Marco Armiero, Kati Lindström, Donna Houston, José Augusto Pádua, Kate Rigby, Owain Jones, Judy Motion, Stephen Muecke, Chia-ju Chang, Shuyuan Lu, Christopher Jones, Lesley Green, Frank Matose, Hedley Twidle, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Bethany Wiggin, and Dolly Jørgensen. "Teaching the environmental humanities: international perspectives and practices." Environmental Humanities 11, no. 2 (2019): 427-460.
- ^ Humanities for the Environment
- ^ ""Where to Study - ASLE"". Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
- ^ S. Kingsland (1985). Modeling Nature. The University of Chicago Press. Chapter 2.
- ^ L. Courtart, translated by D. Rutherford, R. T. Monroe (2002). The Logic of Leibniz. Chapter 5. Archived from the original on 2005-12-17. Retrieved 2006-01-27.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
References
- Italo Calvino, On Fourier, III: A Utopia of Fine Dust, The Literature Machine, Picador, London.
- R. Eckersley (1996) ‘Greening Liberal Democracy’, in Doherty, B. and de Geus, M. ed. Democracy & Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, Routledge, London, pp. 212–236.
- R. Eckersley (1998) ‘The Death of Nature and the Birth of Ecological Humanities’, Organization and Environment, Vol 11, No. 2, pp. 183–185.
- R. Eckersley (2001) 'Symposium Green Thinking – from Australia', Environmental Politics, Vol.10, No.4, pp. 85–102.
- J.B. Foster and P.Burkett (2004) ‘Ecological Economics And Classical Marxism’, Organization & Environment, Vol. 17, No.1, pp. 32–60.
- B. Hannon, R.Costanza and R.Ulanowicz (1991) ‘A General Accounting Framework for Ecological Systems: A Functional Taxonomy for Connectivist Ecology’, Theoretical Population Biology, Vol. 40, 78-104.
- A. Marshall (2002) The Unity of Nature: Wholeness and Disintegration in Ecology and Science. London: Imperial College Press.
- J. Martinez-Alier (1987) Ecological Economics, Basil Blackwell.
- K. Marx (1968), in Karl Marx: 1818/1968, a collection of essays, Inter Nationes, Bad Godesberg.
- H.T. Odum (1994) Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology, Colorado University Press, Boulder, Colorado.
- B.C. Patten, R.W.Bosserman, J.T.Finn and W.B.Cale (1976) ‘Propagation of Cause in Ecosystems’, in Patten, B.C. ed. Systems Analysis and Systems Simulation in Ecology, Academic Press inc. New York.
- S. Podolinsky (2004) ‘Socialism And The Unity Of Physical Forces’, Organization & Environment, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 61–75.
- D. Rose and L. Robin (2004) 'The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation', Australian Humanities Review, 31-2
- D.R. Weiner (2000) Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, University of Pittsburgh Press, U.S.A.
External links
- Environmental Humanities (journal)
- Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (journal)
- "What is the Environmental Humanities?" The Environmental Humanities at UCLA.
- Environment & Society Portal
- D. E. Nye, L. Rugg, J. Fleming, and R. Emmett (2013), "Background Paper: The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities". Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research.
- R. Hutchings (2014) 'Understanding of and Vision for the Environmental Humanities', Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, pp. 213-220 Archived 2017-12-02 at the Wayback Machine
- T. Griffiths 'The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia', Appendix 1 in The Australian Academy of the Humanities, "The Humanities and Australia's National Research Priorities', Report prepared for the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, April 2003