Environmental humanities and climate change: understanding humans geologically and other life forms ethically

Abstract

The task of reconceptualizing planetary change for the human imagination calls on a wide range of disciplinary wisdom. Environmental studies were guided by the natural sciences in the 1960s, and in the 1970s broadened to include policy and the social sciences. By the 1990s, with global environmental changes well‐documented, various humanist initiatives emerged, expanding the idea of ethics, responsibility and justice within the transdisciplinary mode of environmental studies. Shared problems, places, and scales form the basis for collaborative work in the environmental humanities, sometimes in partnerships with natural sciences and the creative arts. Experiential learning and trust in judgments based on different methods typically guide humanities interventions. Shifting the frameworks of environmental research to be more consciously inclusive and diverse is enabling concepts of the physical world that better include humans and taking ethics beyond humans to consider more‐than‐human Others. This review considers historically how the environment and the humanities became conceptualized together. It then explores three emerging fields in transdisciplinary environmental scholarship where environmental humanities are playing major leadership roles: (1) climate and biodiversity justice, both for humans and for other forms of life; (2) the Anthropocene as a metaphor for living with planetary changes and (3) life after ‘the end of nature,’ including rewilding and restoration. While environmental humanities also work in many other fields, these cases exemplify the crucial tasks of situating the human in geological and ecological terms and other life forms (the ‘more‐than‐human’) in ethical terms. WIREs Clim Change 2018, 9:e499. doi: 10.1002/wcc.499 This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

The nature, significance, and influence of perceived personal experience of climate change

“…The centrality and human dimensions of experience are universally accepted in psychology, philosophy, literature, and the arts and humanities generally (e.g., Bruner, 1986Bruner, , 1990Piaget, 1955;Pollio, Henley, & Thompson, 1997;Robin, 2018;Schwarz & Clore, 2007), but so unquestioningly accepted that the importance of experience across many behavioral science research domains has been, paradoxically, both taken for granted and/or intentionally set aside, as it has in more 'behavioral' psychological research, or in social science disciplines in which individual or experiential levels of analyses are exceptional rather than mainstream. This is not to suggest that one's disciplinary vantage point necessarily precludes more 'psychological,' 'internal environment' considerations.…”

Terrain

“…I define environmental management as those research-practices arising out of the natural science tradition to manage nature for biodiversity and natural resource outcomes (Moon et al, 2019;Phillips, 2020;Robin, 2018). For example, this might be in relation to habitat management, waste management, environmental restoration, minimising pollutants, and river regulation.…”

The limits of Anthropocene narratives

“…Does this mean the expectation of transdisciplinarity concerning the most plausible Anthropocene stories is out of the question? The countless calls (Castree et al, 2014; Thomas, 2014; Clark and Gunaratam, 2017; Toivanen et al, 2017; Robin, 2018) for joint investigations to find meaningful ways to relate stories of the Earth system and narratives of a socio-politically divided human world most certainly suggest otherwise. Can it be then that all calls, pleas, and attempts to make sense by crafting entangled Anthropocene narratives testify to a possibility and a necessity, but, at the same time, are nevertheless misplaced in one way or another?…”