Environmental humanities

The **environmental humanities** (also called the **ecological humanities**) is an interdisciplinary field of research that brings together many environmental subfields in the humanities. These include environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication.

Environmental humanities uses humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibility to think about urgent environmental problems. The field tries to bridge traditional gaps between the sciences and the humanities, and also between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of understanding the natural world and the place of humans within it. Environmental humanities also challenges the long-standing separation between "nature" and "culture", showing how so-called environmental problems are linked with issues of justice, work, race, gender, and politics. It combines methods from different disciplines to create new ways of thinking about environmental issues.

## Emergence of environmental humanities

Although the ideas behind environmental humanities are much older, the field became more clearly defined under the name "environmental humanities" in the 2000s. This followed steady developments in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in humanities and social science fields such as literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, and anthropology. In the 1990s a group of Australian researchers used the term "ecological humanities" for their work. The field became more widely known as "environmental humanities" around 2010.

The journal _Environmental Humanities_ was founded in 2012, and _Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities_ in 2014. These journals mark the development of the field and the consolidation of the term "environmental humanities".

There are now many environmental humanities centers, programs, and institutes around the world. Some well-known examples include the fully funded Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah (the oldest environmental humanities graduate program in the United States), 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 (2014–2024), the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, The Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger, and the international Humanities for the Environment observatories.

Many universities now offer PhDs, Master of Arts degrees, graduate certificates, and Bachelor of Arts degrees in environmental humanities. Courses in environmental humanities are taught on every continent.

The field has not developed only from Western academic traditions. Indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist thinkers have been central to the environmental humanities. They have challenged human-centered viewpoints that sharply separate "nature" and "culture" and have questioned white, male, European- and North American-centered understandings of what counts as "nature". They have helped revise and criticise the literary genre of "nature writing" and have created new ideas and fields that link academic work with politics, such as "environmental justice", "environmental racism", "the environmentalism of the poor", "naturecultures", and "the posthuman".

## Connectivity ontology

The environmental humanities are often described as having a _connectivity ontology_. This means they are based on the idea that everything in the world is connected. They are also grounded in two basic assumptions: that humans must submit to ecological laws, and that humans are part of a larger living system and not separate from it.

One main ontological assumption in environmental humanities is that the organic and inorganic parts of the world form a single system, in which each part is linked to all other parts. This way of seeing the world is related to Lotka’s physiological philosophy and the idea of the "World Engine". When everything is seen as connected, traditional humanities questions about economic and political justice are broadened to include the ways in which our ideas of justice are linked to how we transform the environment and ecosystems.

As a result of this connectivity ontology, scholars in environmental humanities argue that we should seek a more inclusive idea of justice that includes non-human beings and systems as subjects of moral concern, and sometimes as holders of rights. This expanded idea of justice is tied to what is sometimes called "enlarged" or "ecological thinking". Such thinking presupposes sharing knowledge across many different and diverse forms of knowledge. This kind of knowledge sharing is called transdisciplinarity. It is connected with the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and with the works of Italo Calvino, who wrote that literature can "enlarge the sphere of what we can imagine". It also connects with Leibniz’s Enlightenment project, where the sciences are both summarised and expanded at the same time.

However, the situation is complex because connections are both _linear_ and _non-linear_. Environmental humanities therefore need language and methods that can deal with both linear cause-and-effect relationships and complex, non-linear patterns. This motivates work to find modes of speaking and writing that can express both kinds of connectivity.

## Axioms

According to some thinkers, environmental humanities can be described through three main axioms:
1. The axiom of submission to ecosystem laws.
1. The axiom of ecological kinship, which places humanity as a participant in a larger living system.
1. The axiom of the social construction of ecosystems and ecological unity, which says that ecosystems and "nature" are also conceptual entities that humans define for particular purposes (Marshall, 2002).

Another way to state the first and second axioms is that the connections between living things, and between living and non-living things, are the basis of how we understand ecosystems and how they work. These connections form laws of existence and guidelines for behaviour (Rose 2004).

The first axiom has a history in the social sciences (_see_ Marx, 1968: 3). From the second axiom, ideas of "ecological embodiment/embeddedness" and "habitat" have emerged in political theory, with strong links to rights, democracy, and ecological politics (Eckersley 1996: 222, 225; Eckersley 1998).

The third axiom comes from the self-reflective tradition of humanities scholarship. It reminds environmental humanities scholars to question their own concepts and methods and to recognise that "ecosystems" and "nature" are also human ways of organising experience. Without this self-critique, environmental humanities would risk becoming identical with the natural science of ecology, instead of being a distinct humanistic field.

### Political economic ecology

Some theorists argue that including non-human beings and systems in discussions of justice links ecocentric philosophy with political economy. Theorising justice is a central task in political economy. If, as environmental humanities suggest, concepts of justice are expanded to include ecological values and non-human entities, then questions of ecology and questions of political economy must be brought together. This synthesis is sometimes called political economic ecology.

### Energy systems language

The question of what kind of language or notation can show both linear and non-linear causal connections in ecological systems has been taken up by the school of ecology known as systems ecology. To represent the internal relationships of ecosystems, where the laws of thermodynamics are crucial (Hannon et al. 1991: 80), systems ecologist H. T. Odum (1994) developed the Energy Systems Language based on ecological energetics. In ecological energetics, as in environmental humanities, the causal link between elements is treated as an ontological category (see Patten et al. 1976: 460).

By simulating ecological systems with energy systems language, H. T. Odum also made the controversial claim that embodied energy could be understood as value. This idea connects directly with the kind of political economic ecology discussed above, because it links ecological processes and energy flows with questions of economic valuation and distribution.

## Related pages

- 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

## 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. (eds) _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, pp. 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_, 31–32.
- D. R. Weiner (2000) _Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia_, University of Pittsburgh Press, U.S.A.

## Other websites

- _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
- 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