Abstract
The development of the environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary formation is a response to an ecological and planetary crisis [...]
Highlights
Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate ChangeDavid Higgins 1, *, Tess Somervell 1 and Nigel Clark 2 *Received: 18 August 2020; Accepted: 18 August 2020; Published: 25 August 20201
Even the idea of “urgency” should be questioned, as Kyle Whyte has suggested, because it potentially occludes environmental injustices already experienced by indigenous peoples and threatens to worsen them through the top–down implementation of “solutions” (Whyte 2020)
This latter term is common in technocratic approaches to climate change that view it as an urgent problem or a set of problems that can be solved by expertise
Summary
The development of the environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary formation is a response to an ecological and planetary crisis. Identify four key ways in which the environmental humanities can respond to a climate emergency: (1) empowering members of the public, especially in disadvantaged groups, to develop their own creative responses to climate change; (2) collaborating with other disciplines, in part by helping to ensure that problems and solutions are framed within appropriate cultural contexts and are socially just (Holm and Brennan 2018; Kitch 2017; Little 2017); (3) teaching our students to think critically about environmental representations and engagements, and to question the still hegemonic carbon ideologies that contribute to global heating (Sultzbach 2019); and (4) publishing research that nuances and critiques grand narratives (e.g., apocalypse, salvation) around environmental change, including the rhetoric of emergency itself. These in turn allow us to create more nuanced analyses that reflect the complex entanglements of climate change, between the local and the global, the ecological and the geological, the past and the future, and the human and the nonhuman
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