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Preface
Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH) is the product of the 21" century, an
age in which it is no longer possible to grasp and manage environmental problems
from a single viewpoint. This is true of the scientific method as well. Although
fundamentally important for the understanding of ecological issues and changes
to the climate, scientific knowledge is not sufficient for providing an adeguate
answer to the complex phenomenon that is the cause and conseguence of the
environmental challenges of our century. This is why traditional humanities subjects
such as philosophy, aesthetics, literary and religious studies, history, and linguistics
have been combined with the natural and social sciences and the arts into an
interdisciplinary formation in an attempt to understand the causes, current forms,
and future trajectories of the contemporary environmental crisis, and to give
possible answers to it. This formation is EH.
The natural sciences have revealed climatic, hydrological, and ecological
correlations that have radically changed — or will change — the entire world,
including human and non-human life alike. The majority of society has been
unaware of this, or reluctant to notice it, but the pandemic and the environmental
disasters of the 2020s have made it clear that evadinge these problems is no longer
possible. “Therefore, the morally legitimate and scientifically established question
is not whether we are in trouble — but how we should cope with this situation,
how great the trouble is, what work it imposes on us humans and, more closely,
on us researchers.” (Mészdéros 2019: 144). In the words of the philosopher Roger
Gottlieb: “What morality has had to face the banality of evil in which the most
common everyday actions (driving an automobile, putting fertilizer on the lawn
(but I might also add our morning coffee and croissant, or our washing detergent)
could contribute to the devastating effects [of climate change] on future generations
or people at the other ends of the world?” (Gottlieb 1997: X). Compared to earlier
environmental problems, our problems today have crossed a certain boundary:
humankind has become capable of turning the sunrays so vital for life into a serious
hazard, or — as noted by the quotation above — we can put the lives of people living
thousands of kilometers away from us in jeopardy through our daily routine.
The “tangible” cause of the environmental problems — and of the economic
and social ones closely connected to them — is the incredibly rapid growth of the
global population with the corollaries of consumption and over-consumption, the
overuse and depletion of natural resources, a decrease in fossil fuels, and diverse
forms of environmental destruction. Underneath all this, however, lies a worldview
that evolved gradually in Europe and became prevalent in modernity.
This worldview — with both religious and philosophical roots — removed the
human being from the rest of the world, created the dichotomy of nature and