Oldal 9 [9]
OCR
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
