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INTRODUCTION
TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
Judit Farkas
The chapter gives an overview of the emergence, goals and basic theses of
Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH). It outlines how it has incorporated
the humanities, the social and natural sciences and the arts, and the role it has cast
for itself in contemporary environmental issues. In addition to summing up
international research and trends, it touches on the appearance of EH in Hungary.
As there are innumerable publications and institutions across the world, it is
impossible to provide an accurate enumeration, and therefore we have to restrict
ourselves to topics of key importance.
History of the environmental humanities
What EH posits as its starting thesis is a negation: it disagrees with the tenet that
rose to prominence in the 17" century, according to which man can be separated
from nature — nature being taken as the objectively defined and controlled subject
of scientific knowledge (see Latour 2014). As part of its prehistory, EH has
identified several moments, texts, images and events that question this idea.
Noel Castree (2021) identified the famous article by the American historian
Lynn White published in the periodical Science, The Historical Roots of Our
Ecological Crisis (1967) as the first example of EH. White saw humanity’s
domineering attitude to nature as the root of the problem and thought that to
solve the crisis, basic social convictions had to be questioned and new values created
(a more detailed presentation of White's thesis is provided in the chapter on Religion
and Ecology). EH counts among its most important antecedents Rachel Carson’s
book The Silent Spring (Carson 1962), historian Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and
the American Mind (1975), philosopher Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975)
and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983), the latter two discussing the
rights of animals. Others retrace the roots of EH to the 18th century with special
emphasis on the work of David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and George Perkins Marsh,'
in which issues of the environment were already combined with social criticism
(Emmett — Nye 2017, Hubbell — Ryan 2022).
The above-mentioned works and authors are among the many whose impact has
led to the so-called “environmental turn” or “greening” of the humanities (see Castree
2021: 1), evolving later into the EH. And, although they are not the results of schol¬
arship (but undoubtedly the outcome of scientific and technological development),
' Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854), George Perkins Marsh: Man and Nature (1864), Aldo
Leopold: A Sand County Almanac (1949).