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INTRODUCTION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 15
Authors on the history of EH stress the Earth Summit organized by the UN in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (in brief, the Rio Conference) whose participants, delegates
of a variety of nations, voiced their concerns over the state of nature and the
necessity of finding the balance between economic development and environmental
protection. The event proved useful for EH on two counts. Firstly, it acknowledged
as well as integrated the decades of scholarship on Indigenous culture, the re¬
evaluation of nature, and religious and artistic understandings of the environment.
Secondly, it encouraged researchers under the broad umbrella of EH to know that
they could meet with increased public awareness of the environment and that they
could contribute to the political management of global problems (Hubbell — Ryan
2022: 9 — 10).
The academic literature dates the actual start of EH to the 1990s, or rather the
2000s. It is prominently tied to research in Australia: in the 1990s, historian Tom
Griffith and law scholar Tim Bonyhady founded the National Working Group on
the Ecological Humanities. The new approach and method we term Environmental
Humanities began to be called ecological humanities at the Australian National
University and the University of New South Wales. Though EH is now present
the world over, Australian research still holds a special place for introducing several
new ideas and methods.‘ The fact that most of their research is focussed on, or
inspired by, Australian aboriginal cultures does not diminish their importance.
In the academic literature, the founding issue of the first EH periodical,
Environmental Humanities (2012), is registered as the first mention of the term
Environmental Humanities in print, but the notion existed earlier. In 1998, the
biologist and sociologist Hana Librova initiated a program at the philosophical
faculty of Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Rep.) with the title Humanitni
environmentalistika (Schmidt — Soentgen — Zapf 2020: 225).° From the turn of
the 2010s, several research groups, research centers and educational programs
followed suit: the Rachel Carson Center was founded in Munich in 2009° and
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm set up the Environmental
Humanities Laboratory in 2012. The interdisciplinary EH research network was
founded in Augsburg, Germany, in 2015. In Europe the Oslo School of
Environmental Humanities (OSEH)’ and The New Institute Center for
Environmental Humanities (NICHE) in Italy deserve mention. The first MA
course was held at Bath Spa University (UK) in 2016 with the express aim that
“the natural sciences and the humanities shall give a creative answer to the
environmental challenges”’ (Schmidt — Soentgen — Zapf 2020: 225).
See, e.g., Kate Wright: Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene. More-than-human encounters.
2018. The book is an anthropological account of a journey written about Adelaide and its environs,
the wonderful homeland of the Australian author. At the same time, however, it is a place created
by settlers with force, theone-time home and sacred place of Australian aborigines, and the habitat
of many non-human beings. In describing the journey and the encounters and interpreting the
places, she defines the identity of a place of multiple interlacing stories.
Today The Department of Environmental Studies, see: www.muni.cz/en/people/630-hana-librova
https://www.muni.cz/en/people/630-hana-librova.
The institute itself has been active since 2009. https://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/index.html
www.hf.uio.no/english/research/strategic-research-areas/oseh/
www.unive.it/pag/44234/
www.bathspa.ac.uk/courses/pg-environmental-humanities/