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16 JUDIT FARKAS
After the first EH periodical, the above-mentioned Environmental Humanities"
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities was launched in 2013,
followed by other papers on EH themes (Green Humanities, Landscape).
It can be declared that from the 2010s, EH has been explosively present in
academia, attracting such authors to the field as the philosopher Timothy Morton,
who has been rethinking the relationship between human and non-human beings;
the philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour; the forerunner of
ecocriticism, literary scholar Lawrence Buell; anthropologist Tim Ingold, who
studies the perception of the environment and human-animal interactions; chemist
and philosopher Isabelle Stengers who focuses on the history of science; ecofeminists
Donna Haraway, Wal Plumwood and Karen Warren; Rose Deborah Bird, the
anthropologist pursuing multispecies ethnography and studying aboriginal cultures;
Anna Tsiong, the anthropologist researcher of globalization and the Anthropocene;
human geographer Nigel Clerk, who examines humans’ environmental impact,
etc. (see Castree 2021; Oppermann — lovino 2017).'' Several new ideas and
perspectives were conceived which have provided new theoretical frameworks or
motivation for EH, such as eco-racism, environmental justice, poverty and the
environment, posthumanism, postcolonial criticism, ecofeminism, gender and
queer theories and the natureculture idea. (See, among others, Oppermann — Iovino
2017; Emmett — Nye 2017; Gaard 2017).
EH has grown into a global intellectual movement which combines the natural
sciences, the technological, social and humanities scholarly disciplines and the arts
so as to attempt to more accurately understand the dilemmas generated by industrial
society and contemporary environmental and social problems, and to find new
perspectives for the solutions. (The history of the EH discipline has been summed
up, among others, by Castree 2021; Emmett — Nye 2017; Hubbell — Ryan 2022;
Schmidt — Soentgen — Zapf 2020).
Environmental humanities — basic principles
The authors Hubbell and Ryan define very accurately in the preface of their book
what — to my mind, too — is the essence of EH: the radical recreation of knowledge.
“Environmental Humanities is both a product and an agent in the radical
reorganization of knowledge” (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: IX).
The global environmental crisis demands new directions in thought and
communication which offer environmental solutions based on lay knowledge and
are embedded into everyday life. This crisis cannot be solved by simply offering
technological innovations or even the simplest solutions (selective garbage
collection, packaging-free shops, saving water) to the masses of passive consumers,
because they might ignore even the most effective solutions. Unsustainable practices
and maladaptive reactions require cultural interpretations as does the introduction
of good practices. Information that is “affectively or sensitively powerful enough
10 In the first issue of the journal, the editors defined EH as follows: “The environmental humanities
engage with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose in a time of
rapid, and escalating, change.” (Bird, Rose et a/. 2012, 1)
These scholars have naturally published a variety of other works. The intention here was to give
an idea of the diversity and significance of the field.