Environmental Humanities?
The humanities have long struggled to articulate the relevance of studying art and literature in a world distressed by politics, environmental alarm, violence, suffering, and pressing matters of injustice across the planet. Some in the humanities have argued that the arts have an instrumental use – that reading literature promotes empathy or that making art develops analytical skills. Others argue the humanities have inherent value to understanding the experience of being human.
The question of what art and stories can afford a world unsettled by change guides this thesis. In particular, I ponder the humanities in the task of understanding environmental narratives of crisis. Much of the crossover between environmental studies and the humanities has been in the investigation of the past. Less work in the environmental humanities has been done to explore the experience of crisis itself. If we can look to history, religion, and literature to understand the trajectory of environmental crisis, might we also look to the humanities to study how humans confront crisis, environmental or otherwise? In other words, if we are already looking at art, literature, and history in order to understand why environmental crisis seems to loom ever closer in the horizon, why not also look in these places understand the experience of crisis itself?
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