By Faythe Endres

The unofficial geological time frame, the Anthropocene epoch, is heavily debated for all its aspects. Yet, these contradictions and questions are helping to spark conversations about the scales of human activity on Earth. Alongside the physical sciences, economic analyses, and moral positionings surrounding global warming, the ecological humanities are also asking for an equal and credited seat at the table when discussing teachings and understanding of the human-nature relationship.

Eco-humanities is more than a combination of the studies of historical humanitarian fields with environmental studies. It is a joining effort; one that goes beyond a single focus to consider where life intersects. While still critiquing and reflecting on significant theories, eco-humanities approach environmental concerns with an open mind so competing or conflicting perspectives can come to agreements with each other.

Offering connections between the past and present while holding hope for the future, the vast coupling of the environmental sciences and humanitarian studies can help translate ideas across disciplines due to its nature of thinking about “nature.”

Eco-humanities: Research of decolonization and environmental justice

“Traditionally, as fields of study, the humanities include the arts, literature, philosophy, history, and modern languages,” says Andrew Frederick Smith, PhD, a professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Drexel University.

“Predictably, scholars in these fields often study human events and experiences and what they tell us about the human condition (if there is such a universalizable thing).”

Environmental science as an academic field is already quite interdisciplinary. It combines the physical sciences of Earth (i.e., biology, physics, chemistry, ecology, geology, and engineering) with the understanding of human impact. Aiming to explain, quantify, and provide solutions to environmental changes and problems.

However, its research is focused away from anthropomorphic subjects. Environmental studies consider human relations and eco-humanities, as Smith mentions, “is a subject of study precisely because of the widespread lack of ecological wellbeing. Indeed, we’re in an era of intense and accelerating ecocide.”

Ecocide: “The destruction of the environment by humans”

Before falling into a ‘doomerist’ perspective about climate change, let us first go back to some definitions and context.

“As a prefix, eco- derives from the ancient Greek term for home,” explains Smith.

“Ecology, then, is the study of homes—or habitats. Broadly construed, among the core ideas in eco-humanities, is that we are one another’s habitats. For all beings, ecological wellbeing goes hand in hand with social and personal wellbeing.”

From here, we have two significant perspectives. One, humans have positioned themselves above all other nature, and in that, “we” have caused great destruction to the planet and all other beings. Two, at our core, humans are animals too, entangled in an ecological web, and we have evolved and thrived thanks to natural resources.

Our views and definitions of nature and our environments take various shapes. Falling into countless gives and takes in the name of human excellence, innovation, progress, and development. As teachers and students of Earth who have become subject to natural disasters and the string of issues that both cause and affect climate change, searching for hope lies comfortably in the hands of the eco-humanities.

“Some scholars blame the rise of intensive agriculture, other colonialism, and the global slave trade, and still others, industrialism,” says Smith in regard to the disagreements around teaching eco-humanities.

“In reply, scholars offer an array of ways to resist ecocide, from changing people’s material conditions to instigating a cultural and/or spiritual transformation to undermining existing structures of political power (or some combination of these and other ideas).”

Humanities in a time of crisis

Under traditional Western academic institutions, students often become less thought of as intellectuals and change-makers and, instead, become customers at a bank to be fed information about how things are and how things will continue to be. Already, growing up feels like the weight of the world is on one’s shoulders, and adding our current news cycle to the mix has made for tough times for our youth.

Positioning for the utility of eco-humanities is where the physical sciences might lack the depth of power and rationalities that affect environments. In instances when science cannot persuade people to change their actions or values, eco-humanities harp at the complexity and unpredictability of social behavior.

To teach eco-humanities is to encourage students to visualize the world as an otherwise positive and playful community. An interdisciplinary approach to the environmental sciences and the humanities and social sciences can offer an exchange of creative tools to modify the way we treat “nature.”

What has become apparent about climate change is that its effects are not distributed equally and that environmental damages follow from a deeply historical hierarchical positioning. The humanities help to clarify these contemporary power relations that underlie the environmental issues. Eco-humanities study how to promote pro-environmental behaviors and what is needed for operation at various participatory levels.

Why teach eco-humanities?

In one paper by Smith titled, Indigenous Pedagogies for Burned-Out Students on a Burned-Out Planet, he shares his perception of students in his class as “tattered and torn,” “burned out, just like the planet they inhabit.” Students are left trying to make sense of the impacts of “settler state violence” and “structures of disablement.” Their “capacity to adapt” is “to function within a system of schooling that incentivizes prioritizing surface concerns over content.”

Left with a feeling of separation and “trained to prioritize grades over learning, we less readily share time and resources.” Smith mentions the duties of a teacher, where complacency lies, and how Indigenous pedagogies can be a guide towards a better openness of autonomy, community, and humanity.

“Indigenous communities have uniquely rich histories of nurturing self-determination and anti-authoritarianism,” he says.

From this, eco-humanities can be used to consider how to go about relationships of trust within our current ecosystems. Situating oneself in place to others’ lived experiences, we can move towards self-care that focuses on community. This means adding decolonial practices into eco-humanities.

What is being taught in eco-humanities classes?

Environmental humanities is the work of place-based stories. Starting with Arne Naess’s “deep ecology,” which is a sensitivity to ourselves and non-human life that asks more of us. It is the understanding that humans are not separate or in charge or above “nature.” It is a poetics of place, how we are made up of our environments, and how we, in turn, make up our environments.

Take into consideration Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s reflections on the notion of species. He sees the term “species” as an “epistemic violence” that has characterized taxonomies and racial hierarchies. Viveiros de Castro explains that “the difference of species is not a difference of opinion or culture, but rather a difference of “nature.”

It is a difference in the way each species is experienced and perceived by others. From the microbes in your gut to the spider that lives in the corner of your room, to the plants outside your home, to the rocks and rain, to the lion in the zoo, and to the whales that swim in our oceans with hearts that weigh 400 pounds, there is the consideration of all as human.

“In a world where every thing is human, humanity is an entirely different thing,” and “when everything is human, the human becomes a wholly other thing.”

Eco-humanities ask for sincerity—feelings with understanding and the capacity to participate. It teaches a “being-in-the-world” that decenters human subjectivity and enters blurred ontology.

A one-world world presents itself as exclusive and controls possibilities, rendering itself empty, but a “pluiverse” considers a political ecology and ontology of all aspects of “nature.” Considering the mountains’ perspective, although maybe an out-there thought, it is a multispecies approach of sameness. An example of this that comes to mind is the “Rights of Nature” movement, which applies legal rights to non-human elements so that we might come to live in a community with Nature and not dominate it.

How to apply eco-humanities teachings

Eco-humanities also require the incorporation of justice theories, where topics move from just being that and instead conceptualize different perspectives and lived experiences of people.

In “Buen Vivir: an alternative perspective from the peoples of the global south to the crisis of capitalist modernity,” Acosta and Abarca position a new form of economic conditions that is against a one-dimensional idea of progress. Buen Vivir, here, is “a form of resistance” towards development that is driven to produce economic growth based on predatory and exploitative actions that are threats to Earth’s resistance. “The idea of being rich or poor based on the accumulation or scarcity of material goods is anathema in this system of belief.”

Eco-humanities emergence and wide range should not lead people astray from knowing its facets and learning from its many forms and perspectives. Its rapid evolution is one that asks you to take part in it, as it’s all around you—how you choose to re-imagine and re-story yourself in relation to your environments and how change will respond back to you.

Challenges and solutions to environmental humanities

Environmental issues play out on different spatial and temporal scales than an individual’s lifespan. Our organization and understanding of events can be difficult to identify with. It is a matter of degrees with the intangibility or inability to grasp such global and interwoven concepts.

And it is not at the fault of an individual. It has been made easy to point fingers, to make environmental concerns somebody else problems, to deny or delay, but hope and change can and does still grow. Eco-humanities can help spot the current flowers or plant new seeds.

For academics, this means moving away from the competition of merit or superiority of fields. There is so much to learn from each other about our interests and passions. For the everyday person, this means meaningful civic and political engagement. Even if not always overlapping, there can still be appreciation and a need for consistent collaboration.

It is no secret that the world of academia can be exclusionary and inaccessible. My hope for eco-humanities is to go beyond tropes and to meet ourselves and our communities at ground level. There is a trickiness with eco-humanities, between a romanization of nature and anthropocentrism, that needs a consistent questioning of where humans stand in and with “nature.”

Going beyond “mere intuitions, romanticism, and sentimentalism as a basis for environmental ethics-” our “duty to Nature” requires a more substantial applicability of these concepts.

It might be that someone feels indifferent to nonhuman and non-sentient “nature,” but it doesn’t always mean they see themselves as not part of “the whole.” People understand and appreciate their place in “nature,” but their actions or values of “nature” itself are harder to shape. This leads to discussions of humility: self-acceptance of the creatures that we are and the relative importance of respect for each other. The features of ourselves that live, grow, and decline with the Earth.