The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. Routledge, 2017.
As a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA from 2014 to 2016, I coordinated the Mellon Sawyer seminar for which participants drafted the chapters in this anthology, which I co-edited.
This book offers a scholarly introduction to the environmental humanities—that is, the interdisciplinary study of how human cultures and histories shape the environment and inform our responses to environmental problems. It consists of 45 chapters by leading environmental historians, environmental philosophers, geographers, anthropologists, and ecocritics.
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues. Sections cover:
- The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth
- Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities
- Inequality and Environmental Justice
- Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory
- Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies
- The State of the Environmental Humanities
The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.
Michelle Niemann 