"Environmental Humanities" is a new thing in the academy, and while all new things should be considered fads till they're proved durable, this looks to be asking some interesting questions at least--and questions that don't seem organically "at home" in any of the particular disciplinary configurations that are available.

This essay, from January 2018, asks some good questions about how "environmental humanities" as a field will understand the body of knowledge it works from--at once drawing from natural science and from the humanities--and the essay implies a question: will this potentially new field enable us, at long last, to figure out how productively to relate work in the humanities and in the natural sciences?  There have been other attempts to do that; from my perspective in "religious ethics," I immediately think of bioethics and (more distantly) "medical humanities."  But medicine is only secondarily a "science," it is more immediately a kind of ethnography of human interactions in situations of medical concern--if we want to make some sort of methodological distinction between "scientific" and other, non-scientific but still disciplined, modes of inquiry, that is.

The essay especially asks some good questions about the "problems of scale" that it must confront--problems of scale in terms of time (geological epochs versus solar years) and space (especially the relationship between nation, place, and globe).  Here is what it says on that:

climate change demands that citizens think about their place in history in a new way. Modern democracies typically instruct their citizens in national histories. For example, many such stories have a clear beginning at a celebrated moment of independence. They unfold in an era comfortably defined as modern. And they are peopled by the relatively homogeneous “imagined community” that constitutes the nation. Monuments, festivals, and anthems all train citizens to think of themselves as actors in this story.

Climate change, in contrast, proposes a planetary history, stretching back to the formation of the earth four and a half billion years ago, and encompassing the accumulated geophysical impact of humanity as a species in its 200,000 years of existence.

It also presses on the question of how the "humanities" and the "natural sciences"--the famous "two cultures" of CP Snow--might find themselves working more closely together in addressing these issues.  To my mind, this is the more immediately significant part of the proposal: 

The practical contexts in which climate science took root in the nineteenth century remind us that this has always been a science that has mediated between abstract, planetary physics and everyday human needs. Rather than assuming that planetary science must be “translated” for public consumption, we can look back to the early days of this science. There we find scientists and non-scientists alike developing an intuition for the dimensions of climatic change—learning, for instance, to recognize a historical shift in climate in a landscape’s spatial patterns of vegetation. This was an enterprise in which the tasks of explanation and understanding were inseparable. If we can resist the age-old impulse to define binary oppositions between ways of knowing—scientific versus humanistic, expert versus popular—we will be in a better position to join forces across those divides towards understanding and action.

I think here of the (von) Humboldt brothers, Wilhelm and Alexander.  Wilhelm was a great humanist of the early nineteenth century, and the designer and leader, more or less, of the University of Berlin, and thereby the ancestor of the modern (humanistic but more than that) academy; Alexander was the great naturalist of the early nineteenth century, a huge antecedent to Darwin, and in many ways the inventor, or at least the precursor, of the modern study of ecosystems and the "environment" as a whole.  Neither of them saw their interests as fundamentally opposed, perhaps because they were both Romantic intellectuals.  

Both of them also thought seriously about the shape and nature of human agency in a world enframed by a legacy of centuries of learning (Wilhelm) and a legacy of millennia of natural forces (Alexander), and this question of agency is one of my biggest interests overall.  Today the thinker most palpably a descendant of the von Humboldts on this matter is the rather obscure (in his prose) French writer Bruno Latour.  His work--I think especially of his essays on the anthropocene and on critique, but I imagine his recent work on "Gaia" is also relevant here, it's just that, to be honest, I haven't managed to screw up my courage to the sticking point and hack my way through his prose in that book yet--but his work speaks directly to this question of the relationship between (1) a "natural science" register of understanding, using causal structures and temporal horizons far beyond ordinary human frameworks, and (2) a "humanistic" register of understanding, using our received human conceptions of  agency, responsibility, and relevant context to give an account of our lives.  Latour has sought to think about how those two registers of understanding may better interrelate, and what the consequences of that might be for our own self-understanding.

We live in a world in which, in innumerable ways, our agency is being technologically and politically and existentially amplified--we are becoming more powerful, and more free, more individual, all the time; but, and at the same time, we feel our embeddedness in structures of constraint and compulsion all the more, sometimes as a revelation of forces sometimes radically outside ourselves (large scale sunspot activity alters the amount of energy that reaches the earth), sometimes in ways where our responsibility and forces beyond us are mixed together (climate change, looking at the screens of our phones all the time, racism, homophobia, etc), and in some cases in situations where we don't really need to look outside ourselves at all for a satisfactory account of responsibility.  And sometimes, our experiences of growing power seem also, in another way, experiences of deepening powerlessness (thus again, climate change). Given all this, how should we understand ourselves?

This question of agency--simultaneously of growing power and growing powerlessness--may be related to question of growing into adulthood.  I don't mean "The adulthood of the race" or anything like that; I mean literally adulthood.  On one level, adults have a great deal more power and freedom, we really do!  On another, we are actually far more profoundly constrained than ever before.

This question of agency is also, I want to point out, at the heart of a lot of religious traditions of thought.  "Not I, but Christ in me," "my yoke is easy and my burden is light," and others: think about the idea, central at least in some forms of Christianity and not without resonance elsewhere, that the heights of freedom and the depths of responsibility are in some radical way the same place, that God liberates by humans submitting: there's a lot there.  Too much for one blog post, to be sure.  But never forget that the author of these posts is an Augustinian Christian, and one day I'll make clear what that means, to me at least.

In a way, the line from the von Humboldts to Latour is the story of a number of interesting "Romantic" worries about the (Kantian?) ideology of enlightenment that has done so much good for our world, and also so much damage.  (The status of Hegel here seems important, though oddly to me, and not as a Hegel specialist, not so much as an innovator, but as a synthesizer.  And no that's not a joke, though it probably says mroe about me than him.)  Another crucial set of figures in the middle of this, though in a more humanistic mode, would be the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, most famously Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.  

In any event, a move forward in the area of "environmental humanities" might be a way forward in trying to reconcile the legacies the two brothers bequeathed to us almost two hundred years ago, and a step forward in thinking through what it means to live in this so-called "modern world."