Environmental Humanities, what is Environmental Humanism

Environmental Humanities, environmental matter

Environmental Humanities, also called Ecological Humanities, translated as environmentalist or environmental Humanism or Ecological Humanism is an interdisciplinary research area, today also a real subject and course of studies, which is explicit and works through numerous sub-disciplines developed during the course of decades past, including environmental and ecological literature, philosophy, history and anthropology.

Critical or ecocritical ecology and political ecology are also part of this sphere of humanistic research, which act as a bridge between the social sciences and natural sciences and in fact collaborate with the aim of making the public debate regarding environmental policies and issues more efficient.

There are many groups that today revolve around this movement or research line, we try to understand through which means they move and what is their purpose.

What is environmental Humanism

Professor Luisella Battaglia wrote in "For ecological humanism": "In the context of contemporary philosophy, the environmental question is assuming the same relevance that the" social question "had assumed in the area of modern philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" .

The awareness of the current ecological crisis has paved the way, for several years already, to this new humanistic discipline : environmental philosophy and ethics have taken their start already during the 1970s, emerging only a decade later as real sub-discipline; ecocritica was officially institutionalized during the early 1990s, becoming an integral part of academic and other study courses in the last few decades.

Who deals with Environmental Humanities

Famous research centers that leverage environmental humanism and related subjects are the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at University of Wisconsin-Madison; Rachel Carson Center in Monaco; the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm, and the Eco-Humanities Hub in Sweden.

At the same time the Australian Environmental Humanities of the University of New South Wales started in 2014 to publish an open-access journal on the subject ; as well as Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, born of the University of Nebraska Press.

Network as Humanities for the Environment; the Australian Environmental Humanities Hub or the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) and the nearest European Environmental Humanities Alliance, through updates, meetings and publications give more and more space and voice to this sensitivity and to the energy of journalists, activists, experts and scientists, but also students or ordinary people to do something and put themselves in the front line in the service of the environment and change .

And what is in Italy? In this sense, the Center for Environmental Ethics (CEA) is the most representative body. Interesting meetings on the subject will be held soon in Alessandria: with the title " Towards a new planetary humanism - Science and philosophy for the environment", a real seminar is kicked off.

There is also a group of researchers called The Environmental Humanities International Research Group.

Reference books:

> "Nature's Economy" (1977), Donald Worster

> "The Trouble with Wilderness", (1995) William Cronon

> "A new ethic for the environment" , Cosimo Quarta

> "Ecological Transition", Gaël Giraud

> "Literature and ecology. Shapes and themes of a narrative relationship" (2017), Niccolò Scaffai

Among the most well-known environmental thinkers, we mention Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Not forgetting journalists, writers and environmentalists like Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, and Barbara Kingsolver.