The environmental humanities, also called ecological humanities, is a field of study that combines ideas from many different areas of research within the humanities. These areas include environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication.

This field uses questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to help solve important environmental issues. It aims to connect the sciences and the humanities, as well as different ways of thinking about the natural world from Western, Eastern, and Indigenous perspectives. It also shows that many environmental problems are linked to human concerns like justice, work, and politics, rather than being separate from them. The environmental humanities also combines methods from different fields to create new ways of understanding and solving environmental challenges.

Emergence of environmental humanities

The ideas behind environmental humanities have been around for hundreds of years, but the field became known as "environmental humanities" in the 2000s. This happened after many developments in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in areas like literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, and anthropology. In the 1990s, a group of Australian researchers used the term "ecological humanities" to describe their work. By around 2010, the field was more widely called "environmental humanities." In 2012, the journal Environmental Humanities was created, and in 2014, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities was launched. These events show the growth and focus of the field.

There are many environmental humanities centers, programs, and institutions worldwide. Some well-known examples include the fully funded Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah, which is the oldest in the United States; the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University; the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania (2014–2024); the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology; The Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger; and the international Humanities for the Environment observatories.

Many universities around the world offer degrees in environmental humanities, including PhDs, Master of Arts degrees, graduate certificates, and Bachelor of Arts degrees. Courses in this field are taught on every continent.

The environmental humanities did not only come from Western scholars. Thinkers from Indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist backgrounds have made important contributions. These include challenging ideas that separate "nature" and "culture" or that define "nature" based on white, male, European, or North American perspectives. They have also changed the literary genre of "nature writing" and created new ideas and fields that connect academic study with political action, such as "environmental justice," "environmental racism," "the environmentalism of the poor," "naturecultures," and "the posthuman."

Connectivity ontology

The environmental humanities focus on understanding how everything in the world is connected and how humans are part of a larger living system. A key idea is that humans must follow the rules of nature and recognize that all living and non-living parts of the world form one interconnected system. This view is similar to the ideas of scientist Alfred Lotka, who described the Earth as a single system, or "World Engine." When people see all parts of the world as linked, traditional questions about fairness in society, such as economic and political justice, expand to include how human actions affect the environment and ecosystems.

This way of thinking leads to a broader understanding of justice that includes non-human beings, such as animals and plants, as part of the group that deserves rights. This expanded idea of justice requires people to share knowledge across different fields, such as science, culture, and philosophy. This sharing of knowledge is called transdisciplinarity. It connects to ideas from thinkers like Ibn Khaldun, Hannah Arendt, and Italo Calvino. Calvino described this process as helping people imagine new possibilities. It also relates to the Enlightenment ideas of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who believed that combining different areas of knowledge could both simplify and expand scientific understanding.

However, the situation becomes more complex because connections in the world can be both straightforward (linear) and complicated (non-linear). The environmental humanities therefore require using both simple and complex forms of language to explain how justice can be understood in these different ways. This means finding ways to express both types of connections clearly.

Axioms

According to some thinkers, the environmental humanities are based on three key ideas, or axioms:

• The idea that humans must follow the natural rules of ecosystems;
• The idea that humans are part of a larger living system, connected to all other living things; and
• The idea that ecosystems and nature are concepts created by humans, not fixed realities (Marshall, 2002).

Another way to describe the first two ideas is that the relationships between living things form the foundation for understanding how ecosystems function. These relationships act as natural rules and guide how people should behave (Rose, 2004).

The first idea has roots in social science studies (see Marx, 1968: 3). The second idea has led to the development of terms like "ecological embodiment/embeddedness" and "habitat" in political theory. These terms are closely tied to ideas about rights, democracy, and environmentalism (Eckersley, 1996: 222, 225; Eckersley, 1998).

The third idea comes from the tradition of studying human culture and ideas in the humanities. It encourages the environmental humanities to examine its own theories. Without this, the environmental humanities would simply be the same as the study of ecology (Marshall, 2002).

Contemporary ideas

Some experts say that including non-human life in discussions about fairness connects environmental ideas with how societies manage resources and money. This is because thinking about fairness is a key part of studying how societies work. If ideas from environmental studies are used to expand theories about fairness, then the result is combining ecological concerns with how societies manage resources and money, which is called political economic ecology.

A group of ecologists called systems ecology has studied what kind of language best explains the simple and complex relationships in ecosystems. These relationships are influenced by the rules of energy, such as the laws of thermodynamics. In 1994, ecologist H.T. Odum created a system called Energy Systems Language based on how energy moves in ecosystems. In this system, the connections between parts of an ecosystem are seen as a basic part of how the world works. Odum also suggested that the energy used in ecosystems could be linked to the idea of value, which connects to the field of political economic ecology discussed earlier.