Humanities for the Environment examines how evidence that human impacts on the Earth are causing the planet to transition into a possible new epoch challenges academic disciplinary assumptions not only in the humanities but also in scientific and international policy circles. The collection examines how the term "Anthropocene" is increasingly being used in media reports and other venues outside of academia. Special issues ofThe Economist, Nature, and The Smithsonian have explicated and popularized the term as a powerful explanatory concept for the ways that humans are altering the planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, playing a role in increasing rates of extinction, releasing huge amounts of toxins, atomic isotopes, and fossilized plastics into ecosystems everywhere, and changing the pH levels and temperatures of the world’s oceans, as well as engaging in activities causing polar ice to melt, sea levels to rise, and deserts to expand.
The collection will be the first book to reflect not only on the insights of the environmental humanities into the social, cultural, legal, political and environmental impacts of the Anthropocene, but also to make an intervention into the ways that the humanities are currently organized institutionally. It is the first book to focus on new "constellations of practice" emerging out of this networking and the first to explore how the humanities is currently re-organizing to more seamlessly work with social scientists and scientists at the international level on common projects.
This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture
