Humanistic Environmental Studies and Global Indigeneities

The Environmental Humanities constitute an emerging transdisciplinary enterprise that is becoming a key part of the liberal arts and an indispensable component of the twenty-first-century university. Bringing together scholars from a number of environmentally related fields in the humanities and allied social sciences—including Ecocriticism (Literature and Environment studies), Environmental History, Environmental Philosophy, Environmental Anthropology, and Human Geography—the Environmental Humanities has, in the past decade, become a substantial collaborative scholarly endeavor. Journals including Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (est. 2014) and Environmental Humanities (est. 2012), as well as book series such as Routledge Environmental Humanities, are providing an increasing number of venues for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences to introduce new approaches for grappling with the world’s environmental challenges. For their part, initiatives such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities for the Environment (http://hfe-observatories.org), which includes the African Observatory, Asia-Pacific Observatory, Australian Observatory, North American Observatory, and European Observatory; in addition to institutes and projects, such as Environmental Humanities at Princeton, Environmental Humanities Project at Stanford, Environmental Humanities at UCLA, Australian Environmental Humanities Hub, Environmental Humanities Laboratory (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich), Transatlantic Environmental Research Network in Environmental Humanities, and the African Network of Environmental Humanities—not to mention the Harvard Global Institute Environmental Humanities Initiatives—are providing a growing number of opportunities for scholars in a variety of humanistic and related social science disciplines to embark on collaborative environment-related research and teaching.1 Indeed, the institutional and scholarly umbrella of environmental humanities has provided specialists in a variety of humanistic and related social science fields with a forum to join forces on shared environmental concerns, as well as to work together with engineers and scientists, politicians and business leaders, within and outside the academy. Understandings of the Environmental Humanities generally are quite broad and the field’s aims ambitious. In “Developing the Environmental Humanities: A Swiss Perspective,” Philippe Forêt et al. declare the environmental humanities to be “a metadiscipline that brings into conversation several subfields . . . [and] seeks to offer new and more synthetic insights into cultural, historical and ethical dimensions of our most intractable environmental problems” ([2], p. 67).2 In addition, Forêt et al. note that the Environmental Humanities work to “recast established environmental problems as cultural issues and so provide fresh ideas to environmental research” ([4], p. 68). Similarly,