Environmental Humanities

Our planet is experiencing unprecedented ecological anomalies of escalating severity. Over the last few years, France has been no stranger to ‘natural catastrophes’ with palpable links to human-caused climate change, which is making them ever more unnatural in scope. On the global stage, longstanding concerns over such matters have coalesced around initiatives like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 'Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C' from 2018, in which a multinational team of leading scientists provides an exceptional level of detail about the grave dangers of not reducing unsustainable practices including emissions from heavy industry in the Global North. A failure to engage fully with the story of the climate crisis is a problem requiring expertise in qualitative approaches rooted in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as a counterpart to quantitative methods that are the foundations of the natural and physical sciences. Relations between individuals and environments can be amply illuminated by comparing and critiquing sources pertaining to a variety of contexts, not least ones involving languages other than the scientific form of English entailed in the IPCC’s work.