Environmental Humanities

Environmental Humanities is an open-access journal by Duke University which focuses on environmental issues and takes an interdisciplinary approach combining the humanities with the social and natural sciences. In particular it seeks to publish research that does not ‘fit’ neatly into academic sub-disciplines. Different kinds of articles include editorials, academic research, environmental humanities in practice, as well as provocations. Some issues contain special sections with articles clustered around a certain topic such as ‘Enchanted Ecologies and An Ethics of Care’ (vol. 14, no. 2) or ‘Extinction in Public’ (vol. 15, no. 1). Notably the journal as a whole and each issue individually includes a ‘Living Lexicon’ comprised of 1,000 word essays on key terms in the environmental humanities. These essays, equal parts explanation and personal reflection, seek to both critique and unsettle dominant narratives and to offer constructive pathways for action and change. Examples of terms include: ‘Absence,’ ‘Becoming-with,’ ‘Eco-comedy,’ ‘Hope,’ ‘Mitigation,’ ‘Resilience,’ and ‘Weird.’

Potential Articles of Interest

J. Baird. Callicott (2013), ‘A NeoPresocratic Manifesto,’ Environmental Humanities, 2 (1), 169–186.

• Callicot examines the unity of natural and moral Ancient Greek philosophy, drawing on philosophers like Aristotle, Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato before turning to early modern through to contemporary philosophy and tracing its intellectual transformation. Callicot predicts a return in the 21^st century to natural philosophy so that science can once more inform moral philosophy, an approach which he calls ‘NeoPresocratic.’

Hannah Cooper-Smithson (2022), ‘Arboromorphism,’ Environmental Humanities, 14 (1), 233–236.

• A lexicon entry on Arboromorphism which combines personal and literary reflection, tracing the process of becoming a tree from the literality of Ovid’s Metamorphoses through to its increasingly psychological dimension in contemporary literature. By drawing on these diverse literary texts from ancient to contemporary times, Cooper-Smithson posits Arboromorphism as a way to live in the Anthropocene: as not just a poetics but an ethics as well.

Patrick D. Nunn (2020), ‘In Anticipation of Extirpation: How Ancient Peoples Rationalized and Responded to Postglacial Sea Level Rise,’ Environmental Humanities, 12 (1), 113–131.

• Nunn proposes that looking to analogs of how ancient peoples during the Holocene understood and responded to rising sea levels can help inform how we approach this issue in the present and looks in particular to Australia and North-western Europe.

Gordon M. Sayre (2017), ‘The Alexandrian Library of Life: A Flawed Metaphor for Biodiversity,’ Environmental Humanities, 9 (2), 280–299.

• Sayre explores the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and our subsequent loss of knowledge as a metaphor to describe species extinction and the loss of biodiversity beginning in the 1980s and 90s before then critiquing its use. The problem for Sayre is that species, as live organisms, cannot be archived and copied like ‘texts’ in the service of imperially controlling and cataloguing knowledge.