Environmental Humanities: something new under the sun?

Solutions to environmental issues such as climate change, toxic
waste, deforestation and species extinction, have been mainly
framed as scientific, technological and economic problems. The
slow progress of dealing with these issues has made us realise
that science and technology do not have all the answers.
Increasingly the humanities are called upon to provide
perspectives on the environment and natural world that includes
humans and human cultures.  In response the environmental
humanities have emerged as a new research arena that aims at
infusing a humanities perspective into complex issues surrounding
environmental problems and questions of the place of humans in
the environment itself and of what the human actually is.


In this edition of the podcast Thom Van Dooren, Senior Lecturer
in the Environmental Humanities at the University of New South
Wales in Sydney, explores what the environmental humanities are
and why it has so rapidly emerged in recent years. Thom’s current
work focuses on the philosophical and ethical dimensions of
species extinctions. In the second half of the podcast Thom
discusses his work on the Hawaiian Crow or Alalâ, which is
extinct in the wild, and how this research connects the
humanities with ecology, biology, and ethology. Music credits:


Where You Are Now by Zapac, Ch'i Burger by panu, Extinct by
unreal_dm with vocals by Kara Square. All available from
ccMixter