The increasing visibility of an emergent Environmental Humanities research field offers evidence of a sea change in the very structure and agendas of international research, while also holding the promise of reintegrating the humanities in the scientific production of knowledge. Such a development could have some significant implications within the policy sphere, as well as for the struggling humanities domain more generally. Yet in many ways the Environmental Humanities remains far from a settled field. Drawing upon examples from European and wider global contexts, this talk traces a number of initiatives over the past several years that have served in some measure to clarify this developing field of study. The talk also offers a critique of some of the productive, and at times unproductive, tensions among competing visions of this emergent field that need to be resolved before the Environmental Humanities can realize the impacts many scholars now hope the field may achieve.
Keynote Presentation, Workshop "The Future of the Commons: Interfaces of Nature and Culture," Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, Flemingsberg, Sweden, 6-7 February 2014.