Environmental (Post)humanities

This chapter offers an overview of prominent subfields within the environmental humanities and posthumanities, such as environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, critical animal studies and multispecies studies, (material) ecocriticism, and the blue humanities, while placing an emphasis on those that more clearly align with the recent posthumanist renewed attention to matter and “our” entanglements. The chapter explores the various ways in which the relation between the human and the nonhuman and the relation between the human and nature as a whole have been construed. The environmental posthumanities embrace the posthumanities’ inter- and transdisciplinary critique of humanist concepts using methods and narratives from different disciplines and contemplating different objects and beings as texts. One concept under sustained critique is the human exceptionalism that grounds oppressive regimes which, in relation to the environment and nonhuman animals, justify extractive and destructive practices that have led to the Anthropocene and the 6th mass extinction event. Environmental posthumanities also reject the notion of the human as sole and autonomous agent and places it in the midst of entangled relations and a wide net of distributed agentic capacities. The chapter also delineates key ethical positions such as multispecies ethics and permaculture ethics of care whereby the human is definitively decentered while still having a duty to care. Finally, storytelling – philosophical, literary, artistic, or otherwise – is presented as a key method in bringing to life the challenges and experiences faced by the many beings – biotic and abiotic – inhabiting this world. ; Peer reviewed