Climate change undermines the property concepts embedded within histories of capitalism and colonialism, placing them in crisis. As Arctic territories and Pacific island states recede to sea level rise, as wildfires burn through suburban communities in the wealthy world, as global fresh water runs dry, uncertainty shadows what it means to own, to use, and to inhabit. For the wealthier world, survival may depend on owning and occupying less, upon reducing the scale of supply chains and stewarding regional resources. Enter "the commons,” a concept and praxis tied to sustainability in the form of stable subsistence in anthropological literatures, to Indigenous economies and cosmologies worldwide, and to European peasant economies. For the world’s Indigenous, theconcept may be, at best, an incomplete translation of Indigenous traditional knowledges. Yet the commons as concept attempts to combat extractive, colonial economies, offering a justice-oriented and site-specific alternative to the state and the market as organizing systems and stories. This chapter considers the dynamic intellectual history of the commons as it relates to climate change, environmentalism and decolonization.

Over the past two centuries, apocalypse and extinction have become powerful secular tropes, and have been given new urgency in the context of escalating global heating and biodiversity loss. This chapter examines how the environmental humanities can analyse, complicate, democratise, and challenge these tropes. It addresses present-day speculations about the future of the biosphere, both within the field, and in wider culture through the activities of groups such as Extinction Rebellion. It explores the entanglements of these speculations with questions of justice, and offers an analysis of relationships humanity, inequality, and catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826). The chapter ends with some suggestions about the role of the environmental humanities in an ecological emergency. In particular, it addresses how the field might contribute to the communal task of finding urgent solutions for social-environmental problems, while at the same time maintaining focus on issues of justice and rigorous critique of totalising narratives, including the language of solutions and of apocalypse itself.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres

Scholars from across the humanities and sciences have deepened our understanding of the relationship between environmental and human health, revealing the centrality of race as a critical variable. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have revealed the centrality of race in disparities in access to healthy environments and medical care. Structural inequalities that stem from the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and imperial violence are embedded with racial ideologies that supported those systems. The growth of biomedicine and Western medical institutions in the context of slavery, colonialism, and empire produced medical ideologies of racial difference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, environmental movements that emerged in the context of European and US empires emphasized conservation at the expense of indigenous land rights. The long-term impacts of slavery and colonial policies are apparent in studies of environmental damage and health disparities. In the late twentieth century, environmental activists in the Global South and southern USA challenged racism and postcolonial development, and advocated for environmental justice.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century black radical David Walker’s preoccupation with resource extraction and the history of New World slavery in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker’s account of the history of colonization and enslavement as a matrix of dehumanization, violence, resource extraction, and capital accumulation highlights the importance of understanding the long history of extraction as more than just an effect and driver of capitalist appropriation, expropriation, and accumulation, and brings into focus the global and racialized dimensions of that history, which disrupt the standard teleology of capitalism’s appropriation of resources.

Ecomedia studies refers to the discipline within the environmental humanities that examines the way media systems and artifacts are embedded in ecological relationships. In one sense, the media in ecomedia designates the tools of mass communication already associated with the term. But ecomedia studies insists that media are not just text, image, and sound transmitted through machines, not just the technologies of transmission, but the social and material relationships that make transmission possible. As opposed to the older discipline of media studies, "ecomedia" understands these relationships as a kind of agency beyond the immediate cultural purposes of mediated content. Ecomedia is also distinct from the older concept of media ecologies, which employs ecology as a metaphor for the way media embed themselves in social systems and coproduce social relationships. One may analyze the media ecology of Instagram as an agent of selfie production, but unless that analysis includes an understanding of Instagram's ecological effects, it is not an ecomedia analysis. In its emphasis on the materiality and agency of media in the biosphere, ecomedia studies distinguishes itself as an aspect of environmental humanism's drive beyond a merely human world.

This chapter examines some of the more powerful encounters between feminism and environmentalism to offer the reader an understanding of both historic points of tension and opportunities for rich collaboration. Reading the environmental humanities broadly, the chapter highlights diverse lines of feminist research that drive toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically vibrant futures. It focuses on critical feminist work that challenges hegemonic conceptions of gender and nature, the body and place, and dominant understandings of knowledge production.The reader will become acquainted with key concepts such as essentialism, intersectionality, the nature/culture dualism, environmental justice, and the anthropocene, and with key subfields including ecofeminism, feminist science studies, corporeal feminism, and biopolitics.

Busy with our own world, we often think that animals are just a part of it, minor players in the large, smart, progressive lives of humans. But if we flip the point of view, things change. What are the animals’ worlds that remain inaccessible to us? Be they wild or domestic, animals hold for themselves seething multitudes of points of view that work below the surface of our own ways of understanding them. An encounter with an animal is a moment in which we come to recognize that animals have lives beyond us. In this look from myriad nonhumans, we realize there are more points of view than our own, and that there are other ways of dwelling on earth that are just as important to these animals as ours are to us. This allows us to better consider the ecosystems of which they and we are a part and to change the narrative about how we live with other animals on this shared earth.

Risk in the global economy is often borne by those with the least political agency or monetary resources, who also bear the brunt of the environmental damage inflicted by a system of unstoppered industrial development. Environmental humanities seeks greater justice and equality within human societies and in all ecological relationships; it can therefore model how risk is absorbed by those without access to economic and political advantage. We have to imagine a more equitable society before we can build it. The environmental humanities can create opportunities for creative and scholarly work to rethink its organizational and logical structure, to risk upending received rhetorical models in creative and scholarly work. Environmental humanities has a chance to reconceive how the “human” relates to the world around it, questioning the human as primary subject and imagining a way of seeing and describing the world as a horizontal shared space rather than a vertical, teleological hierarchy. It’s risky to practice new modes of expression. It’s even riskier to subordinate the human in a field where the word “human” is predominant. Environmental humanities is the place to take that risk.

Rights discourse is marked by ambivalence – the enunciation of rights alongside the attendant exclusions and violations of said rights. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the language of rights was used to justify the French and American revolutions even as women and the enslaved were excluded from the category of rights bearers. The human-based conception of rights also excluded the environment. This chapter proposes that extension of rights to both humans and nonhumans is at the core of the environmental humanities (EH). EH discourse of rights attends to the marginalization of communities disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks and nonhuman ecologies threatened by anthropogenic activities such as resource extraction and energy use. Enunciations of rights in EH demonstrate a commitment to not only a select group of humans but to all humans as well as to the rights of nonhumans. However, EH discourse of rights is not without tensions, including the competing claims to rights among humans and between the interests of human and other-than-human worlds. The chapter concludes with an exploration of these tensions in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

This chapter proposes a lithic environmental humanities that explores entanglements where rocks and humans mesh as mutually affective agencies and materialities, and humans are seen as "walking, talking minerals." Situating rocks as a cornerstone of contemporary geohumanities, the chapter engages a range of disciplinary perspectives, from the role of rocks in nature writing and poetry that contest a "whitening of deep time" to an "animaterialist" ecophilosophy’s view of stone as lively matter, from an emerging theory of mineral evolution to a speculative archaeological and neuro-aesthetic view of rock as the originating medium of human symbolic expression. Emphasizing touch and haptic thinking, the chapter combines materialist and mystical relations to rocks, and concludes by presenting a contemporary turn on the ancient art of viewing stone appreciation, conceived as a contemplative practice with rocks.

Argues for the value of the humanities in addressing contemporary social and ecological crises.

The most common physical substance on our planet, water touches and shapes human lives, cultures, and histories in all three of its physical states: solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous vapor. Environmental humanities scholarship has focused largely on oceans and large bodies of fresh water. A wider frame for water-focused ecological scholarship should also include gaseous vapor, solid ice, and other less visible forms that water takes on our planet. Engaging in turn with each of the physical phases in which humans encounter water, and distinguishing between salt and fresh liquid water, this chapter demonstrates the range and dynamism of the relationship between humans and this essential substance. The invisible touch of humidity, the glacial immensity of polar ice, the sweetness of fresh water, and the imaginative breadth of the great salt sea all provide matter for environmental analysis. The chapter contains accounts of recent water-focused writings in the environmental humanities, presents a brief literary history of water in its various shapes, and concludes by gesturing toward the possibilities for new work.

This chapter moves beyond the primarily German, elite context in which E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 was initially received, to consider musical Romanticism in its broader European (and in particular, French) context. In so doing it highlights three expressive modes in which music was understood as operating in partnership with real and imagined visual stimuli: the melodramatic tableau, the unsung voice, and symphonic scenography. These modes pervaded European culture and offer a perspective on musical Romanticism that acknowledges its breadth and the social diversity of its audiences, as well as the variety of listening experiences. Theatre and concert works by Benda, Cherubini, Beethoven, Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn are considered.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

This chapter explores the rise of the twin ideals of authenticity and self-expression in Romantic musical aesthetics. Abandoning earlier aesthetic paradigms of mimesis and rhetoric, Romantic musicians were exhorted to bring forth music from the depths of their inner experience. Authentic expression, in this context, depended on the composer maintaining complete autonomy and renouncing the objective of affecting or pleasing an audience. After examining philosophical, social, and economic developments behind this shift in priorities, the chapter argues that expressive authenticity functioned less as a stable quality than as a regulative concept in nineteenth-century musical life. As such, it was often evoked as a way of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and prestige, but was employed in ways that were inconsistent and complex. As examples from nineteenth-century discourses on orchestral timbre, virtuosity, and identity in music show, the ideal of expressive authenticity could function as an effective tool in the creation and reinforcement of hierarchies of power and authority.