The history of waste records a relationship that has altered over time, resulting in various literal and symbolic manifestations. Waste Studies crosses conventional disciplines to offer ethical frameworks which pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste. With examples from novelists Toni Morrison and Wolfgang Hilbig, this chapter illustrates a number of aspects of waste in literature: waste as material agent; waste as metaphor; and narratives structured as waste, with little hope for clarity. The strategy of slow practice through narrative construction can prove a means to inculcate an ecological sensitivity and awareness we carry with us beyond the act of reading. While waste categories often are used to dismiss, deny, and reject certain humans, other-than-human agents, and material items, waste has also been used as a means to provoke compassion and ethical engagement by which we can develop a compassionate commonality with wasted beings to act for them, for us, and for the world. Waste Studies argues that the humanities can vibrantly and dynamically work to improve all of our lives in a concrete and material way.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.

Chapter 7 directs critical attention to contemporary narratives that are coalescing in popular technology discourses that imagine climate crisis as an occasion to expand on structures of capitalism. This narrative template – whose leitmotif is making rather than saving nature – turns away from what Ramachandra Guha termed “varieties of environmentalism” in celebrating technological acts of inventing, designing, and rebuilding biophysical worlds. It begins by addressing the parallel emergence of a high-tech planet and a planet in peril as divergent stories of global capitalism. It then examines two visions of remaking the planet: geoengineering and terraforming. These overlapping engineering arenas draw an expressly environmental portrait of innovation that imbues the tech industry with quasi-magical capacities that can be leveraged either to improve on or to transcend the Anthropocene. Offering a counterpoint to this techno-utopia, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), which satirizes the colonial logic of world-building fantasies while making the planet a charismatic character with a story of its own.

Despite the critical role of plants in enabling all life on Earth, many people fail to recognize the importance of vegetal life ("plant blindness"). Further, most modern Eurowestern knowledges of plants tend to instrumentalize them, focusing on how plants are useful rather than on how they live their lives. The field of Critical Plant Studies (CPS) has recently emerged in the Humanities to challenge this situation; this chapter explores some of the central preoccupations of this body of work. Broadly speaking, CPS considers the histories and power dynamics involved in Eurowestern utilitarian relations with the vegetal world. In addition, borrowing from insights in the Natural Sciences and also from much older forms of plant knowledge, it considers plants as living organisms with their own forms of agency, being, and desire. These two threads are woven throughout the chapter, with the aim to demonstrate that plants are sophisticated and influential agents caught up in historical and ongoing forms of biopolitics, and that overcoming plant blindness means noticing not only what the plants are doing for us, but also how we are implicated in their unfolding lifeworlds.

Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This chapter covers the meaning of linear time and its implications for how climate change is narrated.  There are concerns about how narrating climate change in this way can eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition. There are of course different ways of telling time. This chapter provides a narration of climate change inspired by particular Indigenous scholars and writers. These conceptions of time narrate time through kinship, not linearity. One implication is that issues of justice are inseparable from the experience of climate change.

Approaching food systems today as a global pharmakon can help advance an Environmental Humanities response to the risks and unknowns of food. Whether it is the difficulty fish have in distinguishing microplastics from plankton, or the trouble humans who live in urban food deserts have finding fresh edibles, food in the early twenty-first century carries unprecedented threats of undernourishment, toxicity and death alongside its promise of life. Paradoxically, the ethics and politics emerging in response to the pharmakon of food may not always involve attempts to purify or certify it “free” of social and environmental ills. One alternative is to tell stories about “food-power” that highlight the agency of other species within a relational ontology that reveals human control, including efforts to control for food safety, to be a fiction. On their own, stories of food-power cannot confront the “power to devour” through which some humans assert their exceptionalism and domination. Gutsy struggles against food injustices by colonized and Indigenous people also show that food is neither an object nor a subject but a multispecies relationship protected through both story and action.

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.