Environmental humanities: Emergent key terms

Staying not least with issue of how to counteract the human forcings of many kinds of drastic climatic and environmental changes, the glossary remaps and redefines solid parts of existing relevant terminology and debates on what is at stake in the Anthropocene. It engages with the multifarious forms in which environmental realities and imaginaries present themselves, including their continuities, crises, ruptures, and projected alternatives. It reflects this engagement formally also by offering varied entries, from short definitions through essays, longer papers, experimental writings to pictorial or diagrammatic contributions.

Terms and concepts for ways in which to inhabit a common planet must be generated and understood to be critically deployed, in transformative scientific and everyday discourses, artistic interventions, and activist practices, among others. This glossary demonstrates that environmental humanists, including artists, activists, students, and scholars, have key roles to play. They are instrumental in mobilizing conceptual definitions, narratives, visions, practices, as well as ways of sensing new modes of multispecies cohabitation in the face of global warming, rising seas and floods, droughts, climate injustices, species extinctions, and over-extraction of planetary resources. In this glossary, environmental humanities approaches prove their capacity to offer different ways of sensing and perceiving the world, improved understandings of our situation, as well as better evaluations of navigations between constructive knowledge and negative critique.

The rich and varied contributions come from the harder, wetter, and more social sciences but especially from fields relating to the environmental humanities, such as climate justice, new materialism, feminism, queer ecology, material ecocriticism, eco art, blue humanities, postcolonial criticism, climate activism, environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics, energy studies, critical multispecies, plant and animal studies, and Indigenous studies. These discussions of the senses of concepts and terms are not to be understood as approaching final, static definitions but rather as operational mobilizations of emergent relational and processual sense-makings at play on all scales of attempted facilitations of continued multispecies coexistence.