Addressing the world's most pressing environmental challenges.

The world faces unprecedented environmental challenges, from climate change, to pollution, to biodiversity loss and species extinction. These challenges have largely been caused by human activity, which since the industrial revolution has been the dominant influence on the environment. With the emergence of the Anthropocene as a geologically recognised epoch, human culture and social practices have become part of the ecosystem itself.

Meeting the challenges posed by the Anthropocene means that we must understand culture as integral to the physical systems of the planet. Representation, creation, figuration and imagination are not only the ways through which the environment features in art, literature, and human culture more broadly—they are factors in its physical and systematic production. Arts & Humanities also speaks crucially to the ethical and moral considerations that must underpin our societies’ response to environmental challenges.

Based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and working in collaboration with our PLuS Alliance partners, Arizona State University and the University of New South Wales, the Environmental Humanities Network is a collaboration of disciplines aimed at understanding these and other environmental issues.

Photo by NASA