Climate Change & The Humanities 2016

In 2011 Mike Hulme published an opinion piece, Meet the Humanities, in Nature Climate Change, one of the premier scientific journals dealing with climate change. He asserted that “Although climate is inarguably changing society, social practices are also impacting on the climate. Nature and culture are deeply entangled, and researchers must examine how each is shaping the other. But they are largely failing to do so” (Hulme 2011). This was likely the first time that many climate scientists had thought much about the humanities as relevant to what they were studying. This book sets out to rectify that, documenting what a broad selection of academics, journalists, artists, and others working in the humanities and social sciences have been writing about climate change recently. It consists of over 200 summaries of such works and provides a good introduction to the range of thinking about climate change addressed by non-scientists, and a good entry point to a growing literature.

Dr. Emil Morhardt is Roberts Professor of Environmental Biology in the W. M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges, members of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He has been writing and teaching about energy, other natural resources, and climate change at the Colleges for nearly two decades. During the two decades prior to that he was a Senior Vice President and Director of Western Operations of a large environmental consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area whose clients included electric and gas utilities, petroleum companies, major water suppliers, the Electric Power Research Institute, the National Park Service, the USEPA, and several branches of the US military. He began work in this field shortly after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law, participated in developing the implementation guidelines for several federal agencies, and was one of the authors of California's first joint federal and state NEPA/CEQA report.