Climate Crisis as a Challenge for the Humanities

The climate crisis poses not only an environmental emergency but a profound challenge to how knowledge, responsibility, and justice are understood within the humanities. This reader situates climate change as a historically produced, unevenly distributed crisis shaped by colonialism, racial capitalism, and structural inequality, rather than a universal or purely technoscientific problem. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from the environmental humanities, it foregrounds marginalized voices, including Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial approaches, to rethink dominant narratives of the Anthropocene. The contributions explore key theoretical frameworks alongside cultural practices, aesthetic strategies, and educational reflections, offering both critical analysis and imaginative interventions. By interrogating entrenched divisions between nature and culture, science and the humanities, the anthology develops alternative modes of knowing and relating that emphasize entanglement, responsibility, and more-than-human worlds. It thus provides scholars and students with a vital conceptual roadmap for engaging the climate crisis as a socioecological, political, and ethical condition, while advancing the humanities as indispensable to more just and transformative futures.