Skip to 0 minutes and 8 seconds Take a look around you. Have you ever thought about your own relationship to the environment? You live, work and play in it, you shape it, and many of us have strong feelings about it — about problems like climate change, toxic waste and endangered species, problems that affect everyone that shares our home, planet Earth. In this course you’ll learn about a new field called the Environmental Humanities, an imaginative area of research that tries to sort out some of the mess we humans have made of our home, by telling a different kind of story about our place within it.
Skip to 0 minutes and 46 seconds To do this, we’ll bring together philosophers, historians, anthropologists, writers and others — leading experts in the Environmental Humanities program at the University of New South Wales Australia, to examine the complex entanglements between humans and the environment. Hidden at the heart of environmental issues are complex histories and questions of politics, morality and religion. And while science has an important role to play, the fate of the environment will ultimately rest in our ability to remake our human value systems. Modernisation will reach its limits, so now is the time we must re-think some basic concepts that organise the architecture of our lives, such as nature, progress, and the right to live or die.
Skip to 1 minute and 38 seconds But this course isn’t all about doom and gloom. It’s about re-crafting our stories and rebooting our institutions for the future. Inhabiting new stories where humans step up to the plate of responsibility, where we give non-humans a voice, and where sustainable futures aren’t merely a dream. This is where you play your part. There are practical and alternative ways forward. So, if you’d like to join us in taking some steps towards a positive future, then this is where your journey begins.
