Environment: From a Humanities Perspective: Introductory Thoughts

In the last decades, there has begun a close and productive dialogue between humanities studies and environment and disaster studies. This has arisen from the general understanding in academic and policy-making circles that the problem of environment crisis or of climate change cannot be meaningfully engaged with through the lens of one single discipline or for that matter through scientific studies alone. Environment is constituted of material and non-material interactions between the humans and the non-humans. It is a very broad and complex domain, and a study addressed towards sustainable living and caring for the environment will need to take into account factors responsible for the current global environmental crisis and the way human communities and non-human living beings in a local set up have responded to environmentally directed but (majorly) human-oriented policies and values. As development ideology continues to remain the cornerstone for ‘progress’, questions of sustainability and conservation have become vital to national, state, and non-state thinktanks.