Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.