Environmental Humanities in East Asia: Challenges and Opportunities

Ⅰ. Origin

Ecological crises are cultural crises. They affect not only people’s physical bodies, but also daily habits and belief systems; they are driven not only by technology and demographics, but also by desires, hopes, and fears. The humanities therefore have an important role to play in our efforts to understand and deal with the present crisis of the biosphere. Over the past two decades or so, this insight has led scholars from across the humanities and sciences to conceive of their work as part of a larger interdisciplinary enterprise called the environmental humanities. 

In much of the West, the environmental humanities have already assumed institutional form. There are MA programs in the environmental humanities at prestigious universities such as Yale University, Columbia University in USA, University of Amsterdam in the Netherlads, or University of Venice in Italy; there are academic conferences, journals, and book series devoted to the new field; there are partnerships with museums, collaborations with filmmakers, and other forms of public outreach. In East Asian countries, no similar coalescence seems to have occurred: while there is much excellent scholarship in ecocriticism, environmental history, or environmental philosophy, for example, scholarly collaboration across disciplinary boundaries still appears to be comparatively rare.

Why this should be so (if indeed it is the case) and what could be done to change it is one of the issues we aim to discuss in our symposium, if only as a conduit to broader questions: to what extent are the environmental humanities in their current form shaped by the historical experience and conceptual legacy of Europe and its settler colonies? Or, conversely, might such concerns detract us from the degree to which the logic of industrial modernity overrides cultural differences? How do lived realities in our region inflect the intellectual priorities, the pedagogy, and the institutional politics of the environmental humanities? How compatible are key concepts of environmentalist discourse in the West (not only nature and culture, but e.g. also anthropocentrism, capitalism, or speciecism) with cultural traditions in East Asia – and how does our perspective on this question change if we understand environmentalism to be a thoroughly global and transcultural phenomenon? 

Based on the above reasons, the College of Liberal Arts at National Taiwan Normal University will invite scholars from top universities to participate in the “International Symposium on Environmental Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities for Environmental Humanities in East Asia.”