Climate Change & The Humanities

In 2011 Mike Hulme published an opinion piece, Meet the Humanities, in Nature Climate Change, one of the premier scientific journals dealing with climate change. He asserted that “Although climate is inarguably changing society, social practices are also impacting on the climate. Nature and culture are deeply entangled, and researchers must examine how each is shaping the other. But they are largely failing to do so” (Hulme 2011). This was likely the first time that many climate scientists had thought much about the humanities as relevant to what they were studying. This book sets out to rectify that, documenting what a broad selection of academics, journalists, artists, and others working in the humanities and social sciences have been writing about climate change recently. It consists of over 200 summaries of such works and provides a good introduction to the range of thinking about climate change addressed by non-scientists, and a good entry point to a growing literature. Hulme, M., 2011. Meet the humanities. Nature Climate Change 1, 177-179.