ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, interdisciplinary groups of scientists have warned about the global direction toward irreversible transgressions of planetary boundaries for climate change, pollution, resource depletion and biodiversity loss. More recently, the scientific warnings have become stronger, emphasizing the fact that especially insufficient climate action can lead to social and ecological risks at an unprecedented scale in the coming decade. On this backdrop, this chapter probes whether there is a sufficient sense of urgency in the humanities. Specifically, we offer an analysis that takes the sense of time and urgency as central concerns for the humanities in the Anthropocene. We argue that the Environmental Humanities suffer from three epistemic problems in this situation: the idealization of slowness, the pursuit of conceptual thickness and the embrace of posthumanism. What we frame as three problems contain both academic virtues, promises, prestige and power. We argue, however, that they are also obstacles in the attempt to bring the humanities up to speed with a new world. A world, which is not only undergoing accelerating geophysical changes, but which is also rapidly changing due to new technologies and political polarizations.
