ABSTRACT
Rethinking the idea of nature is at the core of the project of the environmental humanities. The environmental humanities represent the latest and most ambitious attempt to approach interrelated complexities with respect to environmental issues from a perspective that includes language, culture, history and values while, at the same time, encouraging a dialogue with the sciences and technological approaches. They are evolving from research begun in individual disciplines such as environmental history, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, ecosociology, ecopsychology, and cross-disciplinary research agendas such as ecofeminism. This chapter focuses on the most important ideas and impulses that have shaped the environmental humanities into an emerging scholarly paradigm. An impulse that was formative for the broadening of the research agenda of the environmental humanities was a more sustained reflection on the relationship between colonial and postcolonial studies and environmental concerns, and in tandem with that a greater emphasis on species thinking and the question of posthumanism.
