




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 3 (1): 141–146, January 2020 

 
BOOK REVIEW 
  

Interdisciplinarity and the Challenges of 
Environmental Sensemaking 
 

Ramya K Tella  
 
A Elliott, J Cullis and V Damodaran, eds. 2017. Climate Change and the 
Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the 
Contemporary Environmental Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1-
137-55123-8, pp. 271 + XII, INR 7602 (Hardbound).  
 

Climate change has been described as the 
archetypal ―wicked problem‖ — as one that 
―does not lend itself to a solution‖ (Hulme 
2009, 334, 359). In several ways, the 
phenomenon of climate change, in fact, 
reflects in an intense and unprecedented 
manner the socio-cultural (Hulme 2015) and 
moral (Gardiner 2006) dilemmas of the 
present. Climate Change and the Humanities: 
Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary 
Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental 
Crisis published subsequent to a momentous 
event — the signing of the Paris Agreement 
(2016) — makes a powerful case for re-

cantering the criticality of the humanities in the debates over climate change 
and global warming. 

                                                        
 PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, King‘s College London, Bush House, 30 
Aldwych, London, UK, WC2B 4BG; ramya.tella@kcl.ac.uk 

Copyright © Tella 2020. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i1.100  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i1.100


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [142] 

The organisation of the chapters in this volume reinforces the significance 
of knowing the environment through the overlapping frames of the past, 
present and future: the discussions presented by the contributors emphasise 
the plurality of human experience while drawing attention to the 
contradictions and perils of the homogenous discourses on climate change. 
Through its investigations into the historical, moral, cultural, political and 
philosophical underpinnings of knowing climate, the volume consciously 
sets itself apart from the echo chamber of solution-oriented discourses of 
―‗actionable‘ knowledge‖ (p. 9).  

The volume illustrates that there is ample evidence from history that 
situates the environment within the realm of the literary and philosophical 
imaginations, among other fields. For example, this is borne out in accounts 
of the relationships that are forged between nature and culture in literature 
and in the political tensions these denote, as Groom convincingly argues in 
a chapter titled, ‗Plastic Daffodils: The Pastoral, the Picturesque, and 
Cultural Environmentalism‘. By referring to the specific cases of William 
Wordsworth‘s poem, ‗I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud‘, and James 
Thomson‘s ‗The Seasons‘, the author offers an illustrative account of the 
cultural construction of environments and the weather. Groom even shows 
that these poems were designed to bring about a shift in the type of literary 
pleasure that readers derived — from a vicarious experiencing of landscapes 
to a search for physical immersion. Yet, as the author suggests, a critical 
examination of the literature is incomplete without an acknowledgment of 
the prevalent socio-economic and political forces of the time — the landed 
class in 18th century England — that shaped how landscapes were 
ultimately represented in both the pastoral and picturesque strands of 
English poetry. Notably, processes of enclosure for instance, were 
neglected by the poets, who instead leaned towards a romanticisation of the 
―deserted landscape‖ as the poetic norm (p. 125).  

While the appeal of idyllic desertion occupied the imaginations of literary 
figures past, the contemporary genre of cli-fi (short for climate fiction), as 
Ryle shows in ‗Cli-Fi? Literature, Ecocriticism, History‘, relies on methods 
of socio-cultural and historical distantiation to interesting effects — of a 
sense of awe and rapture that is similar to what might be experienced in 
evocations of a sublime nature. Ryle‘s critique of the cli-fi genre is located 
in a consideration of environmental history and the global politics of 
development, where the author indicates that the framing of climate change 
as a future event obscures the marginalised geographies of the global 
present. Through a strong sub-thematic emphasis on the temporal politics 
of environmental citizenship, the author offers insights on Margaret 



[143] Ramya K Tella 

Atwood‘s ‗Oryx and Crake‘ (2004), a notable work of speculative fiction, 
and Ian McEwan‘s fictional work, ‗Solar‘ (2010).  

Literature, as an arena for creative conversation on climate change, is 
closely interlinked with questions of ethics and philosophy. Atwood‘s work, 
as Ryle shows, engages with this through a problematisation of 
consumerism and the capitalist mode of production. This chapter is 
complemented by Calder‘s investigation of the philosophies of climate, 
Davies‘ work on futures, and Mulgan‘s evaluation of the ‗Broken World‘ 
scenario through a Rawlsian framework. Calder makes a central ―distinction 
between philosophy applied to the environment and environmental 
philosophy‖ (p. 170), and provides a direction for further research in the 
area by revisiting some key scholarly contributions to questions of nature 
and culture.  

Viewed in relation to the need for ―situatedness‖ in understandings of 
environment (Bäckstrand 2004, 706), the foundations for comprehensive 
climate philosophies may be expanded by revisiting critiques of modernity 
and institutionalised discourses through the frameworks of non-western 
norms, philosophical traditions and imaginations. These areas of 
philosophy and ethics in climate discourses also intersect with 
conversations on aesthetics — a point that Brady persuasively makes in 
‗Climate Change and Future Aesthetics‘, in order to draw attention to the 
temporal implications of climate change and its linkages to perceptions of 
diverse landscapes. Most pertinently, the author argues that climate change 
need not result in a devaluation of aesthetics, but could rather be viewed as 
ushering in a shift in the aesthetic calculus of societies, in ways that support 
ideas of both loss and gain.  

Formulations of loss and gain, as too of environmental aesthetics, are 
informed by broader historical narratives which prompt an examination of 
the epistemic politics of climate change. In ‗The Importance of the 
Humanities to the Climate Change Debate‘, Elliott and Cullis observe that 
the emergence of interest in climate is not a recent phenomenon — on the 
contrary, they show that accounts of it are found distributed across the 
annals of history. Early philosophical writings, designs for colonial 
expansion and narratives of environmental determinism are all part of a 
historical corpus of imaginings about the climate. The authors illustrate that 
the dominant discourse of climate change, with its focus on the universality 
and objectivity of scientific knowledge, has led to the erasure of other 
situated, and equally legitimate, epistemic domains. They show that the 
persistence of a dichotomous categorisation of knowledge into ―utilitarian‖ 
and ―esoteric‖ strands (p. 21), as pertaining to science and the humanities 
respectively, impacts on any project for the diversification of climate change 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [144] 

discourse, and as this chapter shows, reflects the hegemonic undertow of 
global politics.  

The chapters in this volume offer nuanced and detailed perspectives on the 
challenges of knowing and representing climate change. They reveal that a 
far more complex rendering of climate can be achieved by engaging with 
the humanities than any story that is exclusively generated by science. In 
‗Understanding Climate Change Historically‘, Staley shows how a critical 
approach to the politics of knowledge production is germane to a wider 
discussion on the relevance of historical analysis in scientific research. The 
Anthropocene constitutes an important frame within this debate, where the 
historian of science occupies a unique position — as a narrator who is able 
to address ―scientists‘ histories‖ while contributing to ―historians‘ histories‖ 
(p.46). What this chapter, and the others in the volume collectively 
emphasize, are questions of who, what, where, when, how and why, in the 
languages of climate change.  

These questions also pervade the sphere of climate change communication, 
where Happer, in ‗Belief in Change: The Role of Media and 
Communications in Driving Action on Climate Change‘, explains how 
climate skepticism is given monetary encouragement by American and 
British corporations with vested interests. A considerable part of the 
current discourse on climate change in the western media points to the 
complexities of navigating campaigns of disinformation. Happer‘s chapter, 
in particular, captures the subtleties of these discourses through primary 
data. In a striking exploration of the why aspect of skepticism, the author 
shows, through the accounts of a set of research respondents, that their 
stances have more to do with a lack of faith in political actors and 
democratic procedure, than with a repudiation of the phenomenon of 
climate change itself. The core arguments made by the author about the 
―circuit of communication‖ (p. 191) on climate change, may also be useful 
to revisit in the light of recent global civic mobilisation against climate 
change inaction and the need for a historical contextualisation of 
environmental concern.  

One important example of the history of environmental concern (and 
alarm) is to be found in Grove‘s account of early environmental legislation 
on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. In ‗The Culture of Islands 
and the History of Environmental Concern‘, the author shows how the 
passage of the Kings Hill Forest Act (1791) was situated in a climatic theory 
of sustainability, which subsequently shaped colonial era legislations 
particularly  in  island  states  through  an  emphasis  on ―desiccationism‖ 
(p. 72). This form of environmentalism was supported by a tripartite 
structure of knowledge production and circulation that comprised: the 



[145] Ramya K Tella 

―professionalisation of science‖ through the identification of experts; the 
formation of global information networks, such as in the field of botany; 
and, the collection of experiential information on degradation in the island 
states (p. 72). In critical ways, the contributions to this volume collectively 
emphasise the need for the humanities to engage with the idea of climate 
across scales in a historical context.  

Imaginings of climate gain ―persuasive power‖ (Jasanoff 2010, 236) from 
their ability to attend to the discursive and material particularities of 
heterogeneous locales. In ‗The Locality in the Anthropocene: Perspectives 
on the Environmental History of Eastern India‘, Damodaran articulates this 
idea in a compelling way through an investigation of locality and indigenous 
subjectivity in eastern India. The key sites in this chapter —Jharkhand and 
Orissa, both states marked by high levels of poverty — contain natural 
resources and minerals that have been the focus of extractive multi-national 
corporations. These are also sites that continue to bear witness to state 
violence against Adivasi and peasant communities, alongside the 
intensification of armed struggle by Naxalites. Damodaran‘s account of the 
environmental history of this region raises important questions about the 
construction of indigenous identities in the present, historical claims to 
space, state responsibility and the institutionalisation of violence. By 
travelling between the concepts of locality and landscape, the author also 
implicitly offers a distinctive theoretical direction to negotiations of space 
and place in environmental history, with possibilities for creative 
theorisation in future research. 

Climate Change and the Humanities has come at a crucial global moment that 
appears increasingly to be folding into a lexicon of ―deadline-ism‖ (Hulme 
2019, 2). The contributions to this volume reassert the centrality of viewing 
climate change historically, of engaging the humanities in accounts of 
representative knowledge, and of situating peoples and socio-economic and 
political undercurrents in narratives of past, present and future. Together, 
they provide an extensive overview of a set of cross-temporal 
environmental themes and make a forceful case for interdisciplinary 
conversations on climate change. 

 

REFERENCES 

Bäckstrand, K. 2004. ―Scientisation vs. civic expertise in environmental 
governance: Eco-feminist, eco-modern and post-modern responses.‖ Environmental 
Politics 13 (4): 695-714. https://doi.org/10.1080/0964401042000274322 

https://doi.org/10.1080/0964401042000274322


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [146] 

Gardiner, S.M. 2006. ―A perfect moral storm: Climate change, intergenerational 
ethics and the problem of moral corruption.‖ Environmental Values 15 (3): 397-413. 
https://doi.org/10.3197/096327106778226293 

Hulme, M. 2009. Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction 
and opportunity. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511841200 

Hulme, M. 2015. ―Climate and its changes: a cultural appraisal.‖ Geo: Geography and 
Environment 2 (1): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.5 

Hulme, M. 2019. Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An 
editorial. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 
https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.619 

Jasanoff, S. 2010. ―A new climate for society.‖ Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2-3): 
233-253. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409361497 

 

https://doi.org/10.3197/096327106778226293
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511841200
https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.5
https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.619
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409361497

