Keywords for Environmental Studies

Raymond Williams famously argued that "Nature," writ large, is "perhaps the most complex word in the language" and any full genealogy and history of the term "would be a history of a large part of human thought." Today, understandings of "nature" have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. The essays in Keywords for Environmental Studies analyze the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Collecting sixty new essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, the essays reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From "ecotourism" to "ecoterrorism," from "genome" to "species," this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues--such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities-- in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. Keywords for Environmental Studies underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today.