Professor David Farrier

And I discovered lots of people here working in the humanities, in philosophy, in divinity, in art history, who had similar interests and similar questions.

And the environmental humanities has been a field

for about 15, 20 years now.

And it would just seem like a very natural home and a place to ask those questions.

In terms of the job title, it's a bit more of a boring story, really.

When I came up for promotion, I had the opportunity to propose my own chair, my own title.

Wow.

It is, it is.

But I feel like these are questions, the kind of questions that we have about how we're changing the world, what should the future look like?

They're questions for the humanities.

They're questions for literature.

Exactly.

What does it mean to be human in this moment?

There's a wonderful line that I always come back to in an essay by Amitabh Ghosh, a fantastic novelist and atheist, Amitabh Ghosh.

He says,

And he says the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, well, I'm fully on board with that, that we need to understand ourselves as, you know, a node in the web of life and not, you know, not a central node either.

Although we are having a profound influence on the world around us and, you know, have also historically put ourselves at that centre for far too long in ways that have, you know, are really at the root of what has taken us to this point.

I think as well, this, this,