Environmental Humanities is the product of the 21st century, an age in which it is no longer possible to grasp and manage environmental problems from a single viewpoint. This is true of the scientific method as well. Although fundamentally important for the understanding of ecological issues and changes to the climate, scientific knowledge is not sufficient for providing an adequate answer to the complex phenomenon that is the cause and consequence of the environmental challenges of our century. This is why traditional humanities subjects have been combined with the natural and social sciences and the arts into an interdisciplinary formation in an attempt to understand the causes, current forms, and future trajectories of the contemporary environmental crisis, and to give possible answers to it.

This volume is intended to join a body of literature – introductions, textbooks – on Environmental Humanities, adapted to the Hungarian context. Due to its nature, it provides a comprehensive description of several topics, such as environmental philosophy, environmental anthropology, nature art, nature conservation, the relationship between religion and ecology, environmental history, legal, political, and economic issues, social justice, overpopulation, or food dilemmas. In addition, the volume shows community responses to contemporary ecological and social problems with examples from Hungary.

Judit Farkas is a cultural anthropologist. She specializes in researching ecological, social, and religious communities and movements. Since 2003, she has been teaching at the Department of European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pécs. She is a head teacher of the College of Sustainable Development at UP and the founder of the human ecology Master at UP. She is also the co-leader of the Environmental Humanities Research Group established at the University of Pécs, the first in Hungary to represent the new research field. In addition to scientific and educational activities, she considers dissemination of knowledge particularly important and regularly gives lectures to the wider public. She also considers this book a significant step in her work from this point of view.