What Can We Learn from the Pandemic? Environmental Humanities Scholars Offer Insights and Actions

By Scott Slovic

Bifrost, a product of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), is an environmental humanities website with a focus on climate change. In June 2020, Bifrost published “The New Normal? An Environmental Humanities Response,” offering an array of lessons we can learn from the COVID-19 crisis. Many of these lessons are relevant to the arithmetic of compassion, showing how the coronavirus challenges us to discern and unpack “messages from nature,” revealing the unequal exposure to risk during the pandemic, considering various notions of empathy and engagement with “otherness” that come to us from this experience, and addressing the perception and communication of environmental and public health data. “Environmental Humanities Response to COVID-19,” an open letter included among the articles, challenges readers to consider lifestyle changes that may emerge from the pandemic, enabling society to reduce its climate impacts and lessen social and environmental inequalities. The convergence of imaginative and behavioral responses to the pandemic mirrors the pairing of conceptual content and “Take Action” suggestions on the Arithmetic of Compassion website. 

To view “The New Normal? An Environmental Humanities Response,” go to bifrostonline.org.