LITERATURE, A TOOL TO FIGHT CLIMATE EMERGENCY

We often overlook the role of the social sciences and humanities, including arts and literature, in addressing climate change and other environmental problems

- KENNETH TOAH NSAH

Academics and policymakers tend to see pure sciences as the only disciplines that can offer solutions for ecological challenges. They sometimes overlook the role of the social sciences and humanities, including arts and literature, in addressing climate change and environmental problems. But this is changing, through emerging interdisciplinary fields such as environmental humanities. This field uses sources such as literary and artistic texts, and also borrows methods from disciplines like communications, history, philosophy, political science, sociology and anthropology.

My recent doctoral thesis argues that literary texts and critical studies of these texts have a role to play in saving the Congo Basin. The Congo Basin’s rainforests in central Africa are sometimes called Earth’s “second lungs” (after the Amazon) because of their ability to store carbon. The basin also has the world’s largest tropical peatlands, discovered in 2017. Scientists estimate that these peatlands store carbon worth about 20 years’ fossil fuel emissions of the US. The Congo Basin is also rich in biodiversity and minerals. But its rainforests and people face serious threats from climate change and other factors related to human activities. Commercial logging, mining, extensive agriculture, infrastructural development, rapid urbanisation, energy consumption and transnational wildlife poaching are among them.