Introduction
- Set in motion by climate change, biodiversity loss, or planetary pollution, the call for socio-political and ecological transformations has become increasingly audible in political and public discourse. Nonetheless, consensus crumbles once concrete measures are put on the table. Serious tension often arises over costs, responsibilities, and accountabilities. Disparities also sit between national and international frameworks and the different scales and temporal dimensions of planetary environmental problems. While awareness of the multivocality and inner, societal, and even global conflicts that go along with ecological crisis has made its way into different social science and humanities disciplines, the notion of ecological ambivalence has not yet been addressed systematically from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, and therefore its possibly creative potential remains underexplored. While awareness of the multivocality and inner, societal, and even global conflicts that go along withSet in motion by climate change, biodiversity loss, or planetary pollution, the call for socio-political and ecological transformations has become increasingly audible in political and public discourse. Nonetheless, consensus crumbles once concrete measures are put on the table. Serious tension often arises over costs, responsibilities, and accountabilities. Disparities also sit between national and international frameworks and the different scales and temporal dimensions of planetary environmental problems. While awareness of the multivocality and inner, societal, and even global conflicts that go along with ecological crisis has made its way into different social science and humanities disciplines, the notion of ecological ambivalence has not yet been addressed systematically from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, and therefore its possibly creative potential remains underexplored. While awareness of the multivocality and inner, societal, and even global conflicts that go along with ecological crisis has made its way into different social science and humanities disciplines, the notion of ecological ambivalence has not yet been addressed systematically from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, and therefore its possibly creative potential for imagining alternative futures remains underexplored. This edited volume, Ecological Ambivalence, Complexity, and Change: Perspectives from the Environmental Humanities, seeks to fill this gap and inspire conversations, new approaches, and narratives across disciplines that capture the dilemma in which conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings toward public policies or private practices for “saving planet Earth” threaten to produce a stalemate.…