Social work stands for the values of humanity. Such a statement would go unchallenged by social workers throughout the world. Yet in this chapter we consider the values of humanity in some detail, recognising that they are both complex and contested, and that humanity is not to be idealised but can be brutally destructive. In pursuing this discussion, we show how a deeper and wider exploration of humanity can be an important source of inspiration for creative social work and can enhance social work’s advocacy of the values of humanity in the contemporary context, where much that seemed to be settled has become unsettled and where people often feel less like rational decision-making beings optimising their wellbeing and more isolated, bewildered and uncertain in a world of paradox and confusion.

Ethical quandaries – such as justice and equity for under-represented communities, treatment of animals in laboratory and field research, and editing the genomes of plants, animals, and humans – are becoming ever more insistent in socio-environmental research. Accordingly, socio-environmental research requires that natural and social scientists become conversant with the humanities and that humanists actively engage, in accessible terms, the conceptual and ethical concerns arising in the sciences. Research methods in the humanities differ – where scholars begin with a thesis instead of a hypothesis – from those in the natural and social sciences. While the methodological differences between research in the humanities and the sciences render interdisciplinary cooperation and even communication between these two broad types of inquiry difficult, this section draws attention to the important contributions that ethical, religous, and historical approaches have made to understanding the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. These contributions range from scholars such as Aldo Leopold, Lynn White, and William Cronon to Vandana Shiva, Leonardo Boff, and Gregory Cajete.

The introduction seeks to set the research questions to be explored throughout the book: what is the nature of the human relationship with nature, what are the central ideologies and assumptions that inform the management of the human–wildlife relationship, how are these ideologies reflected in law and legal institutions and, finally, how do they need to be changed. It outlines the approach the book will take in order to answer these fundamental questions.

There is debate in the political sphere regarding the level at which climate change will have an impact on the earth. In the scientific community there is little debate, but this thought does not necessarily trickle down to the average layperson. Many believe that this disconnect is due to misinformation campaigns through the late 1990s. Climate change is a vast social and health issue that affects communities all over the world differently. Different areas of the world with varied resources and support will fare differently as climate change continues to change the land, making climate change a social justice concern. However, it is possible to improve climate change by focusing resources on human behavior, psychology, and sustainability.

This chapter examines some of the more powerful encounters between feminism and environmentalism to offer the reader an understanding of both historic points of tension and opportunities for rich collaboration. Reading the environmental humanities broadly, the chapter highlights diverse lines of feminist research that drive toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically vibrant futures. It focuses on critical feminist work that challenges hegemonic conceptions of gender and nature, the body and place, and dominant understandings of knowledge production.The reader will become acquainted with key concepts such as essentialism, intersectionality, the nature/culture dualism, environmental justice, and the anthropocene, and with key subfields including ecofeminism, feminist science studies, corporeal feminism, and biopolitics.

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.

“The Essential Ecosystem” considers how environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution have influenced and undermined a number of identity movements and academic paradigms in the 1970s and after. Specifically, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) dramatizes and ultimately compromises the ideals of contemporary “nature feminists,” those who viewed reproductive capacity not only as the cornerstone of essential womanhood, but also as a privileged means of ecological awareness. The narrator’s own attempted identification with her biology broadens her idea of reproduction to include all material functions, from nutrient consumption to decomposition. This fixation on network disorients gender rather than shores it up. However, far from undermining identity, it also illuminates the extent to which social thought has at times rendered whole systems as a matter of essentialism. Reading Surfacing alongside Atwood’s later work illuminates lines of rhetorical continuity between the essentialist “all women” position in nature feminism and a potential “all matter” position in contemporary new-materialist writing.

What is Green politics? Ecological thinking can be understood very narrowly, and quite broadly, even in its political manifestations. Like other political ideologies and perspectives, it has things to say across the whole gamut of issues facing society and though there are elements of feminism, pacifism and anarchism in Green political theory, it has its own identity and intellectual heritage and, I argue, a coherent set of critiques, visions and strategies for achieving them in global politics. Despite some of the core areas of consensus around which most Greens would converge, there is a wide spectrum of positions that sit under the broad umbrella of Green politics and many tensions and areas of disagreement amongst them. The term covers a spectrum of sometimes competing perspectives over values, politics and strategy. Here I provide a brief typology of different strands of Green political thinking.