Advocating for the role of the humanities in a progressive human-nature nexus

Thanh Tu Tran
Technische Universität Dresden

June 22, 2025

[WORLDVIEW]

No doubt working out solutions for the world’s most devastating problems—the climate crisis and biodiversity losses—has become one of the hardest conundrums that humanity faces today. The pure reliance on scientific evidence and technological innovations has thus far not delivered what so many had expected.

This tells us how we, humanity, will certainly need the role of the humanities if we are set to crave effective solutions to our self-created problems, given the limited resources humans can potentially use in so doing. Many scientists, policymakers, professionals, and also lay people know this reality. The question is why the current stalemate has not gone away, but still staying here plaguing the planet Earth.

The answer lies in part in the analysis provided in the article [1]. The paper points out that with the climate crisis intensifying and planetary boundaries nearly breached, achieving any form of sustainability becomes difficult due, in part, to a large segment of society that remains apathetic and skeptical toward the value of nature and the danger of planetary crises. Denying scientific evidence or creating false claims about climate change hampers our good intention to achieve a fundamental shift in societal thinking encompassing worldview, values, and beliefs. For this bold shift to take place, meaningful cultural and artistic works that can awaken society become genuinely essential because they can help humans recognize blind spots in their perceptions of the human-nature relationship as well as restore and revitalize these connections.

So, how exactly difficult is the process of empowering humans with this progressive thinking concerning the health of planet Earth?

The GITT proposition gives some clue to this hard question: Individual and collective information processing, concerning the value-forming patterns [2]. Making people trust in reliable information and ready to transform their perceptions and behaviors will certainly demand a healthy decision-making process for each individual, as well as a group of people, whereby their acceptance vs. rejection tendency will need to be strengthened through the point of no return. A well-functioning information processing mechanism, on both individual and collective scales, will for sure help point us to a progressive system of environmental values.

This is exactly where the humanities will have a pivotal, perhaps determining, role to play. Reinforcing these values will only be effective when the pro-environmental information processes are voluntary, familiar, and frequent, leading to the irrevocable trend of nature quotient (or intelligence) growth.

Also, right in this analytical view, the humanities have a pivotal role to play. Let’s take the example of Wild Wise Weird [3], a cli-fi work as pointed out by [4].

The fiction “illustrates that conveying environmental messages does not necessarily require strong slogans, radical activism, or vandalism but can instead engage readers through the rationality and emotions of a personified protagonist like Kingfisher... The character’s humor and wisdom invite readers to embrace it, encouraging them to reconsider their own thoughts, choices, and actions to reduce environmental impacts and contribute to ecological sustainability. When blended with natural knowledge [...] and beautiful pictures, this way of communicating can effectively serve as a memorable way of engaging and educating children about our planet’s inhabitants.”

In addition, sometimes, it is more engaging for one to find wisdom by confronting foolishness, which seems to be everywhere when we look at environmental problems. The humanities has a chance to speak its voice to this truth, through satirical fables, in a possibly more effective way when it comes to persuading skeptics and deniers to reconsider their views. It is partly because most climate fiction messages cause readers to associate climate change with intensely negative emotions, likely resulting in climate doomerism, demoralizing the public and potentially leading to climate inaction [1].



Photo. A little egg found in the wild.

Thus, for the little egg to become a beautiful bird, the nurturing will involve the building of new progressive cultural values and well-founded trust in them [4].

References

[1] Nguyen MH. (2024). How can satirical fables offer us a vision for sustainability?. Visions for Sustainability, 23(11267), 1-6. https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/visions/article/view/11267

[2] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Exploring the role of rejection in scholarly knowledge production: insights from granular interaction thinking and information theory. Learned Publishing, 37(4), e1636. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1636

[3] Vuong QH. (2025). Wild Wise Weird. https://books.google.com/books?id=C5dDEQAAQBAJ

[4] Tran TT. (2025). Flying Beyond Didacticism: The Creative Environmental Vision of ‘Wild Wise Weird’. https://youngvoicesofscience.org/?p=1963