In particular, there have been four pervasive problems and challenges for investigating and creating knowledge on climate and environmental change that have followed the program (see also Neimanis et al 2015):
1) A popular alienation from issues of environmental concern and a sense of nature’s intangibility in affluent, urban or high-tech settings.
2) A view of environmental issues as primarily questions of technocratic management.
3) A predominantly negative and even apocalyptic framing of environmental discourse.
4) The compartmentalization of environmental problems from other salient matters such as the globalization of capital, the speed of technological advance, or new forms of colonialism.
All of these problems concern how knowledge is shaped and put into circulation in the larger social body – how to make environmental issues tangible and understandable, how to analyze and represent them in their complexity, how to find and create narratives and images that avoid the apocalyptic and can pave the way for ethically and politically viable modes of living in a transformed world. During the festival, the keynote program continues these issues, reflects around them, and reinvents them environmental humanities inquiry in the future.
