Presentation short abstract

By dialoguing with Sustainability Science and the Environmental Humanities, Ethnobiology could more seriously integrate systemic and critical perspectives. This dialogue would strengthen its political dimension to jointly address sustainability and environmental justice challenges.

Presentation long abstract

The amplification and complexity of sustainability and environmental issues have led to profound transformations in academia over the last decades. In particular, we have witnessed a shift toward interdisciplinary collaborations between the social and environmental sciences, as well as toward the meaningful inclusion of non-academic actors and knowledge through so-called transdisciplinary research. Sustainability science (SustSci) and the environmental humanities (EnvHum) are two emerging research fields that exemplify these efforts to cross disciplinary and science-society boundaries. However, a critical analysis of the two research fields suggests that, rather than overcoming academic boundaries, they contributed to reshaping them. SustSci seeks to develop a systemic understanding of social-ecological systems and focuses on fostering sustainable interactions between humans and non-humans. EnvHum, in contrast, offers a critical examination of power relations—both among humans and between humans and non-humans—highlighting the need to reduce all forms of domination. In this context, I argue that ethnobiology can help bridge these two perspectives by jointly addressing sustainability and environmental justice challenges. Ethnobiology is historically well positioned to document the plurality of ways of living in the world, to conduct nature-based assessments, and to emphasize sustainable human–nature interactions. Yet addressing distributive, procedural, and epistemic injustices remains a more peripheral concern within ethnobiological research. While some ethnobiologists have recently called for a political ethnobiology, Political Ecology and other EnvHum scholarship offer underexplored sources of inspiration for advancing this renewed research agenda.