Ecological crises are cultural crises. They affect not only people’s physical bodies, but also daily habits and belief systems; they are driven not only by technology and demographics, but also by desires, hopes, and fears. The humanities therefore have an important role to play in our efforts to understand and deal with the present crisis of the biosphere. Over the past two decades or so, this insight has led scholars from across the humanities and sciences to conceive of their work as part of a larger interdisciplinary enterprise called the environmental humanities. 
In much of the West, the environmental humanities have already assumed institutional form. There are MA programs in the environmental humanities at prestigious universities such as Yale University, Columbia University in USA, University of Amsterdam in the Netherlads, or University of Venice in Italy; there are academic conferences, journals, and book series devoted to the new field; there are partnerships with museums, collaborations with filmmakers, and other forms of public outreach. In East Asian countries, no similar coalescence seems to have occurred: while there is much excellent scholarship in ecocriticism, environmental history, or environmental philosophy, for example, scholarly collaboration across disciplinary boundaries still appears to be comparatively rare.
Why this should be so (if indeed it is the case) and what could be done to change it is one of the issues we aim to discuss in our symposium, if only as a conduit to broader questions: to what extent are the environmental humanities in their current form shaped by the historical experience and conceptual legacy of Europe and its settler colonies? Or, conversely, might such concerns detract us from the degree to which the logic of industrial modernity overrides cultural differences? How do lived realities in our region inflect the intellectual priorities, the pedagogy, and the institutional politics of the environmental humanities? How compatible are key concepts of environmentalist discourse in the West (not only nature and culture, but e.g. also anthropocentrism, capitalism, or speciecism) with cultural traditions in East Asia – and how does our perspective on this question change if we understand environmentalism to be a thoroughly global and transcultural phenomenon? 
Based on the above reasons, the College of Liberal Arts at National Taiwan Normal University will invite scholars from top universities to participate in the “International Symposium on Environmental Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities for Environmental Humanities in East Asia.”

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生態危機即是文化危機。生態環境的問題不僅威脅到人類的身體健康，還深刻影響了人們的日常習慣與信仰體系。其成因不僅涉及科技發展與人口變遷，更與人類的慾求、希望與恐懼息息相關。因此，人文學科在理解與應對當前生態危機的過程中，扮演著至關重要的角色。過去二十多年來，這樣的體認促使來自不同人文學科以及科學學科的學者投身「環境人文」的跨學科討論當中。在許多西方國家，環境人文已經發展成為一門獨立的學術領域，並逐步建構起制度性的框架。知名學府如美國耶魯大學、哥倫比亞大學、荷蘭阿姆斯特丹大學與義大利威尼斯大學等皆已設立環境人文學的碩士學位課程。此外，環境人文學領域已有專屬的學術研討會、期刊與專書系列，並與博物館、電影產業等文化機構展開合作，以提升公眾意識、並推動公共參與。然而在東亞地區，這類學術共同體的形成似乎仍為零散，儘管生態批評、環境歷史與環境哲學等領域已累積大量優秀的研究成果，但跨學科的學術合作相對而言仍較少見。如果這種現象確實存在，那麼其背後的原因為何？又該如何促進環境人文學在東亞地區的發展？這些問題正是本次論壇希望探討的核心議題。然而我們的討論將不止於此，更將延伸至更廣泛的問題，如：當前的環境人文學體系的形塑如何受到歐洲及其殖民歷史的經驗與概念遺產所影響？或者，相反地，這類問題是否讓我們忽略了工業現代性的發展如何超越文化差異、導致全球的環境變遷？此外，東亞地區的生活現實如何策動了環境人文學的學術優先排序、教育方法與學術機構的運作？西方環境保護論述中的核心概念（如自然與文化的區分、人類中心主義、資本主義或物種歧視論等）在東亞文化傳統中是否相容適用？假如我們認為環境保護就是一個徹底的全球性與跨文化現象，那麼對這些問題的理解及建議是否又會有所不同？基於以上緣由，國立臺灣師範大學文學院將邀集許多頂尖大學學者參與，舉辦「「環境人文國際論壇：東亞環境人文的挑戰及機會」。含主題短講、圓桌論壇、焦點主題研討及生態考察，於2025年6月21~30日舉行。