The Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities is established at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan, in recognition that environmental issues today are deeply entangled in questions of human behaviour, structures, values, and beliefs, and that humanist and more-than-human approaches to the environment are fundamental to develop panbeing intelligence and to secure multibeing sustainable futures. We recognize that the Himalayan region is particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts, and so to potentially catastrophic effect, both for lived ecologies, biodiversity and life within the Himalaya itself and for the over two billion peoples living in adjacent alluvial plains for whom Himalayan gifts, such as monsoons, sediments, and rivers, is a vital life-source. New methods, indigenous knowledge and multispecies ethics and justice need to be developed and applied to renew human-environment relations, and to which we, as an academic institute, wish to commit our research capacity to. From its base in Bhutan, which is heir to distinctive knowledge traditions in the human-environment interface, the RTC Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities aims to promote research, teaching, and interdisciplinary alliances in the environmental humanities across the greater Himalayan region, as well as to leverage Himalayan insights to contribute to new ways of thinking and acting in relation to planetary problems.

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