The climate has become imprisoned in academia, jargon, and empty rhetoric. In this piece, sociologist Onofrio Romano denounces his own discipline's hollow attempts to make a difference to the planet. He proposes a complete overhaul to its approach, dropping its tendency for hollow claims and demanding a focus on measurement and implementation instead. We should not be afraid of the "boring" sites of change. At the local and national levels, concrete carbon budgets and more must be implemented with severe punishments for those who violate them. Setting limits and brakes should be prioritized over constant innovation. 

Everyone now knows the script. We need new narratives, more‑than‑human perspectives, decentred subjectivities, ecologies of care. In the last decade, Environmental Humanities (EH) has grown fast, institutionalising journals, centres, and syllabi to meet the demand. The field’s flagship journal (Environmental Humanities) launched in 2012 with a programmatic invitation to “think through the environment, unsettle the humanities.” The Anthropocene itself—popularised by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen—has become our default epoch, a shorthand for human planetary agency and responsibility.

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The more sophisticated our conceptual vocabularies become, the more elusive material transformation appears. Concepts proliferate; emissions do too.

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And yet a paradox persists. The more sophisticated our conceptual vocabularies become, the more elusive material transformation appears. Concepts proliferate; emissions do too. The discursive field expands; infrastructures, property regimes, and political time keep their own stubborn pace.

This is not an argument for abandoning theory. It is an argument for diagnosing a structural slippage: between epistemic novelties (how we know and say “environment”) and institutional inertias (how standards, ledgers, and public law actually move). The point is simple: semantic innovation is not strategic leverage. Theory that does not interface with the mundane sites of change—indices, permits, asset classes, procurement rules—risks mirroring the very political form it aims to resist.

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So the question is no longer whether EH can craft better stories. It is whether it can furnish handles—interfaces with governance, design, and law—that shift incentives, change baselines, and bind future actors. “More-than-human” will remain a posture until it is also a “procedure.”

EH emerged, like many modern disciplines, in response to crisis. Its genealogy runs through deep ecology, animal liberation, ecofeminism, political ecology, Indigenous cosmopolitics, and the ecocritical turn in literature and culture. A partial map includes Val Plumwood’s “ecological humanities” developed in dialogue with Deborah Bird Rose; the international journal Environmental Humanities (2012); and synthetic volumes—such as Serpil Oppermann & Serenella Iovino’s Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene and their edited Material Ecocriticism—that helped stabilize the field’s canon and ambitions.

From the outset, EH positioned itself against technocratic “fixes”, arguing that ecological breakdown is inseparable from the stories, values, and institutions that organise human–nonhuman relations. That wager remains right. But the historical backdrop matters: the early 1970s did not deliver a “green Keynesian” recalibration of the welfare state. They delivered something else—neoliberalism. The same years that consolidated Earth Day and the Stockholm Declaration also registered the Nixon shock that ended Bretton Woods, the New York fiscal crisis that accelerated urban austerity, and the Chilean coup that trialled market shock therapy. The environmental “awakening” was real—The Limits to Growth (1972) modelled overshoot; The Population Bomb (1968) galvanised public anxiety—yet the policy instruments that followed increasingly routed stewardship through markets, price signals, and disclosure regimes. What disappeared from view was the “system”: the capacity and the legitimacy to steer socio‑technical metabolism at scale. “Govern as little as possible” became common sense.