Ukraine is home to a diverse range of environments, including the richly biodiverse wetlands of Polissya (known as ‘Europe’s Amazon’) in the north, the expansive grassland steppe in the east, and lowland forests and alpine meadows in the Carpathians to the west. Ukraine is also home to one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes (the Chornobyl nuclear disaster), is commonly known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’, and is a country scarred by imperial forms of resourcification in the eastern Donbas region (see Bazdyrieva, 2022).

Since February 24th 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has involved ecocide as a companion to genocide, bringing devastation to environments and people across the country (see Andrianova, 2022; Perga, 2022). Global reliance on environmentally-destructive Russian oil and gas has prevented the international community from fully isolating Russia and supporting Ukraine to reclaim all its occupied territories (Radynski, 2022). Ukrainians, meanwhile, have shown immense resilience, amidst which, deep-rooted connections to land and landscape have begun to re-emerge (see Iakovlenko, 2022). 

Environmental topics have gained increased visibility in both Ukrainian public discourse and the Ukrainian art and cultural spheres since the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine’s east. This can be attributed to both greater global awareness of the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises, but also to a growing desire for, and conversation around, Ukrainian decolonisation. Scholars, artists, and activists have shown an interest in Ukraine’s environments, their specificities, uniqueness, and the way Russia’s military actions constitute ecocide. Such work represents a form of resilience against the aggressor.

Tanya Richardson and Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022) describe how mainstream (anglophone) environmental humanities scholarship has largely bypassed Ukraine, or tends to pigeon-hole the country as a ‘(post)Soviet ruin’ by focusing solely on events like Chornobyl. As a group of early career researchers, designers, artists, and curators with a shared interest in Ukrainian environments, we agree. Accordingly, we believe there is an urgent need to shine a light on, advance, and support the production of knowledge, art, and exhibitions relating to the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities (see Semchuk, 2022; Tsymbalyuk, 2022). As such, we have established the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network as a community and space to gather and share ideas, promote and support work, and enable and encourage collaboration within Ukraine and beyond.

We envision this network as thoroughly interdisciplinary and hope to bring ecologists into conversation with geographers, artists into conversation with journalists, and curators into conversation with anthropologists, spanning the gap between social and natural science, but also between academia and art.