The primary purposes of this essay are: 1. To show that Mia Couto’s fictional and non-fictional works present the writer’s view of nature on the African continent; 2 To prove that Couto’s humor discloses an ecocritical commitment and a deep concern about the current climate crisis.

Prof. Anna-Katharina Hornidge of the German Development Institute (DIE) draws on a systems-theory perspective to show how politicians, voters, companies and countries can be addressed to take climate change and environmental challenges of the future seriously.

In the interview, Dipesh Chakrabarty gives an insight into recent transformations of historical thinking and writing. He discusses various faces of recent democratisation of history, like the proliferation of environmental history and the decolonialisation perspective. He outlines the genealogy of the term “provincializing”, known from his notable work Provincializing Eu-rope. Finally, he elaborates on the emergence of “the planetary” (or “a planetary age”) and recalls the contributions of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt on the conceptualisation of the issue.

The article discusses the issues of values and social responsibility of universities. On the one hand, the foundations of functioning of universities, which are created by research and education and the role of universities in formation, are recalled. On the other hand, it was reminded that the heart of universities, their DNA, are academic values, defined primarily in the Magna Charta Universitatum, but also in many other documents, such as the Code of Values of the Jagiellonian University. Hence, universities are increasingly often referred to not only as universities of knowledge, but also as universities of wisdom. Together, they are the basis for the social responsibility of universities. However, they alone are not enough for this social responsibility to materialise. Appropriate behaviour and actions are essential. Because knowledge alone is not everything. Such actions are always necessary, but especially when we find ourselves, as a country, humanity and a planet, in a crisis situation related to the climate disaster, which we are already partially experiencing. After the presentation of the most important current facts related to the climate and environmental crisis, the tasks to be undertaken urgently in this context by universities were presented, from broadly understood education, through convincing politicians to ambitious and quick actions, to intensive work on innovative solutions that can contribute to reducing threats brought by the climate and environmental crisis, pointing out, among others, the initiatives proposed by the newly created network of universities U7.