Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines the reciprocal influences between humans and nature through time. Topics may include settlement, agriculture, technology, politics, urbanization, science, and conservation. Students with credit for GEOG 377 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

What if the history of human societies was written in ways that recognized the importance of the physical environment, not just as a backdrop for human endeavour but as a collection of non-human beings and forces that were in varying degrees vital to that story?

This is the particular vision that the vibrant and rapidly developing field of environmental history brings to the larger effort since the 1960s to broaden the scope of history to include a more comprehensive span of subjects. HIST 377 aims to introduce students to many of the key concepts and arguments of environmental history through an examination of the recent history (since 1800) of North America, a continent that has been the subject of some of the most dynamic scholarship undertaken to date in this field. Topics to be explored include: climate and history; European colonization; industrial and energy revolutions; the political dimensions of natural disasters and environmental risk; and environmentalism old and new.

One way of seeing our approach is as analagous to the close attention given by many of the Indigenous peoples of this continent to the evolving relationships of the land—understood in its broadest sense as including the many corporal and other beings that dwell upon it and depend upon one other for their survival.

From our current vantage point of deepening ecological and climate crises, we will look anew at the past from the argument that human beings are not a unique species unfettered by natural constraints, and that the ecological dimensions of their past actions matter. Together we will attempt to deepen our understanding of how humans have both affected and been affected by their natural environment through time, in a dynamic, reciprocating relationship. While our primary focus will be on the human-environment dynamic, we will also take into consideration how this relationship has been inflected by other distinctions through engaging with key concepts like ecological imperialism and environmental racism.

Grading

Materials

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