Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A planetary-scale introduction to reciprocal human-environment interactions from the discovery of fire to the present day. Case studies focus on humans and non-human actors in specific locales, and their movement across continents and oceans. Themes include climate, energy regimes, disease, science and technology, agriculture, subsistence, and landscape change. Breadth-Hum/Social Sci/Science.

COURSE DETAILS:

Our species has been telling stories about nature since before we had words. A key trait is our intense and sustained effort to defeat, harness, nurture, and worship nature. We have leveled forests, bloomed deserts, stoppered seas, and changed climate. The course traces thirteen-thousand-year years of global history as a primer on the field of environmental history. Lectures and readings address the reciprocal relations between culture and ecology at the planetary scale. Eight themes shape the narrative: food, energy, settlement, population, disease, climate, knowing, and veneration. Students will be asked to identify how societies and nature reciprocally shaped each other across time and space, and how individual narratives intersect with each other in context-dependent ways. Tales about food were inherently also about identity and settlement; energy, disease, and climate are entangled forces. The course begins with the retreat of ice sheets and rise of agriculture. By 13000 YBP humans had gathered into permanent settlements with domesticated animals. Their populations grew in ways that pressured resources and nurtured pathogens. They altered local ecologies and planetary climate millennia ago, and the social and ecological feedback loops only accelerated across time. Read, listen, and learn just how old the Anthropocene is, and how complex our environmental relationships have been.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: