This course explores the origins of the contemporary planetary crisis through a five hundred-year history of capitalism, colonialism, and technological innovation. We will investigate how flows of people, plants, animals, ideas, machines, and germs transformed landscapes on every continent and how these changes in the land in turn shaped the history of empires, nations, and everyday life. We will debate the relative importance of coal and cotton in fueling the English industrial revolution and ponder whether attitudes towards nature expressed in Chinese landscape paintings reveal clues to the country’s “three thousand-year history of unsustainable development.” Through the lens of environmental justice, we will analyze the interaction of global commodity markets with changing climatic patterns to determine the causes of famine in colonial territories and assess the differential vulnerabilities of particular bodies to the toxic wastes of modern industry. This is an ironic history in which unprecedented increases in life expectancy, material comforts, political freedoms, and scientific understanding threatened to destroy the environmental relationships on which such progress depended.
Ultimately, we seek to understand how humans became the primary drivers of change in the Earth System; thus, this course offers a history of a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. This is an introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history, which combines traditional historical methods with ecological thinking. It is open to all students, requires no prior coursework or knowledge and welcomes students from both the humanities and natural sciences. Evaluation is based on classroom participation, weekly reading discussion posts, a few short papers, and a longer final independent research project. Readings average about seventy-pages per week and all texts will posted on Canvas.
Course Requirements:
Weekly reading discussion posts, a few short papers, and a longer final independent research project
Intended Audience:
All students in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences
Class Format:
Lecture