This course tracks humanity’s emergence as a destructive planetary force with special focus on the last two centuries. It familiarizes students with the techniques and major concerns of environmental and climate history and offers ways to think historically about our current era of accelerating ecological destruction and planetary uncertainty. This course will prompt us to think about “energy regimes,” the Industrial Revolution (if this is even a singular thing), and climate change as significant drivers of history, among other phenomena.
Equally importantly, we will discover that environmental history widens the frame of historical actors, not merely historical analysis. Environmental historians and historians of allied disciplines have argued for the agency and importance of nonhuman animals in history, and that of even more inert aspects of the world around us: plants, forests, diseases, glaciers, entire ecosystems, and even the “Earth system” of climatic regulation. Environmental history is also an excellent lens for assessing power and inequality within human societies too. Natural resources are not evenly consumed worldwide, while environmental harms are disproportionately borne by those with the least political and economic power.
Above all, this course asks students to meditate on complex ideas which are at the heart of modern life: the relationships between control of natural resources, proximity to environmental hazards, and political power; the tensions and trade-offs between Westerners’ unparalleled standards
of living and unparalleled consumptive habits; and the question of how—or even whether—a pathway out of our era of collective ecological self-harm can be developed.
Equally importantly, we will discover that environmental history widens the frame of historical actors, not merely historical analysis. Environmental historians and historians of allied disciplines have argued for the agency and importance of nonhuman animals in history, and that of even more inert aspects of the world around us: plants, forests, diseases, glaciers, entire ecosystems, and even the “Earth system” of climatic regulation. Environmental history is also an excellent lens for assessing power and inequality within human societies too. Natural resources are not evenly consumed worldwide, while environmental harms are disproportionately borne by those with the least political and economic power.
Above all, this course asks students to meditate on complex ideas which are at the heart of modern life: the relationships between control of natural resources, proximity to environmental hazards, and political power; the tensions and trade-offs between Westerners’ unparalleled standards
of living and unparalleled consumptive habits; and the question of how—or even whether—a pathway out of our era of collective ecological self-harm can be developed.
- Instructor: Barrie Blatchford