HIST 132: Global Environmental History
Spring 2024: Our species has told stories about nature since before we had written language. Our defining trait is an intense and sustained effort to defeat, harness, nurture, and worship nature. We leveled forests, bloomed deserts, stoppered seas, and changed climate. This course traces that thirteen-thousand-year global history as a general interest primer on the field of environmental history. Lectures and readings address the reciprocal relations between culture and ecology at a 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 each narrative intersects with other threads in context-dependent ways. Tales about food were inherently also about population and settlement; energy, disease, and climate matter as well. The course begins with the retreat of ice sheets and rise of agriculture. 13000 YBP humans were beginning to gather themselves and a suite of domesticated animals in semi-permanent and then permanent settlements. Populations grew in ways that pressured resources and nurtured pathogens. We altered not only local ecologies but planetary climates many millennia ago, and social and ecological feedback loops have only accelerated those impacts across time. Read, listen, and learn just how old and how complex our environmental relationships have been.
Objectives:
Students will learn to contextualize major periods of human history within dynamic ecological and cultural relations, and to recognize key concepts for thinking about environmental relations that have shaped material life across many millennia. Students will read primary documents and secondary texts on these themes. Lectures and tutorials will explore the material in greater depth. Exams and the term paper will be the means by which the professor and teaching assistants will evaluate student comprehension of the course material.
Required Readings:
All readings will be available digitally via the Internet, the SFU Electronic Journals portal, or the Canvas Course Site.
Course Evaluation
Weekly Quizzes: 10%
Midterm: 30%
Paper: 30%
Final: 30%
Objectives:
Students will learn to contextualize major periods of human history within dynamic ecological and cultural relations, and to recognize key concepts for thinking about environmental relations that have shaped material life across many millennia. Students will read primary documents and secondary texts on these themes. Lectures and tutorials will explore the material in greater depth. Exams and the term paper will be the means by which the professor and teaching assistants will evaluate student comprehension of the course material.
Required Readings:
All readings will be available digitally via the Internet, the SFU Electronic Journals portal, or the Canvas Course Site.
Course Evaluation
Weekly Quizzes: 10%
Midterm: 30%
Paper: 30%
Final: 30%
