Una historia ambiental del mundo (El Antropoceno)

This is an environmental history course, focusing on the human transformations and impacts to the land, water, and atmosphere of our biosphere.  The aim is to provide students with insights to environmental sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development from historical examples.  The course concludes with important ecological and environmental innovations that hold the promise for true sustainability.  

No prior knowledge is required for this class, only an interest in history, world cultures, ecology, and scientific innovation.  

Course Description 

All organisms modify their environments; people are no different.  However, humankind has so drastically changed the life-sustaining the biosphere that the scientists have declared the earth has entered into an age of the Anthropocene (an ecological age defined by human impacts) .  Ecologists are now witnessing deforestation, desertification, fishery depletion, species extinction, aquifer depletion, and the loss of arable land throughout the biosphere that is now threatening global sustainability ... that is, unless action is taken to redress these issues.  

In this environmental history course, students will examine the human habitation of the biosphere across time and the globe, looking for lessons in true sustainability.   The aim is to empower students with a sense of hope and optimism for a better future by learning from past mistakes.  

Course Structure

The class will be an interactive lecture, complete with slides that students may keep (as a PDF) for future reference.  Student discussion (with myself and other students) will be encouraged, but not required -- listening is learning too !  

Week 1 - Easter Island 

We begin with the collapse of the Easter Island (Rapa Nui) society, and the conflicting views of historians on its causes.  The Easter Islanders were an "outpost" of a trans-pacific Polynesian civilization.  Theirs is often used as a case study for ecological collapse: once a thriving people, the islanders fell into catastrophic collapse resulting from multiple factors including invasive exotics (Polynesian rat), deforestation, and warfare.   By the time of discovery by European travelers, all that remained were their impressive stone monuments, a denuded treeless landscape, and evidence that famine caused a collapse of a once great civilization.  Students will critical examine multiple perspectives from several historians, and all the lessons can be learned about historical science itself and this case study.

Week 2 - Hunter, Gatherer, and Pastoral Societies of the Paleolithic (and today)

We examine ancient and contemporary societies whose ecological lifestyle is hunting and gathering, or pastoral herding, looking for insights to these adaptations to the land, the trade-offs they required, and their ecological impacts.  

Week 3 - The Agriculturalists of the Mesolithic and Neolithic

We examine the transition to agriculture -- its advantages, disadvantages, and ecological consequences.   Special attention is given to the meso- and neolithic cultures of southwest Asia (Levant, Turkey, and the Zargos region of Iran), China, Egypt, India, and Mesoamerica.  We will also examine the types of crops and animals that were domesticated. 

Week 4 - Bronze and Iron Age Empires 

We examine the first agrarian empires including the Akkadian, Sumerian, Mayan, Egyptian, and the Indus River Valley civilization, as well as their ecological adaptions, their consequences, and what befell each in turn.  We then turn to the emergence of the Roman and Persian empires in their wake, and their innovations and ecological trade-offs.  

Week 5 - Feudalism of the Middle Ages

The economic and agricultural strategy called feudalism would define much of the world in the Middle Ages, from Europe to Asia.  This came with innovations (e.g., crop rotation, three-field rotation, heavy plough technology) and corresponding consequences that came with increased human population levels that became possible with the increased agricultural output (e.g., locust, rinderpest, epidemics like the plague, famine).  The various consequences of feudalism will be examined, including the limitations on diet from reliance on only certain crops.  

Week 6 - The Industrial Age 

Fossil fuels, beginning with coal and then later with oil and other hydrocarbon based fuels, enabled the former agrarian peasantry to transition to industrial jobs, and new lifestyles with the emergence of a true middle class.  However, fossil fuels, while enabling much of humanity to explore new possibilities in employment (other than agrarian peasantry), has come with possibly disastrous changes to the atmosphere resulting in climate change that threaten both arable land and our food production.  We examine the myriad advantages and trade-off from this fossil-fueled prosperity, and what lessons can be learned for today.

Week 7 - The Post-Industrial Technological Age

Renewal energy and the hopes of transitioning from fossil fuels defined the latter half of the 20th Century.  However, change has been slow, and renewable carbon-neutral economies exist today as more 'science fiction' than actual fact.  We examine these technologies from nuclear (fission), fusion, photovoltaic, solar furnace, wind, hydro, and geothermal, as well as the ecological consequences resulting from the same.  Also examined will be geo-engineering proposals to modify the atmosphere to mitigate climate change impacts, as well as the possible consequences resulting from the same.  

Week 8 - The 21st Century and Beyond 

Perhaps more than techno-optimism in renewables and geo-engineering are those strategies that empower individuals to lessen their ecological 'footprint' on the biosphere through recycling, upcycling, localism with respect to food security, and 'living simply so that other may simply live' strategies of ecological justice.   It is an approach that embraces innovation, but is not solely dependent upon it for solving ecological and environmental problems of today, since it embraces the wisdom of hunter/gatherer and pastoralist societies of the past, as well as the other historical lessons learned throughout this course.  The aim is to empower students with a sense of personal agency in creating the world they wish to see.