Week 1
Lesson 1
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. 
 Week 2
Lesson 2
Week 2 - Hunter, Gatherer, and Pastoral Societies
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
Lesson 3
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
Lesson 4
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
Lesson 5
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). 
 Week 6
Lesson 6
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
 Week 7
Lesson 7
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.
 Week 8
Lesson 8
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.