Earth on Fire: Global Environmental History since 1492

4 credits · Undergraduate

The past five hundred years have witnessed the rapid transformation of the earth’s biosphere, resulting in biodiversity loss, species extinction, deforestation, land-use change, and the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions impacting the stability of the earth system. This class examines the origins of these environmental crises by studying global transformations of environment and society since the fifteenth century, emphasizing the intensifying resource demands of imperial globalization, industrial capitalism, commodity frontiers, unfree labor, food systems, and postwar economic development. By ending in the late twentieth century, the course also situates the ideas and politics that have emerged to imagine new environmental futures.