Environmental Change and the Contemporary Human Niche

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The rate and expanse of human-caused global environmental change is unmatched in our evolutionary history. It is widely argued that these actions have produced enough change that the stable conditions found in the Holocene epoch of the last 11,000 years are over and we are transitioning to a new Earth Systems trajectory and epoch dubbed the Anthropocene - the time when humans are the single largest driver of geologic change. In this course, we will seek to understand what characteristics of the contemporary human niche - the myriad socio-ecological practices, policies, institutions and lifeways that comprise how humans live their everyday lives around the globe - are producing the Anthropocene and what the implications are for different groups of people. We will pay specific attention to the distribution of global environmental change and corresponding risk to human health, historical and contemporary contributions to the production of this change, and what the implications are for human health, equality, and environmental justice. The focus of this course is more towards breadth than depth - we will sample and discuss many topics but will be unable to fully dive into each in a holistic way. But, this is by design, as the point is for us to develop a mutually negotiated and understood functional language and base understanding of the topics such that after this course you are empowered to engage the topics most compelling to you and have the skills requisite to effectively dive in.