Climate and Collapse: Environmental Change and the Fate of Civilizations

Undergraduate / Graduate

The "climate crisis" is upon us. Public warnings about global warming have been widely publicized since the mid-1970s. Multiple science and policy based analyses have provided a range of suggestions on how human societies must adapt to a world of accelerating climate change. But climate change and the profoundly related problems of environmental degradation and resource depletion that accompany that change are nothing new. This undergraduate seminar will explore past, present and projected future scenarios of climate change and its cascading effects on human civilization. We will analyze empirical cases of previous civilizational collapse driven, in great part, by climate change as documented in historical, archaeological and paleoecological records in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We will pose questions about the relationship between natural and anthropogenic climate change, as well as closely intertwined stressors such as transformations in land use, biodiversity loss, and nutrient imbalances that have contributed to social and population dislocations over large expanses of space and time. After analyzing previous cases of societal collapse, the course will conclude with reflections on "what now?" How do we understand the physical and social consequences of climate change, and what steps can humanity take to avert, or, more likely, adapt to these transformational processes to avoid systemic civilizational collapse?