Environmental Histories of the Pacific

Undergraduate / Graduate

The Pacific Ocean is the world's largest geographic feature. It spans 64 million square miles, is encircled by 83,000 miles of coastline, contains 25,000 islands, and is home to one-third of the Earth's human population. European and American explorers of the 18th century deemed the Pacific an immense and restrictive void; historians of the late-20th century echoed such sentiments when referring to the Pacific as "Earth's Empty Quarter." Recent scholarship has sought to reframe the Pacific as a constellation of overlapping "worlds" by charting interconnected patterns of human mobility, ecological exchange, economic development, and environmental destruction. Focusing on the past 250 years, this discussion-based research seminar will adopt micro-historical, comparative, and transnational methods to examine the environmental histories of three Pacific worlds: Australasia; Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia; and the Northeastern Pacific. Throughout the course, we will investigate how race, ethnicity, gender, class, politics, and health shaped and were shaped by large-scale socio-environmental processes across these regions. Thematic topics include Traditional Environmental Knowledge; Euro-American exploration and settler colonization; environmental extraction and degradation; agricultural, industrial, and urban development; labor migration and commercial growth; disease transmission and demographic change; and imperial expansion, scientific experimentation, and tourism.