The Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Undergraduate / Graduate

How has "nature" been understood and investigated in the modern world? Building upon diverse approaches to environmental history and philosophy, the history of science, and cultural studies, this discussion-based course surveys the major frameworks through which the environment has been understood, investigated, and transformed since the origins of global modernity. Because of its outsized impact (intellectually and materially) on the globe, North American environmentalism and understandings of nature are used as our point of departure. Starting with debates about what to name our current epoch, the course approaches shifting definitions of environmental knowledge through decreasing scales of analysis, from the global, to communities and ecosystems, to species and individuals, ending with the microscopic. The course asks questions such as: What historical and cultural trends shape our current understandings of nature and the environment? At what scales can and should we intervene to shift the ways we know and interact with the natural world? How and to whom should the answers to these complex questions be communicated?