Caring for Country: Hunter Gatherer Ecologies

3 units

What makes humans special? Is it our use of tools? Language? Culture? Humanity has been defined on the basis of its uniquely well-developed capacities for using technology, language, and culturally encoded knowledge and belief systems. In this course, we will explore a new hypothesis of human exceptionalism: a fundamental tendency to cultivate and care for lands. Our genius for reshaping ecosystems and incorporating other species into our societies is intimately linked to our technological and communicative skills. We have used these skills to migrate into and reshape every Earthly environment. We will explore the ethnographies, oral and written histories, and archaeologies, of so-called hunter-gatherers around the world, learning about the ways they shaped and tended their homelands using ecological knowledge systems. In this era of human induced environmental change - from global warming, to mass extinction, to genetic engineering - it is critically important that we look to our species' true ecological history for the wisdom that will help us meet these challenges.