Reckoning Environmental Uncertainty: A Global History since 1100

Undergraduate

How have people made decisions about the future when the environment is uncertain? This lecture class provides a global perspective on how societies have tried to understand and live with an unpredictable world. Beginning in 1100, we examine a series of historical episodes when communities faced environmental dangers, uncertain futures, and how they managed risk. Case studies include water and landscape management in the Song Dynasty, navigation across the Pacific Ocean, utopian cities in the Americas, agricultural and urban systems in South Asia, environmental design in West Africa, and the global rise of weather observatories to monitor atmospheric changes. Rather than telling a linear history of progress or decline, the course asks a more fundamental question: how do people claim to know the environment, and how does uncertainty shape that knowledge? Throughout the semester, we examine how different cultures develop their own strategies for understanding a world that has never been entirely predictable. Drawing on the histories of science, technology, architecture, and the environment, students see how debates about risk, planetary health, and expertise have deep historical roots. HU 0 Course cr TTh 4pm-5:15pm