About Course
Human activities leave a footprint on the environment. From simple subsistence gathering, to agriculture and animal husbandry, to complex market and industrial transactions, the impact of our activities on the natural world varies greatly. Conversely, ecological forces— weather patterns, food and water availability, floods, droughts, and cyclones— shape and transform people’s living conditions, their social and cultural beliefs and practices, and even the rise and fall of governments. This course is designed an introduction to human-environment relations as studied in the social sciences— both how human activities and social and political forces shape the natural world, and conversely, how nature shapes human experiences, beliefs and political systems. How do hunter-gatherers provision for food? How does their relationship to their environment differ from plantation workers, farmers, or fishers? How do landscapes shape cultural beliefs? How do resource conflicts occur? How do people survive in toxic environments? How do humans and animals coexist in the wild? What are the environmental impacts of lifestyle choices in urban, industrialised societies- food, waste, travel, and technology use?
Through such examples, the course will accessibly introduce key themes in the humanistic studies of the environment, such as extinction, labour, extraction, risk, climate change, and conservation. The course will use a range of texts, spanning disciplines and approaches, primarily sociology, anthropology, environmental history and political ecology, in addition to current news and media reportage, and film.
