Colonial Ecologies

Catalog description

The rapidly warming planet makes it increasingly clear that the natural and human worlds are deeply intertwined, and that local ecologies are inherently tied to global political and economic processes. While resulting devastation has more recently emerged as a political crisis, the assimilation of local landscapes and ecologies into global social processes has a much deeper history. This class considers the development and intensification of such global connections from the early modern era to the contemporary moment. It contextualizes local ecological changes wrought by expansive colonial powers—poisoned mountains, mono-cropped landscapes, and disappeared forests—within the emergence of a global economy predicated on extraction. The course studies these themes through an interdisciplinary political ecology framework that examines how power operates through the environment, and how nature is in turn produced as a political force.