Reading the Earth

Catalog description

This course introduces students to a wide variety of cultural perspectives on the ways that nature is conceived in its relation to human agency, social organization, and political behavior. As we become increasingly caught up in a new and ever-changing dynamic of climate change that is transforming cultures and societies globally, understanding our relation to nature becomes a pressing global challenge. How are we to confront the environmental changes caused by industrialization and continuing technological change? How have our views of nature and of ourselves been transformed by urbanization and technological change? Does the global character of production inevitably lead to the dilution of individual and local identities together with previous conceptions of nature? Constructed around a series of discrete problems that will be contextualized historically and culturally, the course strives for a unifying, global perspective on the environmental crisis and will address a range of today's most pressing eco-critical dilemmas.