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School of History · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
How can history help us understand the environmental problems we face today? What has shaped the relationships between people and environments in the past? This unit offers an introduction to global environmental history on a planetary scale, focusing on the period since 1945. In this course, we examine the profound transformation of the relationship between humans and the environment that has unfolded exponentially since 1945. Through a series of case studies and stories we will examine how the human footprint has grown, and its socioeconomic, political, and ecological impacts. This unit is organised both chronologically and thematically, allowing students to explore agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions; energy and technology; development and decolonisation; disease; capitalism; urbanisation; conservation and environmentalism; and anthropogenic climate change. This unit offers an historical perspective on our modern environmental condition through an examination of the changing interactions between people and our planet. It explores the influences on human dealings with the natural world, the ways that humans have changed the natural world, and how humans have responded to environmental change.
Primary source museum report (1000 words)
Learning outcomes 2, 3
Research essay (2000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2
Tutorial participation including source presentation
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Final open-book examination ( 2 hours)
Learning outcomes 4, 5
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 36 hours of contact over 12 weeks: 24 hours of lectures and 12 hours of tutorial and tutorial-like activities; and b) 94 hours of independent student research, reading and writing.
J.R. McNeill & Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945, Harvard University Press, 2014. [Online-ANU] Preliminary Reading · Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Fawcett, 1962. [ANU] · Graeme Davison, Car Wars: how the car won our hearts and conquered our cities, Allen & Unwin, 2004. [ANU] · Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier (eds), Varieties of Environmentalism: essays north and south, Earthscan, 1997. [ANU] · Neil M. Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius, Harvard University Press, 2019. · J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: an environmental history of the twentieth-century world, Norton, 2000. [ANU] · Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011. [ANU] · Haripriya Rangan, Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan history, Verso, 2000. · Libby Robin, Paul Warde and Sverker Soerlin (eds), Future of Nature, Yale University Press, 2013. [ANU] · Vasant Saberwal and Mahesh Rangarajan (eds), Battles over Nature: Science and the Politics of Conservation, Permanent Black, 2003. [ANU] · Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth, Columbia University Press, 2018. [ANU]