ENVR 300 - Environmental Thought

3 Credit(s)

ENVR 300 will look at the many different ways that human beings across times, cultures, and geographies have conceived of and spoken about environments, land, life, and ecosystems. While these categories somewhat oversimplify, this will involve engaging artistic, historical, natural scientific, philosophical, religious, and social scientific approaches to thought and expression about environments. Because we’ll be moving from discipline to discipline, we’ll use a historical frame for the course as a way of organizing and structuring the material. This will have the added benefit of allowing us to investigate contributions from a number of different cultural traditions. In turn, this will give us the opportunity to break from the constraints embodied in the assumptions and prejudices of our own societal and institutional contexts. In very broad strokes, we will start in ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Andean, and Greek civilizations, move through medieval Mesoamerica and the Middle East, and finally end in modern Europe and the Americas.

Throughout the course, we will be focusing particularly on the ways we humans have conceived of environments in relation to matters of great social and cultural significance. In the first half of the course, we’ll focus largely on ways that humans have conceived of the relationships between humanity, the natural world, and the divine. In the second half of the course, we’ll focus on ways in which environments and environmental thought are implicated in matters of justice. Here, we will pay particular attention to the phenomenon of residential segregation-the physical separation of living spaces of people from different identity groups. While most people have some familiarity with the history of racialized residential segregation-it was, after all, a significant focus of the Civil Rights Movement-few recognize the extent to which residential segregation plays a significant role in most Americans’ lives today (n.b. Black Lives Matter, COVID-19). In order to illustrate this, we’ll look at significant impacts of residential segregation from a number of different disciplinary perspectives (e.g. Biological, Ecological, Philosophical, Political, Psychological, and Sociological).