Global Environmental History

Units

1. 1

   Humans in nature: foundations

   3 lessons

   1. What environmental history studiesState what environmental history asks, using Worster's three levels and the idea of nature as an actor, name the field's founding works from Crosby to McNeill, and place the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration on a chain of dates from the first Homo sapiens.
   2. Fire, hunting and the megafaunaExplain how control of fire let humans reshape landscapes, compare the dates of human arrival in Australia and the Americas with the dates of megafauna extinction, and weigh the overkill, climate and combined explanations.
   3. The end of the Ice Age and the HoloceneDescribe the warming after the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, the Younger Dryas cold return, the start of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, and explain why the stable, warmer Holocene made farming possible.
2. 2

   The Neolithic revolution

   3 lessons

   1. Centers of domesticationLocate the independent centers where wheat and barley, rice and millet, maize and potatoes were first domesticated, date them on a timeline, and explain Vavilov's centers and Diamond's argument about why some regions led.
   2. What farming changedExplain how farming raised population, changed health through crowding and animal diseases, and fostered hierarchy and storage, and weigh Diamond's and Scott's argument that farming was a trap against the view that it was a gain.
   3. Irrigation, cities and early statesExplain how irrigation farming in Mesopotamia, the Nile and the Indus valleys supported the first cities and states, how Mesopotamia's irrigation led to salinization, and assess Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis.
3. 3

   The Columbian Exchange and the first global era, 1400 to 1750

   3 lessons

   1. Crops and animals across the AtlanticName the main crops and animals that crossed the Atlantic after 1492 in each direction, explain Crosby's term the Columbian Exchange, and measure two effects: the potato in Ireland and Europe, and horses on the Great Plains.
   2. Disease and the collapse of Native populationsExplain why smallpox, measles and other Old World diseases devastated Native American populations after 1492, trace the 1520 smallpox epidemic in Mexico, read the decline of central Mexico's population in the Cook and Borah estimates, and weigh disease against labor and violence as causes.
   3. The Little Ice Age and the 17th-century crisisDescribe the cooling of about 1300 to 1850, its natural causes (solar minima and volcanic eruptions) and a proposed human cause (the Americas' depopulation), and assess Geoffrey Parker's argument that climate cooling helped drive the general crisis of the seventeenth century in Europe and China.
4. 4

   Plantations, silver and commodity frontiers

   3 lessons

   1. Sugar and the plantation complexExplain how sugar plantations in Barbados and Saint-Domingue transformed island landscapes through deforestation and monoculture, and how the plantation system depended on the transatlantic slave trade.
   2. Silver, Potosí and mercuryDescribe silver mining at Potosi, the mita labour system and the mercury amalgamation process, the poisoning of workers and the land, and the flows of silver to Spain and to China that tied the world economy together.
   3. Furs, timber and whalesExplain how the beaver fur trade, the Atlantic cod fishery and the whale hunt extended commodity frontiers across the northern oceans and forests, how each led to depletion, and how substitutes ended some of them.
5. 5

   Industrial revolutions and fossil fuels

   3 lessons

   1. Coal and the British industrial revolutionExplain how coal and the steam engine, from Newcomen to Watt, powered British industrialization, read the growth of British coal output from 1700 to 1900, and weigh Pomeranz's argument that coal and colonies explain the Great Divergence.
   2. Industrial cities, smoke and riversDescribe the smoke and water pollution of nineteenth-century industrial cities, the London cholera epidemics and the Great Stink of 1858, and the first regulation and engineering responses, including Bazalgette's sewers.
   3. Oil, electricity and the second industrial revolutionExplain how oil, the internal combustion engine and electricity transformed energy use between 1859 and 1950, Rockefeller's role, the rise of Middle East oil, and the changing shares of biomass, coal, oil and gas in world energy.
6. 6

   Empire, resources and landscapes

   3 lessons

   1. Colonial forestry, irrigation and famineExplain British India's forest laws and canal building, and the El Nino drought famine of 1876 to 1878, using Mike Davis's account of how colonial policy, markets and climate combined to cause mass death.
   2. Rubber, extraction and the CongoExplain how the rubber boom in King Leopold's Congo and in the Amazon rested on forced extraction of wild rubber, with exports rising about seventy-five fold between 1890 and 1900, and how violence, protest and plantation rubber ended the boom.
   3. The American West, bison and the Dust BowlExplain the slaughter of the bison in the nineteenth century, the plowing of the Great Plains, and the 1930s Dust Bowl, and place them on a chart of bison numbers and a map of the Dust Bowl region.
7. 7

   The Great Acceleration since 1945

   3 lessons

   1. Carbon dioxide and the warming recordRead the Keeling curve of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958 and its seasonal sawtooth, compare it with ice-core records of the last 800,000 years, and relate the rise to the global temperature record.
   2. Population, cities and consumptionRead the growth of world population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 8 billion in 2022, the rise of urbanization, and the standard Great Acceleration indicators of human activity and Earth system change.
   3. The Green Revolution and synthetic fertilizerExplain Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, the Haber-Bosch process for synthetic nitrogen, irrigation and the dams boom as the basis of the Green Revolution, and read the rise of cereal yields and fertilizer use and its environmental costs.
8. 8

   Environmental movements and climate politics

   3 lessons

   1. Silent Spring and the rise of environmentalismExplain Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and the DDT controversy, the first Earth Day in 1970 and the creation of the EPA, and place the main American environmental laws on a timeline.
   2. Environmental justice and movements of the Global SouthExplain the environmental justice movement that grew from Love Canal and Warren County, the Chipko movement in India, and Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement in Kenya, and show where these movements arose.
   3. Climate negotiations from Rio to ParisTrace the main international environmental agreements, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the 1992 Rio summit and climate convention, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, and read emissions by country to see why climate negotiation is hard.