Environmental History course: Third class: Global Environmental History

Yesterday we had the third meeting of my fall term Environmental History course.  Our topic was global environmental history.

This class took some thought: how to discuss for three hours with 55 students the entirety of global environmental history?  I wanted to avoid the quick tour (15 minutes on Africa, 20 minutes on Asia...).  Instead, I settled on examining the concept itself of global history, and how we can combine a view of change at the global level with the objective of environmental history of understanding peoples' experiences with their own environments.  We got there through a series of short lectures, interspersed with a video, analysis of primary sources, and small-group discussions.

I began with a view of the global environment, followed by various views of this environment expressed by the numbers: human population growth, global fish and agricultural production, oil production, rising global temperatures, and increasing numbers of protected areas.  These figures are attempts to represent various aspects of global environmental change.  They are useful in their way, but don't tell us much about how peoples' relations with the environment have changed over time:

Then, we discussed the Anthropocene, introducing this concept as an example of a recent attempt to place in context global environmental change.  I presented this as an example of a concept (like many) that has both scientific and social definitions, and how this has been the source of much debate:

We then returned to the question of relating global environmental change to people.  I introduced this through the valuable video, "Events in the collective environmental memory of humanity" presented on Youtube by Jan Oosthoek.  This overview of 22 events generated much discussion: about how we understand environmental and human change, and how we decide what counts as a "global" event:

Then we considered how we understand the links between global and local environmental change.  We did this through two exercises.  First, we looked at how we study the local consequences of a global event.  Our example was the Tambora volcanic eruption in 1815, which caused the global "Year Without a Summer".  Using the terrific article and resources put together by Alan MacEachern and Michael O'Hagan, we studied primary sources (mainly newspaper articles from 1816 and 1817) in order to practice constructing an understanding of how this event was experienced in eastern Canada: snow in June, food shortages, etc.:

Then, we looked at these global-local links in a different way, by considering how the global ecological changes accompanying imperial expansion (settlement, trade, etc.) were experienced in our own region.  For this I built on last week's discussion of the environmental history of our own university, connecting local changes with the wider discussion of the Columbian Exchange:

And, with the final small-group discussion exercise identifying the key points from the class, that was it for this week.  Next week: a field trip, rain or shine.