Origins of environmentalism

Course code: HICL130P

Tutor: Michael Hunter

This course investigates changing views on humans' relations with the natural environment.  The changing ideas of 'nature', from the Greeks to the Early Modern Period provide a pre-history of ecological concern, which becomes explicit in the nineteenth century as wilderness becomes something to be adulated and then preserved in the face of modern civilisation.  Students will be asked to read a series of texts which trace how nature has been conceived through the ages.  Looking at different topics - including health, food, landscape, pastoralism, technology, geology, creationism, colonial exploration and green activism - this course uses a range of historical approaches, combining cultural and intellectual history as well as the history of science, to place today's environmental debates into a long perspective.

Introductory Reading:

R.H. Grove, Green Imperialism 1600-1860 (1995)

Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World 1500-1800 (1983)

M.H.Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959; repr. 1997)

C.J.Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought (1967) [to be sampled selectively]

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1999)

Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution (2006)

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (2004, Princeton ed.)