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《美国环境史专题》——短期专家研究生课程

《美国环境史专题》——短期专家研究生课程教学介绍

主讲人:

凯瑟琳?布鲁斯南(Kathleen Brosnan),美国俄克拉荷马大学历史系教授,美国环境史学会前任主席,美国环境史学会突出贡献获得者,在美国环境史、城市史和农业史方面具有很深的造诣。

课程简介:

本课程将依托凯瑟琳?布鲁斯南教授的研究成果和教学实践,并结合中国学生的学习兴趣和拟研究的方向,从美国环境史当中选取若干重要主题展开教学与交流。具体内容将涉及美国城市环境史、乡村环境史、美国各州与环境法的关系、美国的能源环境问题及其在国际环境事务中扮演的角色。这一课程是我校人文学院世界史学科环境史研究生课程教学的有机组成部分,可以丰富学生学习和研究美国历史、了解美国现代化进程的视角,并扩大他们的学术视野。

时 间:2016年12月6日周二上午9:30—12:00

12月8日周四上午9:30—12:00;14:30—17:00

12月13日周二上午9:30—12:00

12月15日周四上午9:30—12:00;14:30—17:00

地 点:365bat线上平台历史学系,文北楼309教室

Special Topics on American Environmental History

1. Urban Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America

Cities were the engines of economic and environmental change as the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation in thenineteenth century. By controlling themechanism of finance,transportation ,andcommunications, cities such as Chicago, or Denvor, came to dominate distant hinterlands, alpine mining camps and dry farms on the plains became joined in ecological degradation in the pursuit ofquick profits. Regional cities competed with metropolises to define their economic niche, and succeeded most often by reimagining the nature that surrounded them as productive landscapes or scenic commodities. As the nation moved into the twentieth century,however, the growing populations of western cities, such as Denver, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, pushed urban leaders to capture distant resource, particularly riparian resource, creating new tensions between city and country.

2. Food, Agriculture, and the Environment

Throughout history, food needs bonded humans to nature in the most elemental way. The transition toagriculture constituted slow, but revolutionary ecologicaltransformations. After 1500C.E, agriculture goods, as well as pests that undermined them, centered speciesshifting between four continents–Africa, South America, North America, and Europe In the United States, by the nineteenth century, more commercial efforts simplified ecosystems Improved technologies and market mechanisms facilitated surpluses in the nineteenth century that fueled industrialization andurbanization . In the twentieth century,industrial agriculture involved expensive machinery, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and antibiotics in pursuit of higher outputs and profits. Over time,however, consumers’ relations with their food and the nature that produced it became more and more attenuated and increasingly Americans and other consumers began toquestion the health of what they ate and the health of the ecosystems which produced it.

3. Law and the Environment

Laws represent a society’s normative values and reflect the goals and policies of those in authority. Likeagriculture systems, legal ideas migrated with people around the world. U.S.law, for example, drew upon legal traditions in England and to a lesser extent, other European nations, but also evolved in America’ssocial, economic, and physical environments. And concepts from US environmental law circulated around the globe at the end of the twentieth century. In the Untied States, the law facilitated both the exploitation andprotection of the environment. During the transition to capitalism, the privatization of natural resources emerged alongside various forms of common property, including national parks. Legal subfields emerged over time to guide distinct social, economic, and political behaviors, reflecting the ever-increasing complexity of human societies. Environmental law developed in the United States and other nations after World War two toadjudicate the use of government authority to protect the natural environment and human health from the impacts of pollution and development. Long before this subfield existed, however law constituted a profound cultural influence on theenvironment. Americans historically employed property law and nuisance law to define human relations with nature and to mediate between humans in disputes about resources.

4. The State and the Evolution of Species

The historian Edmund Russell and others introduced the concept of evolutionary history. Russell notes that humans tend to see history and evolution springing fromseparate roots, one grounded in the humanworld and the other in the natural world. At the same time, humans perhaps have become the most powerful force shaping evolution today. In turn, human-shaped evolution in other species has been an importantfactor shaping human history. Evolutionary history unites history and biology. This lecture addresses the role of the American state in particular in shaping evolution through a variety of policies designed to modernize American agriculture. The state became a dynamic actor of intervention and molded not only crops, but, through its actions, thevarious pests and microbes that “feed” on those crops. In particular, I will examine the role of the state in the wine grape industry and in the evolution of phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that has spurred global ecological crises.This subject should be of interest as well given China’s emerging wine industry.

5. Energy Capitals: Global Influence, Local Impact

Energy and environment exist in symbiosis. Environmental factors shape the availability and choice of energy supplies; theproduction and use of energy have far-reaching impacts on the environment. In the United States, cheap, plentiful energy fed the nation’s growth, contributing to a culture of abundance that shaped the American character. Although waste and environmental degradation accompanied the profligate use of fossil fuels in particular, consumers accepted these costs asnecessary by-products of individualism and capitalism, often ignoring the inequitable distribution of such costs in the population. As the price of energyproduction rose, however, consumer attitudes aboutthe ecological impacts underwent asimultaneous transition. And it is in the discovery of this mixed blessing that American cities and regions, such as Houston and Los Angeles, are increasingly tied to other global energy capitals, such as Tampico, Stavanger, and Perth. The intersection of fossil fuel production and use andurbanization in specific locations around the world resulted in huge supplies of energy and large amounts of capital, but often masked long-term effects including the transformation of regional economies, fundamental changes in labor markets ,highsocial costs in environmental quality and health, and the shaping of regionalin frastrucure.

6.My Way to Environmental History