MA Wilderness and Civilisation Studies

Overview

The global ecological crisis provides an increasingly defining context for both politics and international relations, and wider processes of economic and social development. As attention is focused on the combination of population growth and economic modernization, and specifically the generalization of western patterns of resource and energy consumption, the spectre of global warming has become paradigmatic of the more general problem of sustainability. However, this emphasis on economic modernization is misleading. The tacit opposition between modernity and tradition implies that anthropogenic ecological change is a uniquely modern phenomenon; that capitalist industrialization and the concomitant process of global integration marked a point of departure from a more sustainable and ecologically balanced mode of development that has been lost, but might somehow be recovered. And, at a deeper level, this opposition builds also upon an affinity with the structure of pervasive fall-from-grace mythologies and the states of pre-Lapsarian, Edenic harmony that they evoke.

The course examines anthroposphere-biosphere dynamics - the relationship between humanity and wild-nature - from a number of different disciplinary perspectives: ecology, anthropology, history, and philosophy. Materialist analyses are juxtaposed against the influential literary tradition out of which much of the language and categories of the environmentalist sensibility emerged. Contemporary concerns around sustainability are examined in the light of a temporal frame extending into both the deep past of (pre)historic, social development, and the techno-social futures intimated by ongoing developments in the life-sciences.

Course Objectives

The central objectives are four-fold:

To frame contemporary concerns about sustainability in relation to the dynamics of human ecology - the relationship between culture, social organization and ecology - operating over much longer time-frames.
To examine the socio-cultural constructions of 'wild-nature' that have informed and structured the rising tide of ecological consciousness and critique over the last two centuries.
To introduce students to a number of intellectual and literary traditions which have a bearing on these questions.
To use projected developments in the life-sciences and contemporary exercises in futurology as a foil for thinking about both likely and possible futures for the dynamic relation between wilderness & civilization.

Indicative Modules

The Poets of Nature: The Classical Tradition of Wild-Nature Literature

Gilbert White, Darwin, Christopher Jeffries, John Burroughts, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Rachel Carson, Sigurd F Olson, Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez. Examination of what has become a canon in writing about wild-nature, and the influence of this tradition in framing the wider environmentalist sensibility. Students examine a single author against the tradition as a whole.

Human Ecology & Ecological Anthropology

Introduction to the materialist tradition of human ecology, linking Malthus and Darwin to twentieth century anthropology of Julian Steward, Leslie White, Marvin Harris, Roy Rappaport, Harold Conkin, Roy Ellen & Tim Ingold. Themes include: environmental determinism and cultural ecology; ecological principles in anthropological analysis - 'system', 'niche', energy flows and nutrient cycling; the historical ecology of agriculture; cultural regulation of eco-systems

Environmental History

Review of the maturing field of environmental history (highlighting, amongst others, the work of A. Crosby, Jared Diamond, W. McNeill, W. Cronon, D. Worster, Roderick Nash)

Environmental Philosophy

From the Benthamite rationale for animal liberation advanced by Peter Singer to the Leopoldian Land Ethic championed by J. Baird Callicot, this session reviews three decades of eco-philosophy and the attempt by professional philosophers to establish a solid foundation for an environmental ethic.

Biosphere, Noosphere, Gaia & Anthroposphere

Over the course of the twentieth century a number of inter-disciplinary mavericks sought to capture the human interaction with the wider geo-physical and ecological development of the planet, using concepts that embodied a prescient appreciation of the emergent dynamics of complex systems. This session reconstructs the intellectual genealogy that links Seuss' conception of the biosphere, the conception of the Noosphere developed by Vernadsky, Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin, the Gaian ecology of James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis and finally the contemporary use of the term anthroposphere by sociologists such as Johan Goudsblom.

Techno-Social Scenarios & the Environmentalism of the Deep Future.

Over a century ago biogeographers such as George Perkins Marsh and Vernadsky had recognised the extent to which humanity had become a geo-physical and ecological agent in the evolution of the planet. This final session examines the global trajectory of social development along side possible technological futures (particularly in relation to the life sciences) and asks two related questions:

To what extent (and over what time-frame) might human influence over planetary geophysical and biological systems become self-conscious and subject to controlled interventions (e.g. 'reflexive evolution')?
How might the ensuing environmentalisms differ from their twentieth century antecedents?