Changing Nature: A History of Climatic and Environmental Knowledge

What is the environment? What is the global climate or the weather? Many scientific disciplines devote themselves to the study of these phenomena, providing the building blocks for our knowledge of the earth as a planetary system. How did this come about? And how should we think about the various sciences of the earth?

This course applies a historical and philosophical perspective to the sciences of the earth—including ecology, geology, oceanography, meteorology, climate science, glaciology, and geography. To earth and climate science students, it provides an opportunity to reflect on fundamental questions about the practice of doing science, and on such critical topics as the dynamics between science and society or the nature of scientific expertise. To other students, it offers an introduction to a field that has had an outsize impact on the humanities and social sciences through data on climate change and the concept of the Anthropocene.

This course traces the traditions that gave rise to today’s earth sciences from the seventeenth century to the present, but also explores ways of knowing climate and environment in other times and places. Scientific knowledge of the planet draws on tangled histories of speculation and observation, collecting and classification, instrument making and model building. These sciences are shaped by social context, by field work and lab work, and by empire, exploitation and extraction. They range across different landscapes, from the deep sea up into the stratosphere. By reflecting on the ideas and circumstances that have shaped the sciences of the earth, students will learn to reflect on and position their own scientific or scholarly knowledge, both among other academic disciplines and within a wider societal context. Thus they gain critical skills in an era when the sciences of the earth have assumed a crucial role in debates both inside and outside academia.