FYSP 127 - Race-ing the Environment: Historical Approaches to Race and Environmental History

FC SSCI CD WINT

4 credits
Nature, wilderness, and race seem like basic terms with well-established meanings. But as we will explore together in this course, these concepts are in fact socially constructed, created by people in different historical moments and subject to change over time. This course explores American environmental history from a perspective that foregrounds questions of race. We will consider how European colonialism changed the American landscape; ideas about white masculinity and the founding of National Parks; different racial groups’ cultural beliefs about the natural world; whiteness in the mainstream environmental movement; the racialized impacts of climate change; and environmental racism and environmental justice.