Chapter 6: Environmental History Flashcards
1
Q
Virus Cultures
A
- Microbes make humans
- Domesticating animals and living in cities created the conditions for epidemic diseases like measles and smallpox
- These diseases come from animals we eat like cows, pigs, chickens, etc.
- Zoonotic diseases originate in wild animal populations and jump to humans
- Conditions for these diseases were not widespread before settled agriculture and urban society
2
Q
Black Death
A
- killed half of the worlds population between 1346-1353
- Y. pestis evolved during the ice age
- it jumped to humans in central Asia after agricultural revolution 6,000 years ago partly due to the medieval climactic anomaly
3
Q
Medieval Climactic Anomaly
A
Warm weather stimulated crop growth which brought rats carrying fleas; this helped the Black Death become a pandemic
4
Q
Environmental History
A
- formally began in 1972
- studies the last 250,000 years
- treats nature as an active agent in dynamic relation with human agents changing the world we experience
- tells a story of complex, uneven, indeterminate, contingent changes across multiple scales for multiple reasons
- agency, exceptionalism, scale, and change
- Earth is a self regulating system with its own agency
- How to understand and interpret the balance of co-evolution that prior and current civilizations achieved
- ASEH: established in 1977; American Society for Environmental History
5
Q
Historical “habitat of mind”
A
the ability to see things in a larger context and understand that change is caused by multiple agents, including non-humans with many complex unintended consequences
6
Q
Arcadian Nature
A
- Harmony, equality, and peace
- Humanity’s existential alienation originated with the attempt to dominate nature with technology
- in losing nature man lost himself.
7
Q
What are the main things Environmental History studies?
A
- Dynamics of natural ecosystems over time in relation to human activity (emphasizes biological and physical changes to explain the structure and distribution of natural environments and how they affect human societies)
- interactions of natural ecosystems, socio-economic systems, and technology (emphasizes the evolution of tools and economic modes of production and their consequences on human habitats)
- the evolution of cultural ideas, values, and beliefs about nature (concerned with ideas such as “nature”, “environment”, “wilderness”, and “man”
8
Q
History for the Future
A
- culture as an adaptation?
- environmental history treats cities as structured human relationships with the natural environment, part of the ecosystems within which they exist, although they may make extensive changes within them
