This course investigates a relatively new and exciting genre of historical scholarship: world environmental history with a particular focus on Australia. The course is team taught, and the themes investigated coincide with the research specialty of the teachers.  The first themes are: World Environmental History, (taught by Gregory Barton) Australian Environmental History to World War II, (taught by Tom Griffiths),  and Australian Environmental History from World War II to the present (taught by Nicholas Brown). 

The course begins broadly by examining the ideas of nature held by various cultures throughout history as embodied in primary sources. Gregory Barton will examine the relationship between humans and nature; and the spread of conservationist and environmentalist law and science across the globe through imperialism and trade.  Moving from the Global to the national, Tom Griffiths will then introduce students to twentieth-century debates about Australia’s environmental pasts and futures. In the final section of the course, Dr Nicholas Brown will focus on the intersection between environmental issues and the dynamics of social and political change in post-Word War II Australia. Students will finish the course with an understanding of the place of Australia in world environmental history.

The course will introduce students to a range of issues central to the history of Britain and to that of the contemporary world. It seeks to help students to develop their intellectual resources in three major ways:

• by increasing knowledge and understanding of key issues relating to the development of the environmental movement around the globe, and particularly in Australia.
• by introducing students to important conceptual issues in the study of how humans have impacted the environment
• by relating history to present-day debates on such subjects as deforestation, pollution and climate change.

Student Skills Objectives

Completion of this course enables students to:

• Evaluate the way humans have interacted with their natural environment, and how that environment has affected human society.
• Assess and compare key ideas, themes, and structures that inform environmentalism in the modern age.
• Speak, argue, and write about key concepts, themes and theories in environmental history.
• Reflect on and discuss your own learning as it relates to the subject matter of the course.
• Select and combine primary and secondary evidence from the past to formulate informed positions on topics in environmental history.

Masters students pursuing this course will be expected to submit a major essay of 3,000 words.  They will also be encouraged to form their own discussion group for working through issues relating to the course (this suggestion will be put to students more widely), and encouraged to pursue more independent forms of research (perhaps by formulating their own essay questions or developing topics in collaboration with the course convenor).

Assessment Method:

Essay of 1,500 words (35%);

Essay of 3,000 words (55%);

Tutorial participation (10%).

This course will be team taught by permanent academic staff and fits within their performance expectations.

Prerequisite: completion of a Bachelor of Arts and two courses (12 units) in History at first-year level or with permission of the convenor

Recommended Courses (not prerequisites)

NO VALUE

Preliminary Reading (not required):

 Introductions to issues addressed in the course:

Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (Cambridge, 1998) (paperback)

 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (paperback)

 Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge; 2007) (paperback)

 Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An environmental history, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001

 None of these texts are required preliminary reading.

Prescribed Text: A reading brick that includes primary and secondary material, some not all of it, drawn from the above texts.

NO VALUE