Sustainability or Collapse? Environmental Change and the Past, Present, and Future of Society

Instructor: Professor Rutherford V. Platt
                Department of Environmental Studies

Did climate change contribute to the disappearance of Viking society in Greenland? Did soil erosion lead to the downfall of the Mayan civilization, once the most advanced society in the western hemisphere? How did other societies survive the same environmental changes? What can we learn from these past societies? This Seminar will permit us to explore these questions and will take us away from artificial debates and simplistic treatments of environmental change common in the popular media. We will take the long view, comparing present day societies to various historical and pre-historical societies from the past 10,000 years. We will evaluate many possible environmental factors (such as climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, and human population growth) as well as social factors contributing to the disappearance of societies. The course will rely on Jared Diamond's 2006 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and other fresh and provocative sources such as documentaries, recent books and magazine articles, and articles in the scientific literature.