This is a course I’m fairly sure I want to teach at some point.
I think it needs to be taught with a sort of conceptual edge that goes beyond environmental history per se, but also it needs to open up questions about what we mean by “the Anthropocene”, to look closely at various contentious views about when the Anthropocene begins and even more to try and probe some quite different visions of what it will be like to live through an Anthropocenic future.
What I think I’d spend at least half the class on is work that is mostly not consciously using the Anthropocene as its major organizing concept, but that looks incredibly closely at premodern examples of humans sculpting, engineering, or intervening in environments on a scale large enough to change those environments in substantial ways. The obvious places to start are agriculture, urbanization and domestication in early human history. After that there’s a pretty big choice of premodern engineering at large scale (bridges, dams, mills, roads, prescribed burnings, wells and irrigation). And at least a couple of the most environment-altering examples of mining, hunting, or other resource extraction. There I’d really want readings that did a deep materialist dive into the specifics of the extraction, processing and transport.
Then I think the second section of the course has to zoom in on arguments about where those proto-Anthropocenic formations begin to cohere as a global-scale transition towards being the major drivers of all global ecologies. I think that can be a smaller but intense set of readings that really lay out the arguments, especially showcasing the divergence between seeing the Anthropocene as a result of the rise of an imperial, expansionist Western Europe and those that emphasize capitalism. Not necessarily incompatible views, but there is something at stake in that conversation.
Then I think I’d want a few of the most comprehensive portrayals of the contemporary Anthropocene and some of the most visionary, ambitious and contentious assertions about life going forward.
A rough sketch of this maybe course might be:
I. Re-Working the World
James Scott, Against the Grain
Richard Jones, “Why Manure Matters”, in Jones, ed. Manure Matters
Xiujia Huan et al, “Intensification of rice farming and its environmental consequences recorded in a Liangzhu reservoir, China”, Quarternary International, 619: 2022.
Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel
Darcy Morey, Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond
J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires (this seems like an interesting way to get at the ecological impacts of shifting large human populations around)
Tim Beach et al, “Ancient Maya Impacts on the Earth’s Surface”, Quarternary Science Reviews, 124: 2015.
[Still trying find something good, compact and accessible on the environmental impact of early human cities.]
Trying to find good readings on the early history of “consequential production” of the following: peat (as energy source), copper, charcoal, sulfur, salt
Would need a week on monumental constructions with meaningful environmental impacts prior to 1750 or so. Finding it hard to get exactly the readings I want here.
II. The Contested Beginnings of the Anthropocene
Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital
Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocenic Now
Livingston, Self-Devouring Growth
McNeill, The Great Acceleration
Kawa, Amazonia in the Anthropocene
Arboleda, Planetary Mine
The Anthropocenic Future
Tsing, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Purdy, After Nature
Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics
Image credit: "2010_08_03_bos-phx-rno198" by dsearls is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I would suggest The Retreat of the Elephants as a useful text to think with for a course like this: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/186324. It's also interesting as a history text because the sources he uses are often very unlike the sources presented in Western history courses.