ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY AGE

M-STO/04 - 6 CFU - 1° Semester

Teaching Staff

SALVATORE ADORNO

Course Structure

lectures and seminar activities.


Detailed Course Content

The course aims to provide the basic tools (languages, skills, knowledge) to study the relationship between man and nature in a historical perspective. The twentieth century has led to a huge-scale quantitative leap in the process of exploitation of nature leading to a qualitative change and determining that local phenomena have become increasingly regional and global.

The course covers the following topics:
1) The economic and population growth, the evolution of energy systems in the long term, with particular attention to the turn eight twentieth century.
2) The historical study of the relationship between humans and environmental media: soil, air, water (desertification, erosion, salinization, pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, acid rain, rivers, lakes seas: impoverishment, dams, deviations)
3) The relationship between humans and other life forms of the Earth (deforestation migration, biodiversity)
4) The role of cities, fuels, technologies, ideas and politics of environmental change as engines.

The topics will be addressed in key eminently historical global, national and local


Textbook Information

 

Required texts

John R. MC Neil, Qualcosa di nuovo sotto il sole. Storia dell’ambiente nel secolo XX, Torino, Einaudi, 2000, 470 pp.

One text chosen from the following

Christophe Bonneuil, Jean Baptiste Fressoz, La storia la terra e noi. L’evento Antropocene,, Treccani 2019, 365 pp.

J. R. McNeil Peter Engelke, La grande accelerazione, una storia ambientale dell’Antropocene dopo il 1945, Einaudi 2018, 245 pp.

Wolfgang Behringer, Storia culturale del clima dall’era glaciale al riscaldamento globale, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2010, 289 pp.

Please remember that in compliance with art 171 L22.04.1941, n. 633 and its amendments, it is illegal to copy entire books or journals, only 15% of their content can be copied.

For further information on sanctions and regulations concerning photocopying please refer to the regulations on copyright (Linee Guida sulla Gestione dei Diritti d’Autore) provided by AIDRO - Associazione Italiana per i Diritti di Riproduzione delle opere dell’ingegno (the Italian Association on Copyright).

All the books listed in the programs can be consulted in the Library.


Open in PDF format Versione in italiano