Environmental history is a way of observing and understanding the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature over time. Emerging from the ecological crisis and the need to understand its causes and historical dynamics, environmental historiography has become established over the last two or three decades: first in North America from the second half of the 1970s, then in Europe and Latin America from the second half of the 1990s, and later in Asia and Africa. More a perspective than a discipline, environmental history recognizes soils, animals, climates, waters, and the diversity of life on Earth as co-participants in human history. This approach generates narratives that creatively combine natural archives and human traces, climatological algorithms and tourist postcards, stratigraphic measurements and farmers’ testimonies, among many other sources, to reconstruct the unity of life experiences (human and more-than-human) on the planet. The aim of the course is to provide an overview of the themes, methods, and different traditions within this field. [studiumani...niroma3.it]
Expected Learning Outcomes
Acquisition of fundamental knowledge in the field of Environmental History, with particular attention to its different traditions across the world's major cultural and geographical areas. [studiumani...niroma3.it]
Development of critical skills for interpreting environmental information produced in both scientific and popular contexts. [studiumani...niroma3.it]
Ability to use and understand the methodological challenges posed by environmental history.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Acquisition of fundamental knowledge in the field of Environmental History, with particular attention to its different traditions across the world's major cultural and geographical areas. [studiumani...niroma3.it]
Development of critical skills for interpreting environmental information produced in both scientific and popular contexts. [studiumani...niroma3.it]
Ability to use and understand the methodological challenges posed by environmental history.
teacher profile teaching materials
Among the various ways of addressing the thematic, spatial and temporal complexities of environmental history, the course adopts an approach that begins with concrete stories and specific sources of information, in order to weave together comprehensive interpretative frameworks of the relationships between societies, ecosystems and planetary dynamics. The starting points will be chapters such as ‘maize’, linking one of the Earth’s Neolithic revolutions – namely the Mesoamerican domestication of maize – with the Columbian exchange of 1492 in the Americas; moving on to Europe to understand the epoch-making change in the diets of people and animals during the centuries that shaped ‘modernity’; returning to the Americas to recognise the early signs of the post-war Green Revolution, and concluding in Italy, in search of ‘miracle maize’, genetic manipulation and the chemical revolution in agriculture. In the same comparative spirit and using the same method, the course will cover urban horses in nineteenth-century London, waste management in medieval Scandinavian cities, Chinese pigs as key players in the emergence of Western industrial capitalism, Peruvian guano fertilising British soils, and other small stories that shed light on enormous problems and policies. Far from being mere ‘case studies’, the chapters aim to bring environmental history closer to the feelings and understanding (or ‘feeling-thinking’) of people – just like all of us – who inhabit very tangible aspects of life. Through this approach, the course hopes to steer the discussion towards a critical understanding of colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, urbanisation, the Anthropocene–Capitalocene–Plantationocene debate, and the historical significance of ‘sustainability’.
The lecturer will provide any materials not available in bookshops, libraries or freely accessible online
BOOK
Biasillo, Roberta. Storia globale dell’ambiente. Carocci, Roma 2025. (CHECK FOR ALTERNATIVE BOOK IN ENGLISH)
4 ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS:
- Crosby, Alfred W. Lo Scambio Colombiano: Conseguenze Biologiche e Culturali Del 1492. Einaudi, 1992. (The Colombian Exchange)
- Radkau, Joachim. Storia globale dell'ambiente, LEG, Gorizia 2020 (disponibile in biblioteca Petrocchi. Also in English)
- McNeill, John. Qualcosa di nuovo sotto il sole: Storia dell’ambiente nel XX secolo. Einaudi, 2020. (Something New Under the Sun)
- Piccioni, Luigi, and Giorgio Nebbia. I Limiti Dello Sviluppo in Italia. Cronache Di Un Dibattito 1971-74. Fondazione Luigi Micheletti, Brescia 2011. https://altronovecento.fondazionemicheletti.eu/i-quaderni/
- Di Tulio, Matteo, and Martino Lorenzo Fagnani. Una storia ambientale dell’età moderna. Carocci, 2024.
- Armiero, Marco, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. La natura del duce: Una storia ambientale del fascismo. 2022.
- Horta Duarte, Regina. “‘El zoológico del porvenir’: narrativas y memorias de nación sobre el Zoológico de Chapultepec, Ciudad de México, siglo XX.” Historia Crítica, no. 72 (April 2019): 93–113. https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit72.2019.05.
- Krausmann, Fridolin. “A City and Its Hinterland: Vienna’s Energy Metabolism 1800–2006.” In Long Term Socio-Ecological Research. Human-Environment Interactions. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1177-8_11.
- Bernardi, Emanuele. Il mais “miracoloso”: storia di un’innovazione tra politica, economia e religione. Roma: Carocci, 2014.
- Bevilacqua, Piero. La terra é finita: breve storia dell’ambiente. Roma: Laterza, 2006.
- Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Padua, eds. A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America. Berghahn Books, 2018 (esiste in versine spagnola, chiedere alla docente)
- Agnoletti, Mauro, and Simone Neri Serneri, eds. The Basic Environmental History. Springer, 2014
- Bonan, Giacomo. “Gli Storici e l’Antropocene: Narrazioni, Periodizzazioni, Dibattiti.” Passato e Presente, no. 104 (2018): 129–43.
- Robin, Libby, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde, eds. The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. Yale University Press, 2013
Programme
Emerging in the wake of the ecological crisis and the need to understand its causes and historical dynamics, environmental historiography has become firmly established over the last two or three decades (first in North America from the second half of the 1970s, then in Europe and Latin America from the second half of the 1990s, and subsequently in Asia and Africa). Environmental history is a way of observing and understanding the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature over time. As a perspective rather than a discipline, environmental history recognises soils, animals, climates, waters and the diversity of life on Earth as co-participants in human history. This gives rise to narratives which, by creatively drawing on nature’s archives and human sediments, climatological algorithms and tourist postcards, stratigraphic measurements and farmers’ accounts – to name but a few examples – succeed in reconstructing the unity of the experience of life (human and non-human) on the planet.Among the various ways of addressing the thematic, spatial and temporal complexities of environmental history, the course adopts an approach that begins with concrete stories and specific sources of information, in order to weave together comprehensive interpretative frameworks of the relationships between societies, ecosystems and planetary dynamics. The starting points will be chapters such as ‘maize’, linking one of the Earth’s Neolithic revolutions – namely the Mesoamerican domestication of maize – with the Columbian exchange of 1492 in the Americas; moving on to Europe to understand the epoch-making change in the diets of people and animals during the centuries that shaped ‘modernity’; returning to the Americas to recognise the early signs of the post-war Green Revolution, and concluding in Italy, in search of ‘miracle maize’, genetic manipulation and the chemical revolution in agriculture. In the same comparative spirit and using the same method, the course will cover urban horses in nineteenth-century London, waste management in medieval Scandinavian cities, Chinese pigs as key players in the emergence of Western industrial capitalism, Peruvian guano fertilising British soils, and other small stories that shed light on enormous problems and policies. Far from being mere ‘case studies’, the chapters aim to bring environmental history closer to the feelings and understanding (or ‘feeling-thinking’) of people – just like all of us – who inhabit very tangible aspects of life. Through this approach, the course hopes to steer the discussion towards a critical understanding of colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, urbanisation, the Anthropocene–Capitalocene–Plantationocene debate, and the historical significance of ‘sustainability’.
Core Documentation
1 BOOK +4 ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS of your choiceThe lecturer will provide any materials not available in bookshops, libraries or freely accessible online
BOOK
Biasillo, Roberta. Storia globale dell’ambiente. Carocci, Roma 2025. (CHECK FOR ALTERNATIVE BOOK IN ENGLISH)
4 ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS:
- Crosby, Alfred W. Lo Scambio Colombiano: Conseguenze Biologiche e Culturali Del 1492. Einaudi, 1992. (The Colombian Exchange)
- Radkau, Joachim. Storia globale dell'ambiente, LEG, Gorizia 2020 (disponibile in biblioteca Petrocchi. Also in English)
- McNeill, John. Qualcosa di nuovo sotto il sole: Storia dell’ambiente nel XX secolo. Einaudi, 2020. (Something New Under the Sun)
- Piccioni, Luigi, and Giorgio Nebbia. I Limiti Dello Sviluppo in Italia. Cronache Di Un Dibattito 1971-74. Fondazione Luigi Micheletti, Brescia 2011. https://altronovecento.fondazionemicheletti.eu/i-quaderni/
- Di Tulio, Matteo, and Martino Lorenzo Fagnani. Una storia ambientale dell’età moderna. Carocci, 2024.
- Armiero, Marco, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. La natura del duce: Una storia ambientale del fascismo. 2022.
- Horta Duarte, Regina. “‘El zoológico del porvenir’: narrativas y memorias de nación sobre el Zoológico de Chapultepec, Ciudad de México, siglo XX.” Historia Crítica, no. 72 (April 2019): 93–113. https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit72.2019.05.
- Krausmann, Fridolin. “A City and Its Hinterland: Vienna’s Energy Metabolism 1800–2006.” In Long Term Socio-Ecological Research. Human-Environment Interactions. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1177-8_11.
- Bernardi, Emanuele. Il mais “miracoloso”: storia di un’innovazione tra politica, economia e religione. Roma: Carocci, 2014.
- Bevilacqua, Piero. La terra é finita: breve storia dell’ambiente. Roma: Laterza, 2006.
- Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Padua, eds. A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America. Berghahn Books, 2018 (esiste in versine spagnola, chiedere alla docente)
- Agnoletti, Mauro, and Simone Neri Serneri, eds. The Basic Environmental History. Springer, 2014
- Bonan, Giacomo. “Gli Storici e l’Antropocene: Narrazioni, Periodizzazioni, Dibattiti.” Passato e Presente, no. 104 (2018): 129–43.
- Robin, Libby, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde, eds. The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. Yale University Press, 2013
Attendance
Attendance is strongly recommended so that you can engage with the lecturer, your fellow students and special guests.Type of evaluation
Attending students: continuous assessment, based on course materials and class participation. The oral examination will involve a discussion of the assignments already completed. Non-attending students and attending students who prefer not to undertake the continuous assessments: an oral examination based on the study of the recommended reading list.