HISTORY OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES
Academic Year 2023/2024 - Teacher:
SALVATORE ADORNO
Expected Learning Outcomes
The course aims to provide the basic tools (languages, skills,
knowledge) to study the relationship between man and nature in a historical
perspective. According to the Dublin descriptors, the achievement of the
objectives of knowledge, application of knowledge, independent judgment,
communication skills and learning skills will be declined within the
specificity of environmental history, to allow students to orient themselves in
the face of the current situation of the environmental transition with the
scientific tools offered from the discipline. From this perspective, the
caesura of 19th-20th-century contemporaneity is interpreted as an enormous leap
in quantitative scale in the process of exploitation of nature which has led to
a qualitative change, determining that local phenomena have progressively
become regional and global.
Course Structure
The course will take place through lectures. 10 hours of the course will
be devoted to the seminar reading of passages selected from the texts of your
choice.
Attendance of Lessons
Attendance is not compulsory.
Detailed Course Content
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)
The topics will be addressed in key
eminently historical global, national and local
Textbook Information
For everyone
John R. MC Neil, Qualcosa di nuovo sotto il sole. Storia dell’ambiente
nel secolo XX, Torino, Einaudi, 2000, 470 pp.
J. R. McNeil Peter Engelke, La grande accelerazione, una storia ambientale
dell’Antropocene dopo il 1945, Einaudi 2018, (245 p.)
S. Adorno, I limiti del pianeta. Note e appunti sull’Antropocene,
in Scalisi e Sanchez, Fra le mura della
modernità, Roma, Viella 2019, pp. 351-365
G. Bonan, Gli storici e l’Antropocene: narrazioni
periodizzazioni, dibattiti, in “Passato e Presente” 104, 2018, pp.
129-143.
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.
