Descriptif

At the age of global ecological crisis, this course will look at the environment in its historical dimension in order to understand not ‘how we got here’, but rather: where exactly do we stand? From one COP to another, from one World Biodiversity Summit to another, environmental discourses are increasingly meaningless, with an international rhetoric that mixes abstract objectives (‘sustainable development’), fictitious actors (‘local communities’) and abstract actions (‘community conservation’). Yet when we talk about the environment, we are always talking about power struggles: struggles to govern a territory (such as a national park), struggles to impose a representation of nature (such as the American wilderness), struggles to exploit a resource (such as African cobalt). By examining this history over a long 20th century and in various geographical areas, from North America to Asia, via Europe and Asia, this course aims to understand the environment for what it has become today: the most political issue in the contemporary world.