Climate and Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has starkly revealed how human health is entwined with environmental factors. In New York City, the ZIP codes that were hit hardest during the deadly first wave of Covid can be mapped using climatological indices, such as heat vulnerability, air quality, and green space proximity. This course will examine how the deep relationship between climate and pandemic might not just be associative, but causal.  Poor air quality directly contributes to the transmission of airborne viruses. Habitat loss and climate-driven shifts in animal migration have led to new zoonotic encounters. Still infectious 30,000-year old “giant viruses” have already been discovered in melting Siberian permafrost. At the psychiatric level, climate anxiety has emerged as a clinical condition. Speculative fictions, past and present, invite us to imagine future climate-driven pandemics.

Through interdisciplinary readings in literature and history, virology and the biomedical sciences, seminar discussions, and a skills-building mapping practicum with community partners at Columbia and a New York City climate non-profit, students will study how climate and pandemic have been interconnected in the past, and together we will produce public-facing collaborative research speculating about how they might interact in the future. This is a 4000-level seminar class open to undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of fields; it counts as a core course in the Medical Humanities major.