Imagining Global Warming: Climate Change

While Global Warming has historically been seen as a matter best understood through a scientific lens, more recently it has been recognized as a quintessentially "wicked"problem," one that cannot be understood from a single perspective. Keeping in mind the value of bringing different disciplinary attitudes to such a problem, this course supplements a purely scientific approach to Global Warming by calling on the many different ways that the human mind--and eye, hand, and ear--have sought to understand and react to our ever-changing environment. Students will begin by reviewing in the first week of the course the basic science of Climate Change and then studying the roots of our understanding of nature, including a variety of ancient religious texts and a wide range of Creation Narratives from around the globe. The second week of the course will be an introduction to a critical examination of artistic responses to Climate Change in recent decades. This will include Land Art that questions and tests our control over the landscape, a century of films that feature natural disaster scenarios, dystopian poems and short stories, music that seeks to represent the challenges of climate change in the auditory dimension, paintings and sculptures that visualize global warming, and performance art that uses the human body to dramatize the ways in we have been transforming nature. In the third week of the course, students will be exposed to the history of environmentalism itself before spending the final sessions in groups producing their own artistic responses to Climate Change.