The Adaptable Human

Student Quotes

“Her greatest strength was how concerned that her students were actually learning and she made class fun…this course made me pay more attention to climate change and helped to inform me. I liked that this course made me care about the problem of climate change and made me want to help address it”

Systematic study of human-environment relationships has only recently included complexities of climate change. Natural and social scientists have renamed this time on earth the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch created by human pollution, land use change, and atomic experimentation. The critical variables in the study of climate change impacts on humans include vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation. These buzz words are used across disciplines with varying meanings, creating conflicting avenues for designing research and implementing interventions.

What is clear, throughout a growing number of case studies on adaptations, is that shifting climatic regimes are projected to particularly negatively affect poor, marginalized populations, creating a heightened urgency to understand effective adaptation measures. This course explores the origins of research in human adaptation, including the origins of the "man-made" and "natural" worlds, the "settled" versus the "wild." The readings and lectures will investigate the tensions between ethnographic evaluations of vulnerability, empirical modeling of human resilience, and how those disciplinary schisms stemmed from, and can productively return to adaptation research.