Sustainability and the western civilization curriculum: Reflections on cross-pollinating the humanities and environmental history

Abstract

Standard Western civilizations curricula of the premodern period, while ably incorporating postcolonial, feminist, and ethnic studies scholarship, reflect virtually nothing of the larger cultural consciousness regarding sustainability or the critiques and findings of environmental history. At the same time, world environmental histories tend to treat this period only selectively, do not often engage directly with the current discourses of sustainability, and are not inclined toward the humanities-oriented tasks of deep, sustained reflection on primary texts and historical narratives, the aims of a Western civilizations curriculum. This essay reflects on a course, "Western Civilization and Sustainability: Beginnings to 1600," developed to fill this gap. It describes how a multilayered approach that critically assesses sustainability and pairs traditional and environmental histories with analysis of primary texts has the capacity to reorient historians' questions, narratives, and periodization at the same time that it leads to fertile engagement between environmental history, sustainability, and the humanities. © 2010 The Author.