Geographies of Man. Environmental Influence from Antiquity to the Enlightenment.
A one-day interdisciplinary conference at the University of Warwick
Friday, 16th May 2014
University of Warwick
Keynote Speaker: Dr Vladimir Jankovic, University of Manchester
In recent years fears of climate change, resource consumption, and irreversible environmental damage have made us more aware of how profoundly embedded we are in the natural world. There is growing concern not only with how we impact weather, climate, and landscape, but also with how these impact us in return, affecting our daily activities, shaping our individual and collective behaviour, and contributing to the constitution of our identity in many complex ways. The goal of this conference is to historicise contemporary ecological discourse by exploring how this dynamic interaction between human beings and their lived environments was conceived of from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. While scholarly attention has traditionally focused on the development of environmental ideas from the eighteenth century to the present, there is still great scope for further investigation of ancient, medieval, and early modern attitudes to the environment. How did human beings relate to weather, climate, and landscape? What was the interplay between theory and practice—between environmental discourse on the one hand and practical attitudes to environmental management on the other? How did social and historical circumstances contribute to changes in environmental thought?
We welcome 20-minute papers that address these questions from a variety of approaches and angles. Topics to consider include, but are not limited to:
- theories of environmental/climatic influence from Hippocrates to Montesquieu
- ways to overcome the environment
- environmental medicine and relationships between place and health
- foreign climes and their effects
- identity and landscapes
- attitudes to environmental extremes
- engineered environments: gardens, natural laboratories, agricultural improvement
- eco-governmentality and ‘the state’
- religion and environmental discourse
- historical perceptions of resource consumption, climatic change and pollution