Welcome to Climate Change

Wed, Aug 23

“The world is too much with us,” wrote William Wordsworth in 1802, bemoaning how the hectic, noisy, high-speed world of early nineteenth-century England ripped people from closeness to Nature, alienated them from the Earth and from themselves, and put us all “out of tune” with the truth of the moon and seas and stars.

But in a time of catastrophic global human-caused climate change, as mountains burst into flame, the poles melt, and the very seas rise against us, this Wordsworthian conception of “nature” — which in many ways we still live within — comes to seem melancholic and uncanny, even incomprehensible.  

Goals

• Start thinking about how our ideas of “nature” are not natural at all, but cultural and historical.
• Look closely at the way poets use language to shape the reader’s experience.
• Understand that climate change and ecological crisis pose profound challenges to how we understand the relation between the human and the nonhuman.