Class name: “Sacrifice Zones: Empires, Epidemics and Climate Changes”
Taught by: Visiting Assistant Professor of Health Studies Lauren Minksy
Says Minksy about her class:
In this course, we explore the relationship between imperial projects of territorial sovereignty and the social and spatial distribution of premature death — or sacrifice zones — from the Neolithic to the present. We pay special attention to changes that occurred in transregional imperial projects and their regimes of sacrificed lives during times of global climate changes. We also center predictable episodes of climate change, such as the El Nino southern oscillation, in human history. With this framework in place, we then dedicate ourselves to understanding the imperial and international geopolitics of epidemics in our present era of global warming. We conclude the semester by zooming in locally to study the sacrifice zones of Pennsylvania’s geopolitics and carbon economy, particularly the communities of Chester and Marcus Hook along the Delaware River in southeastern Delaware County.
Ultimately, I hope that my students leave the course with an appreciation that all of the Holocene is an Anthropocene, but, crucially, not a static, unilinear, or inevitable one, not least in terms of transformations that occurred in the nature and working of geopolitical power and the spatial distribution of human experiences of drowning, starving, sickening, and dying. I also hope that my students appreciate that “ordinary” people have never been passive and fatalistic, whether in “pre-modern” times or our “modern” present. Rather, they have creatively built institutions (often labeled as “popular religion”) and collectively negotiated the conditions necessary for their health and survival.
In teaching this course, I often return to historian Mark Elvin’s apt characterization of China as having a history of “3,000 years of unsustainable growth.” It opens up such an important question: How did people sustain the unsustainable for thousands of years (and counting)? Perhaps seeing how people worked towards establishing conditions for the governance of life and just regimes of sacrifice in the past can both offer an answer to this paradox and, additionally, inspire us to do the same for a livable future? My hope is that students leave the course mulling on these kinds of questions!
Minsky on why she wanted to teach this class:
When people debate what to do about global warming or, say, the related global diabetes pandemic or the looming threat of an H5N1 pandemic, they routinely invoke “history” to justify their positions. To make this point, I start the course by having students analyze the positions of proponents of both sides of the green growth versus de-growth debate for how best to respond to the current climate crisis. They identify how each side assumes a different primary historical origin of global warming and differently periodizes “the Anthropocene.” They also identify key shared historical assumptions, such as that of a largely irrelevant, static precapitalist or preindustrial world of “sustainable growth,” “village self-sufficiency,” and “natural disasters.”
Understandings of the past point the way to future possibilities. Understandings of the past also point to which people have the agency to effectively determine what those possibilities are and to effect future change. In deciding to teach this course, I hoped that Haverford and Bryn Mawr students might benefit from the chance to develop a global and longue durée perspective on human history — one that can inform the scope of possibilities that they might imagine for addressing climate change and pandemics in the future.
Minsky on what makes this class unique:
You see things differently at different levels of spatial and temporal scale. Each has its place. As much as global warming and pandemics loom large, global climate changes — and especially the rich human history of imperial governance, sacrifices, and adaptations to such climate changes — are rarely centrally integrated into health histories. The same is true of many other disciplines, such as literature, as Amitav Ghosh discusses in his book The Great Derangement.
Before coming to Haverford, I had taught courses on disease and society and topics in environmental health but had never analytically centered climate changes that occurred before our current era of global warming. With support from colleagues and the college, I was happy to take up Ghosh’s challenge to all writers, scholars, and educators, and to design this new course. Naturally, every fall semester it continues to evolve through dialogue with thoughtful, engaged (and forgiving) students!
In developing this course, I also felt that it was important for Bi-Co health studies students to have space in their coursework to see and advocate with people who live in sacrifice zones located in their immediate surroundings. So, as part of the course, I also offer an environmental justice field trip to the communities of Chester and Marcus Hook. Students see the remnants of a coal-power electric plant and multiple chemical manufacturers, the U.S.’s largest trash incinerator, Delaware County’s Sewage and Wastewater treatment plant, Delta Airline’s sole oil refinery, and a massive former Sunoco oil/now Energy Transfers LNG refinery (which processes fracked gas brought in via the Mariner pipeline for export abroad for plastics manufacturing) all sitting side-by-side.
They also see (and smell) how these facilities cumulatively release substantial quantities of pollutants and other forms of waste into the soil, water, and air of the surrounding communities, whose health suffers as a direct consequence. I also offer students the option of engaging in community advocacy, research, and public educational projects and events like environmental justice rallies to fulfill part of their academic requirements for the course.