Welcome to HC 434: Natural Hazards and Culture Collapse
This is a self contained web site. Imbecilic Blackboard only exists as a front end to this website.
For more information about the course, click on the About this Course link above.
Navigation of this web site is as
follows:
The Syllabus Link takes you to the course syllabus that might contain some useful information. More information
can also be found in the About This Course link
The Modules Link contains the table of contents for all of the course content. If at any time you get lost, simply click on the Modules to find your self again.
The Course Assignments Link will take you to where the assignments are posted. Homework assignments can be done collaboratively.
The Resources page has links to various products that we will use through out the term including the
very important link to the Statistics tools that can be used to help with various data aspects of the class.
The links under that page will be frequently updated so visit it often.
Grading of assignment and tests will still make use of the grade center in Blackboard
A brief course Introduction:
The role of natural disasters in the forms of volcanic eruptions, giant earthquakes, tsunamis, extended drought, extended extreme weather (usually cold), massive floods (e.g. Pakistan 2011), massive mudflows, and climate change, until recently, have been rather overlooked as a dynamic mechanism for causing dispersal of the local culture or its total collapse. The result of any one of these listed disasters is to rapidly and catastrophically change the local landscape and the function of the land thus possibly making the local environment unlivable. This course will focus both on the science behind the disasters and their overall frequency of occurrence in various regions of the Earth and on the cultural response to these disasters and possible cultural planning to avoid future disasters as most cultures are unwilling to relocate away from their sacred soil. To make this course have contemporary relevance, we will also discuss the impact of the current global climate change (?) on various cultures living in various locations on the Earth. The course will be arranged around several case studies involving known events as well as some suspected, but still controversial and unverified events (e.g. The Black Sea Deluge)
The scientific discipline of mass extinctions first opened in 1980 through to work of Luis Alvarez. Similarly, the role of natural hazards, specifically volcanic eruptions, on the evolution of cultures was essentially borne with the 1979 publication by Sheets and Grayson: Volcanic Activity and Human Ecology. Since then there have been a wealth of scholarly publications which have reached the popular vernacular via the wretched works of Jared Diamond (and others). This course will take a look at the science behind some of these disasters as well as the uncertainty of verification due to problems with age-dating and historical records. Of prime import in is to demonstrate to students that natural disasters occur every year and a given year has far more events than one realizes. To pick some random year, say 1985, the following occurred:
A Columbian Volcanic eruption killed 25,000
A Mexican Earthquake killed 20,000
A tropical cyclone in Bangladesh killed 11,000
A Heat wave in the US killed 103 citizens
A cold wave in the US killed 145 citizens
This course will then assess the frequency and probability of similar types of occurrences to show that they are not particularly rare. We will also examine the scientific expectation of global climate change on the frequency of these kinds of events as well as why the Pacific Ring of Fire is a dangerous place to live.
As a reminder that global imbalanced resource consumption can also lead to various stages of collapse, the following collection of widgets and graphs will serve as reminders of our current trajectory. Of course, the global collapse of culture is not likely to be a recoverable situation compared to the local collapses we will be studying this term.
