Over the past decades, our global society has begun to document the undeniable impact of global warming. Extreme weather patterns are bringing about more severe flooding, fires, droughts, epidemics, and so on that at times coincide with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that exacerbate already dire situations. As we are also recognizing the roots of our increasingly desperate global condition has its roots in the rise of Christian European colonialism that spread across the earth; an enterprise based on conquest and an extraction economy and the exploitation of resources and peoples. By the eighteenth century, signs of environmental crises were appearing across the Atlantic world, as peoples responded to severe droughts, deforestation, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, and other natural disasters and the challenges they posed for colonial and early independent societies. Not unexpectedly art and architecture responded to these events. Through art and architecture peoples explored new forms of engineering, building, religiosity, environmental studies, and etc.

Chairs: Luis J. Gordo Peláez - [email protected] and C. C. Barteet, The University of Western Ontario - [email protected]

Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture