This seminar will focus on a series of historical episodes since 1200 C.E. that present different approaches to reckoning environmental uncertainty to develop specific social and spatial configurations. Topics range from anthropogenic forests in southern China to seafaring across the Pacific Ocean and from patchworks of agriculture and urban centers throughout the Gangetic plains to the proliferation of observatories across the globe to monitor weather patterns. What ties these diverse places and histories together is but one goal: to understand how strategies for claiming knowledge are entangled with environmental uncertainty. The aim of this course will be to assemble, and consider spatially, a variety of approaches to how people have come to know the world around them and what they have done to account for change.