Community Dev & Global Environment Writing II: Anlysis and Synthesis

Catalog description

Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this course examines “First World” environmentalism along with the “environmentalism of the poor.” While the former is concerned with the “effluents of affluence” in post-industrial societies, the latter focuses on the rights and survival of indigenous communities in developing countries whose livelihoods are under threat due to climate change, unfettered capitalism, economic modernization and globalization. The main focus of the course will be on the unique set of environmental challenges and social problems that communities in marginal areas of the Global South have to grapple with in the 21st century. We also examine how the underlying principle of private ownership implicit in global capitalism threatens communal ownership of livelihood resources such as farmland, firewood, and water. Loss of communal rights to agricultural land, pasture, and water tend to induce ethnic conflict as different groups - for example farmers and cattle herders - compete over increasingly precarious rural assets. We will therefore take stock of “nature-based conflicts” and the various social movements that have spawned to resist privatization and individualization of the global commons.