Introduction to Environmental Ideas

Catalog description

By recognizing that environmental problems are themselves complex and require insights from social, political, and scientific perspectives, the interdisciplinary Program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ESS) prepares students to gain proficiency in different disciplinary habits of thinking. As part of this endeavor, students take part in informed discussions about interpretive lenses; ways of seeing; and thinking about social, cultural, and historical contexts for interpretations of environment and sustainability. This seminar-style course introduces key methods and approaches for interdisciplinary inquiry within a framework of Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice. Scholar Giovanna de Chiro writes: "The term 'environmental justice' emerged from the activism of communities of color in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century...They advocate for social policies that uphold the right to meaningful, democratic participation of frontline communities in environmental decision making." The implications of disciplinary narratives and approaches to questions of environment and sustainability, and the implications for social justice, are a key and repeated question in the course. The role of poverty as a cultural, political, and historical phenomenon is a motif in many of our discussions. We'll explore contrasting historical, cultural, and disciplinary explanations for hunger, famine, and food insecurity. Further, we'll explore how so-called "environmental" explanations for food scarcity, which rationalize the persistence of hunger and poverty in the 21st century, have distracted from decades of expertise, reminding us that hunger and poverty are social problems. In contrast to these so-called "environmental" explanations, there is no scarcity of food in the present era. This course will examine how these narratives contradict…