Multispecies Living and the Environmental Crisis

Catalog description

How do we understand and make sense of the consequences of what has clearly become a climate emergency? What conditions catalyzed this moment of crisis? Why and how might we consider re-orienting our habits of thought and action to engage this global challenge? What are the limits of anthropomorphism or the anthropomorphic imagination, of assigning human attributes to nonhuman others? Our notions of "development" and "progress," our conception of natural resources, our relationship to the technocratic imagination have all contributed to the making of the Age of the Anthropocene, in which human agency reshapes our environment. This course will engage with a range of approaches that re-conceptualize the relationship of humans with nature. It will study the environmental consequences of urbanization, resource frontiers, extractive industries, the quest for sustainable energy, human-animal conflict, and the politics of conservation. It will conclude by asking what constitutes environmental justice as students explore the need to recalibrate multiple disciplines to generate a "multispecies" perspective on our world.