Resilient Communities and Environments

Catalog description

Understanding connections between communities and surrounding ecosystems; exploration of management techniques for building adaptive, resilient, and sustainable communities and environments. CEDEV 567 Resilient Communities and Environments (3) This course provides students with a foundation in concepts which can be used to explore the interconnections of communities and environments, particularly as they apply to community and economic development. The focus of this course is applying concepts from resilience thinking to sustainable community and economic development. In this course, students will explore how communities, whether rural or urban, are linked to their environment, and how this, in turn, can affect the success of community development projects. The class explores the social, political, economic, and ecological barriers guiding these relationships. Topics covered in this context include environmental law and regulation; environmental and land use planning; risk and risk management; the rhetoric of sustainability; natural resource dependency; and interconnections between social and environmental justice. The last portion of the course discusses possible management techniques for building adaptive, resilient, and sustainable communities.