Environmental Ethics and Political Ecology

Catalog description

This course examines environmental issues through a variety of political and ethical perspectives. The goal of the course is to understand how the meaning of political and ethical concepts (e.g., citizenship, justice, responsibility, security, sovereignty) have been broadened or reinterpreted in light of the ascendancy of environmentalism. For instance, the course will cover questions concerning whether environmentalism has encouraged a more precautionary sort of politics, especially in regard to agricultural biotechnology, along with how it has transformed the traditional military definition of security to include new notions such as climate or food security. To address these questions and issues, the course fosters an appreciation of the ethical reasoning of the interdisciplinary field known as political ecology. An emphasis on the ethical reasoning of political ecology will facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of environmental issues through unraveling the political forces at work in environmental change at both the global and local levels.