- Political Ecology

Catalog description

Political Ecology is the study of the relationships between the political, social, and economic factors and environmental issues. This course introduces students to the array of broad political and socio-economic forces that shape the human relationships with the environment through various questions: Who has power over the environment? How is nature constructed and destructed? How do existing policies and stakeholder interactions affect the use of environment by society? How do resource conflicts arise and become resolved? How is environmental knowledge used and abused? These forces are multiple and interact in complex ways over a set of interlocking scales from local to global. We will address these issues by covering several case studies, both from the United States and the world. It is a civic engagement, service learning class.