Time Schedule:
Benjamin Richard Gardner
BPOLST 593
Bothell Campus
Examines the changing arena of policy. Topics are relevant to current issues and may include the following: policy and gender; transportation policy in Puget Sound; policies of aging; and environmental policy.
Class description
Why do struggles over the environment incite such passion? What does it mean to defend nature? How do our understandings of the environment influence our beliefs, values and interests? In what ways are struggles over American Lawns, Nigerian Oil, New Mexico Forests, Industrial Farms, Global Climate Models, and African Parks simultaneously material and symbolic? And what do such struggles tell us about contemporary environmental, economic and cultural politics?
Key texts include: Mike Davis, 2002. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niņo Famines and the Making of the Third World; Deborah Fitzgerald, 2003. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture; Ed Kashi and Michael Watts, 2008. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Jake Kosek, 2006. Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Paul Robbins, 2007. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals make us Who We Are.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
This course looks at environmental politics as a theoretical and methodological way to understand the relationship between environmental issues and problems and contemporary struggles over culture, economy and society. The course will prepare students to ask how and why political, economic, and social dynamics are often left out of common understandings of environmental use and management.
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
Above all, students are asked to apply ideas from the course to contemporary environmental and social problems. By the end of the course students should be able to analyze and document through a variety of methods how environmental change is influenced by a) social relations within and across regions; b) different forms of economic production and reproduction; and c) ideas about nature.
