Climate Crisis

Climate change presents an urgent and unprecedented challenge: defining our era with global warming, mass extinction, and pervasive pollution of air, water, and land—all threatening the sustainability of human civilization. We also live in a time of exacerbated disruption to health, food systems, and livelihoods; of sea level rise, extreme weather events, and population displacement; of contestation over indigenous sovereignty and neo-colonialism/imperialism; and of the rise of right-wing populism and increasing global income inequality.

At its core, the climate crisis stems from the rise in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases—products of human activities driven by the production of consumer goods, excessive car usage, dietary habits, opulent housing, fast fashion, air travel, and various other markers of “civilization.” While the natural sciences illuminate the mechanisms altering our climate, they alone cannot explain the motivations behind these activities or predict their full spectrum of social and political ramifications. This course adopts an environmental humanities perspective to scrutinize these crises, recognizing them as products of human actions and thus, human problems.

In this course we will ask: to what extent are humans part of nature? How should humans interact with their environments? In what ways are environmental issues always already political ones? In what ways are global political crises always already environmental ones? The course will examine these questions through a number of different themes, intellectual traditions, and conceptual approaches with special attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and colonialism in each. In particular, the course will center the work of feminist and indigenous scholars as we deal with the crises that arise in the context of the Anthropocene, global climate change, and western liberal hegemony.