SPRING 2008

ENST 13113. Prairie Ecosystems: Lessons of Sustainability Past, Present, and Future. (=BIOS 13113)
Justin Borevitz
We look at the Midwest Prairie as a model ecosystem. How and when did grasslands evolve? And where and when did they become established? How many species and biotrophic levels are interconnected in a regularly disturbed environment? Are there keystone species? What are the ecological forces maintaining, destroying, and restoring balance? Glacial retreat, fire, deep rooted perennial grasses, large herbivores, deforestation, industrial agriculture, biofuels will be covered. What is the economic value of native prairies? Does such a quantification aid conservation plans? Are cities a drain on surrounding wilderness or could they support it? How will a large human population live equitably with Earth's finite resources? We apply what we have we learned from the grasslands to live sustainably.

ENST 29507 Nature as Technology: A Philosophical and Historical Investigation (=HIPS 29508)
Trevor Pearce
This seminar explores the historical development of philosophers' and scientists' analogies between technological artifacts and products of nature.  Beginning with Plato's suggestion that divine technē produces natural things, we will examine the claim, which extends from ancient philosophy to present-day science, that nature is a kind of technology.  For early modern thinkers like Descartes and Leibniz, God was a divine engineer; likewise, some modern biologists and philosophers have interpreted natural selection as a kind of engineering or tinkering.  Once we have analysed these various historical perspectives, we will be in a better position to discuss recent debates in biomechanics and engineering over the pros and cons of a technology that attempts to mimic nature. 

ENST 21800. Economics and Environmental Policy. (=LLSO 26201, PBPL 21800)
Sabina Shaikh
PQ: ECON 19800 or higher. This course combines basic microeconomic theory and tools with contemporary environmental and resources issues and controversies to examine and analyze public policy decisions. Theoretical points include externalities, public goods, common-property resources, valuing resources, benefit/cost analysis, and risk assessment. Topics include pollution, global climate changes, energy use and conservation, recycling and waste management, endangered species and biodiversity, nonrenewable resources, congestion, economic growth and the environment, and equity impacts of public policies. 

ENST 22501 Urban Ecology: Environmental History of the Modern City.
Steven Kosiba, 2007-08 Environmental Studies Prize Lectureship
We typically think of the city as something detached from nature, an artificial space of impersonal concrete walls and human competitive avarice that is situated on one side of a strictly defined urban-rural divide. In this seminar, we will discuss the historical processes that have produced and naturalized such urban-rural and social-natural divisions, and how these perceived divisions are ideological constructions that have influenced the spatial and social organization of our world. Specifically, we will challenge the urban-rural model by employing a theoretical perspective that is grounded in recent theories of urban ecosystems. We will consider how the production of cities entails the transformation of immediate and distant, local and regional spaces that extend far beyond a city's formal limits. We will also explore how urban and rural distinctions influence and inform political decision-making, thereby contributing to the uneven distribution of power and resources, even though the production of cities is intimately related to the production of broader socioeconomic and political landscapes. Furthermore, we will discuss how urbanization strategies oftentimes produce and perpetuate spatial and ecological parameters of radical social inequality, both within and between cities. More particularly, we will use examples from contemporary American cities (particularly Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles) to discuss how the interrelationship between humans and their environment in the modern world is largely shaped by a political economy that draws sharp conceptual and physical distinctions between city and countryside, society and nature.

ENST 24400. Is Development Sustainable? (=BPRO 23400, HIPS 23400, NCDV 27300, PBPL 24400)
Ted Steck
PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. This is a discussion course for students without a background in environmental issues. Its aim is to grapple with the "big problem" of sustainable development. We analyze problematical issues underlying population growth, resource use, environmental transformation, social transformation, and the plight of developing nations through a consideration of economic, political, scientific, and cultural institutions and processes.  

ENST 25501. Environmental Justice, Human Rights, and Agriculture (=HMRT 25501)
David Aftandilian
In recent years, protecting people's environmental rights has been acknowledged as crucial to protecting their human rights. This course will examine environmental rights in the context of farming and food, focusing on the U.S. and Mexico. After introducing the concept of environmental justice as a useful analytical frame within which to consider environmental rights, we will discuss the impacts of industrialized agriculture on local communities, environments, and individuals. In particular, we will explore the pollution generated by farms, feedlots, and food delivery in the U.S. and the effects of pesticide exposure on farmworker health, as well as the lack of adequate housing and control over the working conditions for migrant farmworkers. We will also investigate the increasing inability of local peoples in the U.S. and Mexico to grow or purchase foods with traditional significance in their cultures, which leads to poorer nutrition, higher incidence of diseases such as diabetes, and loss of cultural knowledge; and the lack of access to fresh produce and other nutritious foods among many people of color and other residents of underprivileged neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Finally, we will evaluate a number of possible solutions to these injustices, including local food security movements and urban community gardens, food policy councils, organic agriculture, fair trade movements, and governmental policies.

ENST 28210. Colonial Ecologies. (=ANTH 28210/48210)
Mark Lycett
This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of periphery and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. In the first half of the quarter, we consider the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts. During the second half of the course, we explore the uses of these varied approaches and lines of evidence in relation to specific cases and trajectories of transformation since the sixteenth century.  

ENST 28700.  Environment and the Body (=HIST 25505)
Angela Gugliotta
TUTH 3:00-4:20 
From the time of the Hippocratic medical text “Airs, Waters and Places,” the natural and built environments were understood  to shape the states and characteristics of human bodies. This connection is evident through many centuries of  medical theory and practice, as well as in arguments advanced for the climatic and geographical determination of racial traits. The relationship between the body and the environment became a matter of particularly intense political struggle in 19th century England and has become so again in our own time. This course will examine the history of conceptions of the environmental shaping of human bodies with particular attention to nineteenth and twentieth century conflicts over sanitation, disease theories and poverty and to contemporary debates over toxic contamination and health.    

Return to Undergraduate Program information.

Past Environmental Studies Courses, WINTER 2008.

ENST 21301. Making the Natural World: Foundations of Human Ecology. (=ANTH 21303)
Mark Lycett
MW 1:30-2:50
This course considers the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary Western notions of ecology, environment, and balance, but also examines several specific historical trajectories of anthropogenic landscape change. We approach these issues from the vantage of several different disciplinary traditions, including environmental history, philosophy, ecological anthropology, and paleoecology. This course is required of all Environmental Studies Majors and Minors. 

ENST 22705. Empire, Science and Environment 1492-1800 (=HST 22705/32705)
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
TuTh 1:30-2:50 
This course investigates the beginnings of the modern global economy by analyzing the environmental basis of Western expansion 1492-1800. The power and wealth of early modern empires rested on the massive reordering of the natural world. We will track this process in multiple and interconnected dimensions: ecological, social, scientific, and political. In terms of geographic scope, we will look at a series of concrete case studies in colonization, from medieval Iceland to seventeenth-century Barbados and eighteenth-century Lapland, Mauritius, and New South Wales. Readings will include a variety of primary sources as well as scholarly classics of the field such as Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism and Richard Grove's Green Imperialism.  

ENST 28402: Religion and Environment (=RLST 25702)
David Aftandilian
TUTH 3:00-4:20
In this course, we will explore how people's religious and spiritual traditions affect their relations with the environment, and vice versa. Our approach will be comparative and cross-cultural, investigating how various world and indigenous religions have treated a series of key environmental topics. These topics will include creation and cosmology, sacred lands, agriculture and food, and animals and hunting. We will also consider several emerging approaches to environment and religion, including ecofeminist spirituality; environmentalism as spiritual practice and civic religion; new, green religious movements; and contemporary religious responses to the environmental crisis.

ENST 28600 Ideas of Nature 1400-1900 (=HIST 25005)
***CANCELLED***