Environment and Economy: Reading and Research Seminar
NRE 664
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: Graduate Standing.

This course draws on a range of histories and analytic perspectives regarding environmental, political and economic relations that transcend boundaries. The aim is to understand patterns of degradation and to suggest possibilities for sustainability. Put differently, the proximate causes of degradation are well known (e.g., clear-cutting, auto use, refrigeration), but the driving forces (e.g, economic growth, technological change, political and economic institutions, values and attitudes) are less clear. By examining details of political and economic development with an eye towards environmental impacts and by scrutinizing a range of perspectives on such processes, this course attempts to grasp the underlying forces. A premise is that the design of policies to reverse degradative trends and to promote ecologically sustainable systems requires and understanding of such relations. This premise applies at all levels, for the local to the global and pertains to all comtemporary political economies, from industrializing to advances industrial.