ASTK18402U Global Environmental Justice

This course interrogates the intersection of environmental studies with ethical and political theories of justice. As a class, we will engage with issues of environmental justice and injustice on a global scale. We will give special consideration to the intersecting dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender as well as global economic inequality and settler colonialism. An important dimension of the class will be learning about the understandings of environment, and claims to justice, mobilized by social movements seeking to address environmental injustice.

Through readings, in-class discussions, guest lectures, selected films and documentaries, and a final project, students will be asked to reflect critically on the root causes of the uneven distribution of the basic resources necessary for life. We will consider the selective toxic contamination and dumping on certain lands and waters, and the uneven experiences of accelerating global climate change. We will discuss the social movements locally and globally that are challenging and, in some cases, transforming such inequality.

The course will begin with an introduction to theories of environment, justice, and scientific knowledge production, including such texts as William Cronon’s (1995) critique of wilderness and Donna Haraway’s (1988) “Situated Knowledge” and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s article on “The Grammar of Animacy” (2017). From there we will move to an investigation of themes in environmental in/justice, highlighting cases and perspectives from around the world. Each week we will focus on a different theme and case study: linking theoretical articles with ethnographic and case-based readings and shorts films. In our weekly in-class discussion of these materials we will consider how capital flows and the distribution of power shape who has access to the necessities of life and to clean environments, and who does not, and how the world itself is being radically altered by human action. Throughout the course, we will continually return to the question of how plural understandings of justice and the environment underwrite, or challenge, environmental destruction, and socio-economic inequality. The course will conclude with a section specifically contemplating environmental justice beyond the human. In this portion, we will weave together threads from throughout the course, to consider what ethical and political obligations humans may have to more-than-human beings, and how the struggle to protect these beings is often tied up with the social justice struggles of marginalized human groups.