Course Description
Summary
What is nature? Who gets to speak for nature? What is the institutional arrangement, political economic system, and form of political community best suited to cultivating a more sustainable relationship with the more-than-human realm? These questions are most effectively grappled with by putting political theory into conversation with environmental studies. The first half of the class will provide an introduction to major debates in environmental political theory; focusing both on how conventional political theoretical debates over democracy, citizenship, sovereignty and justice have been critiqued and recast by environmentalists, and on how conventional environmental debates over wilderness, animal rights, and environmental justice have been understood by political theorists. Over the second half of the class, we will use to tools of Environmental Political Theory to explore what the climate crisis, Covid-19, and contemporary struggles over the commons have to tell us about nature-society relations of the past, present, and future.
