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TUESDAY, APRIL 1
CRISES OLD AND NEW
Today we will begin by going over how the class works. I will explain
- The philosophy of the class and topics to be covered
- Readings
- Assignments, including
- Papers
- Quantitative Exercises
- Group Projects
- Grading policies
- Expectations for conduct in class
Then we will proceed to a substantive discussion of the class readings. The perception seems to have begun in the 1960s (didn't everything begin in the 1960s?) that the earth was entering a crisis. Two works by environmental scientists that propelled this perception were Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons. Read these, and we can spend the first half of class discussing what these guys were saying, and how their predictions look almost 40 years later. This discussion should help you in the process of finishing up the arguments for your first paper.
Finally, we will turn to the third reading for today, Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus's essay, The Death of Environmentalism, which presents a very different picture of the place of environmental concerns in society, 40+ years after Hardin and Ehrlich wrote their famous pieces. You should think about whether the controversial sentiments of the article's authors affect the possibility of doing positive environmental work.
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