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Class Schedule: Week 3, Resilience and Sustainability
Monday, April 15: Sustainability is one of the most difficult concepts to define, let alone use in a scientific way, yet it remains essential to our current discourse on environmental and resource problems. Today we will read three divergent approaches to sustainability, and by 10:00 a.m., you should post 200-300 words on what you think sustainability means and why you think it is (or is not) an important concept. In class, I will present a lecture on three ways that sustainability is like both God and a water weenie. We will use my lecture and your postings to discuss whether we can ever get hold of the water weenie that is sustainability.
- The Classic: Overview and Chapters 1-2 of the 1987 "Brundtland Report," Our Common Future, which first used the term "Sustainable Development."
- The Concerned: D.W. Orr, "Four Challenges of Sustainability," Conservation Biology 16:1457-1460 (2002)
- The Political: Michael Redclift, "Sustainable development and popular participation: A framework for analysis," in Dharam Ghai and Jessica M. Vivian, eds., Grassroots Environmental Action: People's Participation in Sustainable Development, London: Routledge (1995), pp. 23-49.
Wednesday, April 17: Today we get into formal definitions and applications of sustainability, from economists and historians, to see if the concept is more than just a signal of hope or a beacon for political activism. By 10:00 a.m., you should post 200-300 words on an example of the ways the authors' definitions of sustainability might be applied to a problem you are personally interested in. In class, we will start with a general discussion of these authors' methods, and then discuss each of your examples until we run out of time.
- Robert Solow, "Sustainability: An economist's perspective," in Robert Dorfman and Nancy S. Dorfman, eds., Economics of the Environment: Selected Readings (1993), pp. 179-187.
- William A. Brock, Karl-Goran-Maler, and Charles Perrings, "Resilience and Sustainability: The Economic Analysis of Nonlinear Dynamic Systems," chapter 10 of Panarchy
- John A Dearing. 2007. Human-Environment Interactions: Learning from the Past. In Robert Costanza, Lisa L. Graumlich, and Will Steffen, eds., Sustainability or Collapse (Berlin: Freie Universitaet), pp. 19-34.
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