Home Page Introduction Course Objectives Requirements Course Schedule Email the Class

Assignment for Wednesday, April 5: Sustainability and Political Ecology Political ecology is a relatively new and ill-defined but nevertheless vibrant field that deals with the relationship between politics and ecology and environment. Its main point is that politics affects the way humans and the environment interact. Its practitioners are mostly left-liberal (Redclift) or Marxist (Peet and Watts). Thus today we are getting a much deeper look at political critiques of environmental trends and environmental policy, as well as the politics of environmental activism of various sorts. Read 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. Read Richard Peet and Michael Watts, "Liberation Ecology," in Peet and Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies, 1996