Catastrophe and Triumph

Update 8/25/2024

RHM textbook, Environment & Society:

  • First half: perspectives: “dominant ways of thinking about environment-society relations”
    • there are many more… you will encounter in courses and elsewhere
    • shape how people think about and impact the environment
  • Second half: perspectives “applied to familiar objects of the world around us.”
    • not problems and crises: important
    • “An opportunity to break away from the environment as an undifferentiated generic problem, one universally characterized by a state of immediate and unique crisis.”
    • the problem with apocalyptic catastrophism & environment
      • apocalyptic: “describing or prophesying the complete destruction of the world.”
      • catastrophism: “involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering.”

There is good news and the promise of being able to do something…

A generalized process: book, class, class project

  • Understand the natural and the socialĀ together from different perspectives
  • Understand common environmental objects embedded in natural and social contexts
  • Understand how environmental challenges (at a range of scales) arise from this complex context
  • Define solutions to these problems

Project Drawdown: which efforts have the biggest impact on climate change and environmental problems? Click on Scenario 1 or Scenario 2 (two levels of impact on reducing CO2)

Scrappy Sustainability –Ā here


Class Project information linked in menu above and here

Leave a Reply