Global Environmental Justice

Everyday there are new reports of environmental injustice: floods wiping out communities, poisonous water leading to chronic illness, increase in size and quantity of forest fires, unpredictable hurricanes and tornadoes, the burning of the Amazon for agribusiness, the acidification of the ocean and growing plastic islands in the Pacific Ocean, oil spills and methane leakage, amongst many others. While these profound ecological crises have global reach, their effects and everyday impacts are exceedingly uneven. What are the political, economic, and social processes driving this unequal distribution of ecological catastrophe and harm? This course offers tools and frameworks of global environmental justice to interrogate how environmental harms and benefits are distributed across the world and the underlying causes of these inequalities. Alongside this, we will learn from the strategies and movements that have emerged to challenge these inequalities and build alternative outcomes and systems. The course will cover a range of topics, including energy transition, climate change, pollution, waste, resource extraction, and agriculture, along with case studies of environmental justice struggles from around the world.