Ecology and Sustainability

Content

The environmental problems are not just issues that concern natural environmental scientists. Social sciences show how the so-called crisis challenges modern societies to thoroughly re-organize their economic and political structures; environmental humanities examine the way in which the same crisis urges a reconceptualization of the basic concepts by which we think of human existence. Environmental philosophy is a broad field. The environmental crisis raises metaphysical and ontological questions about the nature of earth and the era of the Anthropocene. But environmental philosophy also addresses socio-political questions regarding the way societies organize their relation tot future generations and to the nonhuman world in politics and economics. Finally, environmental ethics focuses on our moral relation to the natural world and addresses the way we conceptualize the value of the nonhuman world. This module will be organized around three courses that focus on closely related core thematics. 1) Ecophilosophy in the Anthropocene focuses on the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of humanities relation to the earth system, addressing the role of technology, and the implications of complexity in the ecological worldview for our understanding of the Anthropocene. 2) Environmental Political Thought focusses on socio-political issues such related to ecological citizenship, environmental and intergenerational justice, bio-based economy and global policies addressing climate change. 3) Biodiversity and Ecological Co-existence focuses on ethical and existential issues connected to the way values of the natural world are articulated, the meaning of wildness in an Anthropocene world, and the questions of co-existence with nonhuman lifeforms. Each thematic will be introduced both historically and systematically and further explored through reading and discussing the work of some key contemporary authors in environmental and ecological thought. Classes will consist of lectures, close reading sessions of primary literature, group discussions on cases, student presentations and a few practical components like excursions or video/movie screenings and debate.