POLS 378G American Environmental Politics

POLITICAL SCIENCE 378G

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Ira Rohter Spring 2008
irohter@hawaii.edu
956-7277   732-5497

Although the U.S. and developed nations have made significant progress in cleaning up many rivers and lakes, reduced air pollution, and closed off a few of the worst toxic dump sites, every indicator of major environmental well-being shows the condition of our biosphere worsening.  Fresh water sources are being depleted and polluted around the world, ocean fisheries are collapsing, tropical and virgin forests are being chopped down, toxic waste products are infiltrating our food and water, bio-species are dying, global climate disruptions are rapidly occurring and ....  goes on the depressing litany.

As a growing list of books such as Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century detail, our Society’s present institutions and value-structures are about to be forced to adapt to unprecedented climatic-induced crises, environmental collapses,  and declining oil production (Peak Oil).

It's not that these conditions lack solutions.  The sad truth is while many remediation and preservation programs have been established, most efforts to mitigate environmental problems have been only Band-aids relative to the magnitude of the crisis.

A multiplicity of reasons explains this political impotence, but as the authors of the controversial "Death of Environmentalism" paper note, it’s  time for the mainstream environmental movement to "rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things around as long as we understand our failures as essentially tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical."

Genuine solutions require new perspectives on the political economy and idea- systems dominating our planet.  Fortunately new approaches to solving these environmental issues and appalling economic, social, and political injustices, are beginning to be adopted around the world.

Advocates of Sustainable Development Theory emphasize that economic activities must be more ecologically sound, and not destroy the future.  A more radical approach adds other criteria to the minimal ("Lite") definition of "sustainability," arguing that "good development" should also meet multiple humanistic needs and not just jobs and GNP economic growth.  These include preserving local values and advancing self-reliance and institutional transformations. This deeper approach goes beyond simply "balancing" economics and the environment, to instead giving primacy to natural systems. 

PS 378G utilizes a political ecology perspective to critically examine the ideational and institutional roots of environmental degradation. The course also examines a host of proposed sustainable development -type solutions in large and small settings, from local communities to national Green Plans. It emphasizes a mixture of theory and practice, and considers such topics as "green philosophy," "managing" sustainable development, urban redesign, and new styles of policy making and politics called "civic environmentalism," "industrial ecology," and "natural capitalism."

A course in political science especially considers questions about agency and activism (overt politics)  — "Who will bring about these remarkable changes?" and "What should be their strategies?"  Students will be engaged in actual projects, such as those underway in the Sustainable Saunders program, or influencing the Hawaii Sustainability 2050 Plan, or establishing  Peak Oil Working Groups at the Legislature or City.

TEXTS  

Paul Hawken, THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE.   

Brian Tokar,  EARTH FOR SALE: RECLAIMING ECOLOGY IN AGE OF CORPORATE GREENWASH ; 

“Stand Up to Corporation Power,’ Yes Magazine, issue 43 (Fall 2007);       

Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith, FOSTERING SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOR: INTRODUCTION TO COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL MARKETING;  

plus articles from ANNUAL EDITIONS: ENVIRONMENT — 2007/08 & other sources.