Race, Space, and Environmental Justice

3 credits · Peabody College - Professional

Humans have historically shaped the environment to provide food, shelter, energy, profit, and social power. Today, our relationship to nature is more complex and varied than ever before. Temperatures are rising. Ice caps are melting. Species are disappearing. As forests are eaten by fire and lands swallowed by the sea, humanity faces grave uncertainty over the future. On the one hand, societies have an unprecedented capacity to reconfigure the environment through processes that range from genetic manipulation to geo-engineering. On the other hand, the unequal distribution of environmental burdens and benefits across race, class, gender, and nation is widening as climate change intensifies. A global outcry has ensued. Dozens of children have brought lawsuits against the US federal and state governments for failing to act as trustees of the environment and atmosphere. Poorer countries, which bear the disproportionate effects of climate change, claim that wealthier countries should foot the expenses of adaptation. Meanwhile, Indigenous-led environmental justice movements contend that climate change should be understood as intensified colonialism. To reckon with climate change, some argue, we must reckon with how racism, imperialism, anti-Blackness, Native dispossession, gender violence, resource extraction, and capital accumulation are integral to the organization of modern life. In this interdisciplinary graduate course, we will explore environmental justice in theory and practice: How do we "know" nature? What is race? How do historical entanglements of nature, culture, race, space, and capital shape contemporary environmental problems and struggles? How do groups resist and organize around environmental justice concerns? [3]