Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines international efforts to respond to global environmental challenges, such as climate change, deforestation, and the degradation of the oceans. Investigates obstacles to effective action and possible ways forward. Explores the role of a range of key actors, including states, intergovernmental organizations, multinational companies, NGOs, and social movements.

COURSE DETAILS:

 

Even in the context of resurgent fascist movements, rising economic inequality and accelerating wealth concentration, the collapse of secularism and the failure of the neoliberal order to deliver either stability or prosperity to millions, it can easily be argued that the greatest geopolitical failure of our time is the failure of our politics to come to grips with the most significant extinction event in over a hundred million years.

The challenge of anthropogenic climate change and the other global ecological challenges the human race is concurrently precipitating and purporting to ameliorate is one with which international institutions, agreements and movements have sought to arrest. But, at present, not just climate change but associated ecological challenges such as rapid extinctions, collapses of wild food stocks, ocean acidification are being accelerated by human activity.

International Studies 373 seeks to take stock of the major global efforts to address the environmental crises the human race now faces and the ways in which different strategies have both produced victories and tangible progress without in any way arresting or reversing the accelerating global environmental crisis. The course will survey three main fields of environmental political endeavour on the global scale from both comparative and connective perspectives.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

 

First, students will examine the nation-to-nation efforts to achieve environmental change. From the regional accords concerning acid rain of the 1970s through the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion through to the recent Paris Climate Accord, students will examine the early successes and more recent failures of the international treaty-making environment. A key optic for this will be a historical look at the UN’s Globe 90 Conference in Vancouver where “sustainable development” was first formally endorsed as the framework for future agreements.

Second, students will focus on international environmental organizations and coalitions thereof, from venerable patrician ENGOs like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund to newer coalitions, alliances and global groups. In this context, Vancouver’s role as the centre of ENGOs working on deforestation globally from the 1980s to the present will be considered and the ways in which local factors have helped to construct a global forestry optic, epitomized in Valhalla Wilderness Society founder Colleen McCrory’s dubbing BC “the Brazil of the North” in 1989.

Third, students will be asked to engage with partisan environmental politics. Preceded by the Small parties and Values parties of the 1970s, students will examine the emergence of Green parties globally beginning in the 1970s. They will engage with the problem of Green Parties as phenomenon dependent on voting systems and states’ location in the Global North as well as counter-examples of the emergence of effective Green parties.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: