Geography 436: "Ecology, Economy, and Society"

For many years, it was believed that there was a direct tradeoff between economic growth and a clean environment. Sustainable development has been proposed as an framework within which these two objectives can be pursued in harmony and actually can reinforce one another. This course focuses on sustainability issues at the broader (macroeconomic) level, as opposed to the operation of individual businesses (microeconomic, or industrial ecology) level.

The course will have two main emphases: 1) to evaluate the major conceptual ideas surrounding natural resource management and sustainable development, including equity, poverty, fairness, power, knowledge, and community empowerment; 2) to use empirical case studies to examine the practical, material and policy relevance of these concepts. The first part of the semester will be used to untangle and clarify the ideological and theoretical bases (biases) of broad human-environment discourses as they pertain to community empowerment and resource development. The final part of the semester will be used to analyze case studies in order to assess the relevance of existing theoretical framework for resource empowerment and community development in industrialized countries and the Third World, especially Africa.

Professor: Dr. B. Ikubolajeh Logan