Environment General Courses (ENVIRON)

graduate level, taught in Durham

298.41. ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS: TACKLING SOURCES RATHER THAN SYMPTOMS

Professor Norman Myers

This five-week and ten-session course (with three hours each session)  will examine a series of environmental problems, asking why we allow such problems to arise in the first place.  Factors at issue include: political ignorance/ignore-ance; the media; corporate oligarchies; special interests and lobbyists; government inertia; perverse subsidies; tramlines thinking; establishment values; and scientific traditionalism. Particular topics to be addressed include: eco-economics; population/consumption; environmental security; environmental surprises/discontinuities; scientific uncertainty and public policy; the interdisciplinary animal; government and governance; and sustainable development.

If you are ready to think hard, be challenged (by your fellow students as much as your Prof), and provoke your grey cells, come and try it out--though if you prefer to stay in your comfort zone, don't. Should you wish to join in, leave your umbrella behind.

This will be a two-unit course. There will be marked emphasis on class discussion. Assignments will include a lecturette, “out-of-the-box” thinking exercises,  and contributing to a working group project.  Grades will be based on 50% for class discussions, 25% for a lecturette and 25% for a working group project. The teaching method will be: thirdly, to teach the students myself; secondly, to get them to teach each other; and firstly, to learn to teach themselves (to think independently and pioneeringly). The last teaching mode implies gaining an acquaintance of all fields that make up the larger context within which the environment must find its policy place; to gain a grasp of the proliferant linkages between these fields and their disciplines; and to become aware of what information is out there in the libraries or on the web, without necessarily supposing that a student has to become a multi-expert. Linkages are all, hence there will be much emphasis on lateral thinking and other perquisites of the holistic approach.

Students will be asked to do some ahead-of-time homework by digesting at least 15 papers from a list of roughly 35 that I shall send on to be distributed electronically. It will be sufficient for students to rip the guts out of a paper by e.g. reading the abstract and introduction, plus conclusion, together with whatever else is necessary for the reader to become equipped to give a two-minute talk on what a paper is about, what it is not about, and whether the reader thinks it does a good job.  What, you think you can't swallow 15 papers in just a couple of hours?  Well, supposing you were paid $100 for the task, would you still say it’s impossible? Remember, over 1000 new papers are published every week, and if you spend a whole hour on just one paper, you are effectively denying yourself the chance to check the messages of lots of other papers. I shall expect students to digest several other papers per week during the course, taking no more than one hour for them all each time. 

The course will thus relate to how one might go about having environmental science implemented in policy making. It will cover topical issues such as biodiversity hotspots, ecosystem services and their shadow-priced values, future evolution degraded,  population/poverty, over- and mis-consumption, water shortages, deforestation, desertification, energy deficits, eco-agriculture,  zero emissions industry, and the emergent middle classes in China, India etc. (all 1.4 billion of them with purchasing power greater than the United States in PPP terms).

During the course I shall get students to imagine themselves at, say, the tenth-year stage of a professional career in environment, analyzing and evaluating the various policy options to shift our societies (businesses, government/governance,  science, technology, finance, investment/trade, etc.) beyond their present self-defeating paths and toward a sustainable future in all respects. The students will thus be required to address the policy perspectives of e.g. climate change, of poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, and of the need for more realistic metrics of human development than the obsolescent mode of GDP.