Environment and Sustainability Studies II: Natural Sciences and Policy - ENS 202

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In this course, we examine how humans perceive, interpret, and manage socioecological systems with the intent of sustainability. To do this we first consider the different ways in which science can be practiced and how this shapes our understanding of causality as it relates to staking broad environmental policy positions. We then examine the history of scientific ideas about ecological organization in order to better understand how they have informed policy over time. What does it mean today when we say an ecological system is ‘resilient’, ‘complex’ or that an environmental problem is ‘wicked’?  How does the way in which biodiversity is conceptualized matter for the policies that aim to protect and conserve it? A deeper understanding of policies that invoke sustainability is not just about having scientific knowledge about the environment and the organisms in it. Nor is it just a matter of having a specific kind of beliefs and politics.  It is also about learning how humans think, make choices, and respond to problems that span individual and societal impacts. Through ideas in anthropology, economics, psychology, geography, ecology and biology, students in this course will acquire a more sophisticated understanding of how humans conceptualize, comprehend, and manage their impacts through environmental policies.

COURSE TOPICS

1. The world viewed through sense, mind and context: where science and policy begin

How we sense and measure the world shapes science and how we attribute causality. Yet science itself is not one but many different kinds of knowledge practices tht all occur within a social context. In this unit, we explore the underpinnings of how science is done in order to understand the ways in which it relates to environmental and sustainability policies.

Introduction
Philosophy and science
Scale
Sampling


2. Order, disorder, and complexity: science and policy as co-evolutionary dynamic

In this unit, we explore the nature of ecological change, and how our shifting understanding of it is central to making environmental policy and comprehending goals like sustainability.  Change can be gradual and reversible as well as sudden and irreversible. Change is inherent to the world, thus policies that aim for sustainability must make educated guesses as to the trajectories of change that are probable, possible, and unforeseen.

Ecological order and disorder
Complex systems
Resilience theory
Adaptive management


3. Understanding prediction and human behavior for environmental policy

In this unit, we examine how we make assumptions about the future, an inherent facet of policy. To do this often requires working with incomplete information. Thus we are required to anticipate the future through models and modeling.  Yet another aspect of policy must also be considered, that of human decision making and the ways in which we think and reason through situations that involve tradeoffs between the individual and society.

Game theory
Models and modeling
Climate change science and policy


4. Rethinking biodiversity and policy

Biodiversity policy is made upon a shifting understanding of what biodiversity is and how it works. In this unit we cultivate an understanding of the uncertainties and subjectivities of biodiversity, and how they have become enmeshed in current policies and practices.

Constraints on biodiversity conservation
Reframing the idea of biodiversity
Revisiting biodiversity narratives about megafauna conservation
Island and mosaic approaches to biodiversity policy



5. A good versus a bad Anthropocene

In this unit we explore the tension between environmentalist versus ecomodernist policies that aim to address a growing number of wicked problems. Technological fixes, data-driven problem solving, market processes, and financial instruments are increasingly invoked in policy debates as to whether humans can have a good versus a bad Anthropocene.

Environmentalism versus ecomodernism
Algorithmic Earth
Financializing nature
Geoengineering