Acadia University

Note: This course is restricted to ALL Members

An Introduction to Challenging Themes in Environmental Thinking

Dr. Paul Abela

It is difficult to think critically about the environment. Both corporate and environmental propaganda permeates public debate. The last twenty years has seen a marked increase in the urgency attached to how we view our relationship with the environment. This urgency-of-the-moment thinking unfortunately tends to obscure the deeper issues in play when considering our relationship with the natural world. This course offers the student an unrushed opportunity to carefully engage central environmental themes.

The course begins by canvassing traditional approaches to ethics that have proven influential in environmental ethics. The course then moves to address, and reject, a common view that attempts to justify ethical judgments based on purely natural relations. The course then turns to an historical example from the late 1960s (Zero Population Movement) that falsely predicted demographic catastrophe, with an eye to deriving helpful lessons from the dangers of crisis thinking. The following two weeks takes a deep dive into the concepts of sustainable development and the global problem of climate change. In both cases, a critical analysis is offered that sheds light on the underlying arguments that motivate these environmental challenges. The course concludes with some final thoughts on environmentalism and the future.