This course focuses on the urgent social environmental-planetary issue of our times, climate crisis. We will tap the latest scientific assessments on the severity of the global crisis; we will explore the historical trajectory that brings us to the ways we produce, consume, travel, and live today; and we will engage with the environmental justice literature that explains why less-powerful populations are targeted by ecologically and socially degrading practices.
We will then look at how social movements respond with creative solutions to meet these social and ecological challenges. Finally, we will integrate these ideas into a holistic framework with which to understand concrete examples from around the world - in India, Brazil, the Arabian Peninsula, Germany, and in the U.S. such as the Twin Cities -- where people are remaking the world into a safer and more just place to live.