SMNR: Climate Change

• Semester: Spring 2024
• Course ID: 397S
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 28945

Description

     This seminar aims to explore a clutch of topics that represent just a few of the severe and accelerating disruptions to conventional societal arrangements and institutions being instigated or worsened by climate change. Those I have chosen for this Spring’s course engage in immediate terms with fields that include-- and often multiply intersect with-- law; environmental engineering; community and regional planning; public health; public policy and private governance; and the economics of global trade. Problem analysis together with solutions-pathways will be our primary modes of address. Our main gear of operations will involve a focus on challenges that are coming to afflict not only future generations but yours.

     Specific issues for dissection may include the energy transition and next-gen fuels; risk management in the public and private sectors (droughts, floods, extreme heat, private residential insurance); environmental justice for front-line communities; the dam crisis and the re-design of fisheries and waterways; the burdensome economics of “fast” industries such as fashion and furniture; the biodiversity crisis (and why it matters); the global food crisis and its relationship to industrial agriculture and trade; and the professional ethics of lawyers.  Students who enroll in the seminar before the term begins will be invited to vote on the inclusion of one or more of these.

     Learning will be enhanced by the inter-disciplinary mix of our class’s membership, by diverse readings and other materials, by vigorous discussion, and by expert guest- participants.

     Students will write brief analytic papers and one creative one and a brief paper at the end of the term. Students may write collaboratively as pairs, groups, or teams at least once, so long as each person’s contributions are separately identified.