These assignments will not be announced in advance. Other late papers will be docked one letter grade for each week or portion of a week, up to two weeks. The people of virtually all nations must deal with difficult environmental problems. In each region or nation, environmental problems occur within distinctive contexts, and people perceive the nature of the problem in distinctive ways. At the same time, the environmental problems of any one place are usually intimately related to events and people elsewhere.
Many environmental problems are planetary by their very nature, but still require local responses.
To give two contrasting examples, the preservation of the spotted owl in northern California is a local problem, but it is heavily affected by state and national political decisions, and by the decisions of businessmen in Dallas and Tokyo. The problem of possible global warming is a planetary problem, but it is influenced by whether you drove your car to school today. This course will give you a sense of how the diversity of natural life and the health of human society is affected by culture, economics, and politics. We will have to understand something about the scientific and technological character of environmental problems, but our focus will be on trying to see how the way society is organized tends to create, maintain, and sometimes resolve environmental problems. B. Acquire a more sophisticated understanding of major environmental problems such that the environmental implications of all our actions can be more carefully considered.