This page defines the implementation of the second goal of the course: understanding global crisis, culminating with an essay assignment explaining the global crisis.
Learning Module #2 turns from the introduction of World Sustainability to an empirical understanding grounded in competing paradigms that purport to explain the empirical situation. The second part of the course starts on October 2. The essay assignment is due on October 23.
Learning Goal #2: The student will demonstrate an empirical grasp of the nature and extent of the current global crisis. The student will coherently explain timely and comprehensive aspects that indicate the extent of the unsustainability of our current civilization and anthropogenic systems. This goal will culminate with an essay, counting 20 points, that explains how the student interprets and analyzes the nature and extent of the global crisis of sustainability.
Two Learning Outcomes will be pursued here:
This learning objective is crucial to our course. You will be challenged to pull together a coherent and up-to-date analysis of the current global crisis. Read Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0, Preface and chapters 1 through 6, carefully. Brown is very detailed and closely documents his claims. His book, published in 2008, is timely, readable, and influential. While global warming is important to Brown, his analysis goes beyond that widely discussed item.
Pay special attention to the discussion of Peak Oil. Brown has been correct in his predictions over the last few years. Also, his linking of food prices with oil prices made him an expert on this important topic. The latest edition of Brown incorporates recent science on global warming, and the scientific consensus is becoming more alarming. Brown now issues more grave near-term warnings.
On October 2 we will view the DVD by Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth.
Your study material for learning objective #1 is listed below:
You now have a working grasp of the current global crisis. How might you interpret what you have learned? What are the implications? Are there coherent principles underneath Brown? While he "connects the dots," he avoids putting forward a theory or a paradigm. To help with such a comprehensive world-view, try these out to see how they work for you. Some of this is strong stuff. We ask you to think of these things, not to advocate for one or the other.
Professor Edelstein has prepared a PowerPoint presentation that provides context within various paradigms.
Richard Catton's important book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, lays out the overshoot and collapse model. Read an excerpt. A minute's reflection indicates that overshoot and collapse is a variant of the limits to growth paradigm: Growth in population and economic activity creates a load that exceeds ecological carrying capacity, which then erodes and causes declines in population and economic activity. The Die Off web site offers a wide variety of material on the overshoot and collapse paradigm. Appalling stuff.
Biogeographer Jared Diamond's important book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, provides historical context to civilizations that, well, collapsed, sometimes inexplicably. Let Professor Diamond explain this to you. Diamond fits into an ample literature on societal collapse. Habitat destruction through human activity was the most common cause of collapse. Not pretty. Diamond edges toward human institutions and paradigms, but does not quite overcome an underlying physical determinism.
Derrick Jensen, a strident critic of civilization, pushes the overshoot and collapse paradigm to a stark logical conclusion: the apocalypse of endgame. See his web research agenda. His pithy core belief is: Civilization, particularly industrial civilization, cannot be sustained. Read an excerpt that lays out his premises, pages ix-xiv. Jensen does not remain within the neutral and mechanistic categories of the standard ecological model. Rather, he extrapolates from a jaundiced judgement on civilization itself. Professor Hayes elaborates on Jensen's implications for your consideration:
Civilization cannot be sustained and will collapse within two generations or so -- nobody quite knows when -- with catastrophic consequences. While this calamity could be prevented and while many will strive to rescue civilization, the very forces, ideologies, interests, and institutions that create this global crisis will obfuscate critical remedial discourse and will thwart the diverse efforts toward restoration of vital social, economic, political, and ecological systems. The ongoing effort to forestall civilizational collapse will thus fail. The resulting trauma will be appalling and irreversible.
See Professor Hayes'sStatement of Concerns. Hear Jensen's speech, Welcome to the End of the World
Note that in this contrast of paradigms, the ecological paradigm of overshoot and collapse is transcended by human intentionality and events within society and civilization. In this context, a single explanation, such as global warming, gives way to greater complexity -- see Donella Meadows on intervention in complex systems. Which is why World Sustainability includes, but is not limited to, the issue of global warming. The stakes and the complexity are daunting.
Finally, recall a premise of Brown's book: Plan A will fail. Use these paradigms, and your own research and imagination. How will Plan A fail? Think about it. We have, and issued a statement of concern that should be read with essay on the need for an intergenerational horizon for world sustainability. These concerns amplify a legacy set of indicators of unsustainability, now moved to the wiki site. See the related wiki page on coal. These are in progress.
The assignment for Learning Module #2 is due on October 23. Send them to our class e-mail account, enst209@gmail.com. Please save your documents as MS Word 2003 documents. We do not use MS Vista, so we may not be able to open documents saved in .docx format. We cannot open documents saved in other formats, so strictly avoid them. If you are stuck, use RTF (Rich Text Format).