Handbook

Human society has experienced remarkable change as technological innovation, economic growth and population have produced rapidly changing social and environmental landscapes over the past current centuries. Such development is often seen a synonym of progress; however, over the past few decades it has been increasingly recognised that such rapid change has produced an uneven social geography – marginalising significant populations – while also intensively degrading and polluting different environments. We will discuss how the idea of sustainable development has emerged as a response to this conundrum – an effort to redirect economic growth to produced more socially just and environmentally benign outcomes. The path to a sustainable future, however, is not straightforward, as environmental, social and economic issues are ultimately situated in contested political realms. In this course, you will study how human-environment interconnections, across different scales and in different contexts, come together to demonstrate how environmental issues are situated in, and shaped by political and economic contexts. This will include engaging with a number of key sustainability debates as well as the in-depth study of different examples from around the world.