PO 354 - Environmental Justice

Min Units: 3
Max Units: 3
How can we create a world in which all people have access to clean, safe, and welcoming places to live, work, learn, play, and pray, and ecosystems are conserved? Why have some communities been disproportionately burdened with unsafe water, polluted air, and toxic trash while others take access to clean air, water, green spaces, and other amenities for granted? What explains these unjust outcomes? What can be done? These questions are at the heart of this course. This course will develop your capacity to analyze environmental problems, policies, and decision-making processes by introducing you to environmental justice (EJ) as a set of analytic frameworks and overlapping social movements. EJ frameworks attend to the interconnections among environments, polities, societies, and economies to identify causes of and remedies for injustice. EJ movements have placed distributional issues squarely on the environmental policy agenda and presented a broader vision. Advocates have not only asserted that solutions that reduce aggregate pollution while imposing undue burdens on marginalized groups are unacceptable but also have sought to develop strategies to create greater environmental justice. While this course accepts the assertion that all people have right to a clean and healthy environment and the right to the natural resources necessary for health and livelihood, EJ frameworks and movements will be subject to critique. (U) Occasionally
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore status