2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Nov 21, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

SSJ 30701 - Beyond the Population Bomb: Rethinking Population and The Environment in an Era of Climate Change

Population, or “overpopulation,” has long been blamed as a primary reason for environmental problems, including climate change. In this class, we will examine the gendered and racialized ways that environmental thinkers have framed population in relation to resource scarcity, food insecurity, conflict and violence, environmental degradation and climate change. Starting from the 1948 bestsellers Our Plundered Planet and Road to Survival to the 2014 coffee table book, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, we will analyze environmental discourses that call for population reduction to address environmental issues. We will explore how these discourses influence environmental activism, impact sexual and reproductive health policy, and fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric, while obscuring the complex contributors to environmental problems. In the class, we will look to reproductive, environmental and climate justice movements to find frameworks that propose action on environmental issues while fighting for social justice.

Formerly IDCE 30701. Students who have already passed IDCE 30701 cannot receive credit for SSJ 30701 and should not take this course.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall