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The Human Place in Nature: 
Campus Series on the Scholarship of Sustainability
The Office of Sustainability is pleased to announce the Campus Series on the Scholarship of Sustainability. This ten-week series of presentations and discussions will begin on February 2, 2012.
Sessions will take place on Thursdays from 4 to 6 p.m. in 100 Noyes Hall on the main UI quad and will involve participation by faculty members across the campus. The sessions are open to the public, and faculty and staff are urged to attend. Students can attend the sessions on their own. Alternatively, they can enroll for academic credit in one of four campus classes that center around these sessions. The ten sessions form an integrated series but can also stand alone. The Series is being sponsored by the Office of Sustainability with co-sponsorgship from the School of Earth, Society, and the Environment; the College of Law: and the Student Sustainability Committee.
This important series of 10 sessions will explore the big-picture issues of humans and nature, the foundational issues that frame our environmental plight, morally and intellecturally. It will look critically at sustainability as a goal (and compare more ecologically grounded alternatives"; consider the moral status of nonhuman life and environmental backlash. Late sessions will assess competing mechanisms for remedying our ills based on both individual and collective actions and including possible reforms of capitalism.
Earn course credits:
ESE 311 Environmental Issues Today
ESE 497A Special Topics in ESE
RLST 270 Religion, Ethics, Environment
LAW 792JJ Current Legal Problems
OLLI: The Human Place In Nature: Sustainability Series
For more information about the series or assistance accessing materials, please contact us.
The readings for the Series are now available in the College of Law Bookstore; also in the Illini Union Bookstore under the courses affiliated with the Series and in the "Course Package" section of the Bookstore. Attendees are urged to obtain the readings.
February 2: Is Sustainability a Meaningful Goal?
It is commonly said that we should base environmental policy on sound science and that sustainability is our goal. What, though, is science, and what are its proper roles? As for sustainability, it is subject to widely differing definitions and faces criticism as a normative standard. That criticism has led to proposals of various alternative standards, many framed in terms of the ecological functioning of natural systems, others more in terms of biological composition.
February 9: Why Do We Misuse Nature?
Environmental problems are the result of misuses of nature by people. Often we can easily spot the superficial actions that cause the harm. But that conduct is itself typically a product of more foundational forces and causes. Why do we behave toward nature as we do? What are the true root causes–cultural, cognitive, and material–of our misconduct? Perhaps to identify them is, in important ways, to reveal our true environmental ills.
February 16: Environmentalists and Animal Lovers: Friends? Foes?
As we think about moral issues and the human place in nature, how should other life forms fit in? This session will explore the tensions between animal-welfare approaches and more ecological understandings of the moral landscape. It will also consider both the moral status of species and rare communities as such and the essential roles of biodiversity in the functioning of healthy landscapes. At bottom, our varied reasons for wanting to conserve other life forms can lead to widely differing policies and actions.
February 23: Can We Save Biodiversity?
This session will build upon session 3 by considering the steps needed to promote biodiversity on large scales, particularly in landscapes where humans live and work. It will highlight how different reasons for protecting biodiversity can prompt different conservation strategies. Efforts to coordinate land-use activities collide with cultural values that exalt liberty and individualism as well as the realities of landscapes divided among political jurisdictions and private owners. Such fragmentation poses perhaps the gravest challenge for environmental policy given that we can remedy many problems only through collective action at large spatial scales.
March 1: How Should We Share the Planet?
Our thinking about how we ought to live should certainly consider all humans and the need for social justice. As commonly understood, environmental justice deals with the siting of hazardous or otherwise unwanted land uses, but the subject reaches further to include access to land and valuable resources and to the ways we share common-pool resources, particularly the atmosphere and its limited ability to absorb climate-changing gases. It also deals with the sovereign integrity of various peoples around the world.
March 8: Environmental Policy Today: What Has Worked, and How?
The United States has made significant progress in addressing certain environmental ills but little progress on others. What policy approaches have worked, and why have significant challenges gone unaddressed? We’ll identify the main tools used to mitigate environmental harms and evaluate their strengths and limitations, paying particular attention to continuing land-use ills (e.g., soil degradation and erosion, loss of wildlife habitat) and misuses of waterways, wetlands, and coastal zones.
March 15: Getting People to Live Green: Helpful? Diversionary?
The call has gone out for people to make changes in their daily lives to help alleviate environmental ills. In what ways can people make a difference, and on what issues is individual action likely to accomplish little? More generally, is it wise to focus attention on individual change or is such effort largely diversionary and unhelpful if our main need is to foster structural change through legal means?
March 29: The Environmental Backlash: Useful Opponents? Destructive Force?
In the United States, the golden age of environmental control occurred from the late 1960s until around 1980, when nearly all of our laws and major policies were put into place. By 1980, a strong resistance force had arisen, slowing if not halting nearly all environmental progress. That backlash effort, now seemingly stronger than ever, has allowed significant environmental problems to linger and is poised to undercut much environmental progress to date. This session will probe the backlash movement, noting its common methods and linking the movement to core American liberal values and neo-classical economic thought.
April 5: Capitalism: OK? Reform? Replace?
Is capitalism inherently destructive of the environment? Might it be reformed in ways that promote sound environmental outcomes? Instead, is more radical change in our economic system needed–as a rising number of environmental leaders contend? We’ll undertake a primer on externalities and on the ways market competition can foster destruction, consider worries over corporate dominance of government, and look quickly at proposals for changes in corporate governance.
April 12: Is a Broad Coalition Essential?
Environmental policy is, at its core, an effort to change human behaviors that involve misuses of nature, particularly the behaviors of businesses. How can we bring about such change? What methods have been tried in the past, and with what success? To the extent that new laws and government programs are needed, what will it take to bring them about given financial constraints on government, the power of the backlash movement, and the rising control of media by cultural forces hostile to progressive government and environmental protection?