Course Description:
As the 2019 Human Development Report recognized, inequalities in human development has been increasing in line with slowing social mobility, restricted access to education and health, signs of backsliding democracy, growing human displacement due to war and violence, and swelling political instability around the world. This unfavorable situation probably could not get any worse in 2020. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, as a reflection of the anthropogenic pressures put on earth by human carbon, material footprint as well as the depletion of biodiversity, may have pushed some 100 million people into extreme poverty, threatening what has been achieved in the fight against poverty and inequality in the last 30 years (Human Development Report 2020, 6). While driving human populations into poverty and inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic also presents and alerts us with increased zoonotic infections, signs of land degradation, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and intensifying climate-related migration and displacement. Conventional approaches are still prevalent in our culture failing to provide solutions to complex socio-ecological problems. Policymakers continue to advocate for deterministic policy alternatives that prioritize limitless economic growth over the well-being of humans and non-human species living in an anthropogenic ecosystem. This course will introduce students to the burgeoning inter-and trans-disciplinary field of ecological economics beyond environmental economics which largely focuses on the monetary value of ecosystems and the costs and benefits of environmental policies. In our quest, we will learn novel paradigms that challenge the fundamental doctrines of what the market initiative is built upon in the age of intensifying climate crisis, inequality, and eco-systematic uncertainty. At the conclusion of the course, students will hopefully walk away with a firm enough grasp of the empirical realities rather than abstracted models as well as potential routes to engage in further research and actions, addressing the expansion of self-regulating markets and their disrupting impact on humans, the ecosystem, and morality in late capitalism.