dear abhijit and others, while I understand abhijit's desire not to let political economy discussions (and perhaps polemics) dominate the course, I would argue that in the 21st century one cannot teach "resources, environment and sustainability" without significantly considering political economy and political ecology . . .
resources become resources when some human actors see them as useful; different human actors may see the same biophysical entity as having different uses; a biophysical entity that is seen as a resource by one group may be seen as pollution by another group . . . how a particular biophysical entity becomes authoritatively or effectively defined as a resource is thus a very political economic and political ecological question . . . most contemporary discussions of sustainability accept the tripartite basis of environmentally balanced, economically rewarding, and socially just . . . the ability to move in those directions is heavily influenced by political economy and political ecology . . . the danger in not explicitly including political economy and political ecology is that consumption becomes a unitized phenomenon: humans consume . . . but different groups of humans consume in great different amounts and greatly different ways than other groups of humans, and these differences are not perfectly correlated with the society of residence . . . cheers, craig harris department of sociology michigan state university -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Abhijit Banerjee Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 11:11 AM To: gep-ed@listserve1.allegheny.edu Subject: Textbook suggestion for "Resources and Sustainability" course Dear GEP-ED community, I am new to GEP-ED and have found the discussion on this list very helpful, particularly regarding course design. I am currently a PhD candidate in Environmental Policy and shall be teaching a course as an adjunct instructor this coming spring semester. Since I am new to teaching, I thought I would use your vast experience to ask for a textbook suggestion. The course is titled "Resources, Environment and Sustainability" and is an upper-level undergraduate course. In this course, I plan to highlight resource use in different sectors on a global scale, comaparative levels of resource consumption among various countries, life cycle impact of resource use from extraction to waste disposal, ecological footprint or other similar sustainability indicators, environmental and depletion limits, and sustainable consumption. I want to use some good data to highlight the unsustainable levels of concumption and not focus too much on political economy type discussions. I don't want to just describe the various resource management problems and thus prefer not to use a standard "Natural Resource Management" textbook which is often heavily US centric. Also, I have been told that I cannot use any "economics" textbook (so "Ecological Economics" by Herman Daly et al. is out of consideration). Under these circumstances I wanted to get some advice about an appropriate textbook for this course. One option is to use the "Ecological Footprint" books by Wackernagel et al., but I would also like to explore other options. I am sure that with your vast experience you will be able to give me many excellent suggestions. You may reply to my email only ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) rather than to the entire list if you prefer. Many thanks for your time and effort. Sincerely, Abhijit ****************************************************** Abhijit Banerjee Research Associate and Ph.D. candidate Center for Energy & Environmental Policy University of Delaware Newark, Delaware USA __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
