Anthropology and Environment

Lectures

In the early years, I used this class to teach the ‘academic’ topics being produced by anthropology and environment (A&E) researchers (common property, TEK, environmental movements, political ecology, etc) and to introduce the ideas of systems ecology (primarily from HT Odum, Buzz Holling, and others). But in recent years, I recognized the need to include the many topical environmental issues that impinge on all of us. Those topics include, of course, global warming, species extinctions, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, etc. And I felt the need to introduce two topical subjects of importance for Taiwan. Those are ‘net-zero emissions’ and the UN ‘SDGs’. Some ppts have been dropped, but they remain in my graduate class, Environmental Anthropology. I did continue, however, to give the students much of the basic understanding of our biosphere and our place therein. Here is my original syllabus introduction to the class:

People, culture, and nature form one system, one vast, miraculous, interdependent, evolving, and synergistic system that spans the globe. We are all utterly dependent upon this culture-nature system to sustain us, feed us, and provide us with the energy and materials to build and sustain our societies and ourselves. In this class, you will gain a thorough understanding of our self-organized system of culture and nature. You will learn about ecosystems, natural resources, and the human place within nature. When we finish you should have a much deeper understanding of the concept of sustainability, and what it will take to live more simply and peacefully with the world of the 21st Century. We all must learn to act responsibly to sustain the natural world so that it will provide for us and for the generations that follow us. That environmental awareness is what we strive to attain in this class.

  • Introduction

    • Movies – Energy Blind, Part 1 (6:03), Three Seconds (4:18), How Wolves Change Rivers (4:33), The Story of Stuff (21:22)

  • Taiwan Net-Zero Emissions, Central Government Net-Zero Plan

    • In recent years, the topic of ‘Net-zero by 2050’ became the mantra from the central government - the idea that drastically reduced emissions combined with new carbon sinks can lead to a ‘net’ of zero carbon emissions for Taiwan. We used this very simple ppt to begin to debate that goal. But I did not want to simply denounce it. I wanted the students to begin to come to their own understandings for themselves. So I gave them a list of topics to choose from (all promoted by the central government) and produce very short ppts for the next week. Including these and more: Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), Hydrogen Energy Generation, Circular Economy, Energy Storage, Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs), F-gasses, Carbon Pricing (carbon tax, cap-and-trade), etc. In our next class, we could then begin to deconstruct these ‘solutions’, which continued throughout the semester.

  • Energy Resources (Part 1) (81 slides)

    • Movies: Hydraulic Fracturing (6:37, linked), Fracking – Opportunity or Danger (5:03, linked), Fracking on 60 Minutes (13:20, linked)

  • Energy Resources (Part 2) (73 slides)

    • Movies – People’s Planet 4 – What Price Nature?

  • SDGs

    • This class introduces the class to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

  • SDG8 – Economic Growth

  • What is the ‘Environment’? (Part 1) (83 slides)

    • Movies: Earth Systems Interact (5:49, linked), An Introduction to Heat (4:09, linked), Taiwan Had Some Volcanoes (0:59, linked), Earth Continually Changes (5:34, linked)

  • What is the ‘Environment’? (Part 2) (57 slides)

    • Movies: How Ecosystems Work (3:23, linked), All About Soil (12:52, linked), Succession (2:33, linked), Black Tears of the Land

  • What is the ‘Environment’? (Part 3) (66 slides)

    • Movies: The Dirt on Decomposers (3:18), The Phosphorus Challenge (2:28, linked), The Phosphorus Problem (3:34, linked), Regenerative Agriculture (3:56, linked), Population, Community, Ecosystem (2:21, linked), Populations Biotic Potential (2:57, linked)), Interactions in Communities (2:40, linked)

  • People, Culture, Nature (Part 1) (54 slides)

    • Movie – Guns, Germs, and Steel (50 min, linked) or QUIZ

  • People, Culture, Nature (Part 2) (56 slides)

    • Movies: Extinction Rebellion (1:59, linked), Overpopulation: The Human Explosion Explained (6:39, linked), People’s Planet 3 – Feeding 9 Billion, From the Ground Up (13:14, linked)

  • The Rise and Fall of Complex Societies (104 slides)

    • Movies – Why Societies Collapse (19:47, linked)

  • Environmentalism and NGOs (59 slides)

    • Movie – Black Tears of the Land (60 minutes)

  • A Resilient Way Forward (112 slides)

    • Movies: Thermokarst Lakes (1:22, linked), Planetary Boundaries (20 min, linked), The Doughnut (1:26, linked)

  • Socioecological Movements, Part 1 (157 slides)

    • Movies – In Transition 1.0 (49:39, linked)

  • Tipping Points