York University Geography Department
- Head Teaching Assistant & Tutorial Instructor
- 2017 – 2019
- GEOG 2030 – The End of the Earth As We Know It: Introduction to Global Environmental Change
- Course introduction: Large-scale transformations of the earth—especially climate change but also air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation, changes in nutrient cycling, and soil erosion—are among the most difficult problems and challenges of our day. From Hollywood cinema to the nightly news, environmental problems are on the agenda, and the efforts to deal with them continually fall short, resulting in both social and ecological challenges. This course is designed to introduce students to human-environment geography by exploring both historical and contemporary human-induced transformations of the earth’s system. The objectives are to better understand how and why the global environment is changing; how these changes manifest themselves in different places; and the ways in which individuals and societies adapt to, respond to, and mitigate environmental change. Special attention will be given to the politics and power relations embedded in contemporary policy debate. We will investigate the decision to act and the decision not to act on the part of individuals, governments, activist organizations, and corporations. While it is tempting to see global environmental change (GEC) as a uniquely large-scale phenomenon and problem, it is not limited to the global scale. Both the impacts of GEC and responses to it occur across scale and are geographically variable. In order to stress this, the course will examine the local
manifestations of these global processes. The course will start by reviewing what is meant by ‘global environmental change’ and the key features of climate change science. It will then move on to explore different social science and humanities approaches to analyzing GEC and finish with an investigation into the relevant global policy dimensions with an emphasis on equity.
- Course introduction: Large-scale transformations of the earth—especially climate change but also air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation, changes in nutrient cycling, and soil erosion—are among the most difficult problems and challenges of our day. From Hollywood cinema to the nightly news, environmental problems are on the agenda, and the efforts to deal with them continually fall short, resulting in both social and ecological challenges. This course is designed to introduce students to human-environment geography by exploring both historical and contemporary human-induced transformations of the earth’s system. The objectives are to better understand how and why the global environment is changing; how these changes manifest themselves in different places; and the ways in which individuals and societies adapt to, respond to, and mitigate environmental change. Special attention will be given to the politics and power relations embedded in contemporary policy debate. We will investigate the decision to act and the decision not to act on the part of individuals, governments, activist organizations, and corporations. While it is tempting to see global environmental change (GEC) as a uniquely large-scale phenomenon and problem, it is not limited to the global scale. Both the impacts of GEC and responses to it occur across scale and are geographically variable. In order to stress this, the course will examine the local
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