Course Description
Focusing on the meanings of sustainability and the emergent regenerative frameworks, this course explores the various worldviews that have emerged in response to ecological crises as well as a variety of solutions enacted by actors on scales from the local to the global.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will write a final term paper consistent with expectations of graduate-level work.
Athena Title
Regen Sustainable Development
Prerequisite
Any 1000-level GEOG course
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will understand the concepts of sustainable and regenerative development.
- Students will understand how the problems of unsustainability are created spatially and how solutions are foreclosed.
- Students will understand the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of unsustainable systems.
- Students will understand key geographical frameworks for implementing sustainable and regenerative development and design in place.
- Students will identify possible pathways for change including activism, organizing, and policy.
- i) To give students a deep knowledge of sustainability and regenerative development.
- ii) To help students develop their critical thinking skills about social, economic, and environmental injustices associated with unsustainable systems.
- iii) To give students further understandings of the ways that geographies of design and development are shaped by and can shape political institutions, economic interests, and civil society.
Topical Outline
- Introduction to the course: 1 week
- What is Sustainability?
- History of sustainable development/unsustainable systems
- Social, economic, environmental dimensions of sustainability
- What is Regenerative Development?
- Origin and elaboration of the framework
- Regenerative practices and climate change
- Regenerative Projects
- Housing
- Transportation
- Food
- Regenerative Processes
- Energy Transitions
- Resilient Infrastructures
- Climate Drawdown
- Regenerative Change
- Climate Justice
- Sustainable (“Donut”) Economics
- Paying Ecological Debt
- Capstones:
Final Project Presentations
