3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course will investigate the themes of civilizational crisis and collapse with the primary goal of understanding the “perfect storm” of converging crises confronting humanity in the 21st century, including earth system, economic, food and energy crises. While these crises are often studied in isolation from each other, this course will engage with more holistic approaches to study them as interrelated components of a deeper system-wide crisis in the contemporary world order. The first part will explore theories of world-systems, political ecology, and collapse in historical perspective. The second will focus on specific dimensions of the contemporary global crisis and their relations, in particular the earth system crisis, the global economic crisis, food and energy crises. The third part will then explore the implications of these crises for the future of world order by investigating possible scenarios, both for the world-system as a whole and for the United States in particular, and then by evaluating different responses and proposed solutions to our critical civilizational condition.