ANT 435 - Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management

This course focuses on shifting paradigms guiding natural resource management. The class will survey a variety of influential ideas driving debates over natural resources, including the following: 1.) debates over property right and management approaches in common pool resources, 2.) complex adaptive systems theory and its role in the debate over adaptive management as alternatives to single-species management, 3.) the ideal of efficiency in the formative era of professional natural resource management and new approaches that seek to move beyond it, 4.) ideas of progress, modernism, and optimism, including debates over the limits to growth, and 5.) debates over uncertainty and the precautionary principle. Students will explore these paradigms through case studies from fisheries, climate change, industrial pollution, forestry and public land management. In doing so, students will gain a better understanding of the development and contours of current debates over controversial environmental issues.

Satisfies the General Education Population and the Environment Requirement.

Prerequisites: Junior or Senior standing.

Credits: 3