PSC 493 The Politics of Nature

photo credit: Ilkka Halso

Instructor: Dr. Jake Greear

Fall 2026

This upper-level reading course explores and critiques the intersection of politics and nature. We focus on the history of Western environmental consciousness, U.S. environmental movements, and the associated global and domestic policy innovations over the last 150 years.

Readings and Topics

• Nature’s Economy — Donald Worster
• Nature as a concept in Greek thought: Boas & Lovejoy, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity
• Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and Nature as God’s Garden
• Henry David Thoreau — Walking
• John Muir — Selected writings
• The resource problem: Capitalism and conservation of resources — Gifford Pinchot selections
• Animals as wildlife, pests, game — Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men
• Aldo Leopold — A Sand County Almanac; “Thinking Like a Mountain”; The concept of the ecosystem; individualism vs. collectivism, ecosystem as mechanism, organism, and community.
• The “ambient” environmental threat: atmosphere, Dust Bowl, nuclear fallout, chemical fallout — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
• Earth Day and environmental legislation in the 1970s
• Agrarianism and environmentalism — Gary Paul Nabhan, Wendell Berry
• Chaos ecology — Jamie Lorimer on Wildlife, Emma Marris: Rambunctious Garden
• Paul Chaat Smith — Romanticism and the "ecological Indian"
• Nature and race in America — Octavia Butler, Bloodchild
• Environmental justice: global and local; environmentalism in majority and minority worlds
• “The Extinction of Experience”: The environment and the lived environment
• The built environment: from front porch to patio
• Global warming and the “end of nature”
• Global warming and global policy from Rio forward
• Sustainable development, degrowth, and eco-Marxism