Environmental Philosophy
Environmental philosophy is so much more than just environmental ethics! In this course, I focus on different areas of environmental philosophy, usually through special topics. Of course environmental ethics is still a part of the course, but it isn’t the focus. Since Northland College had a wide suite of environmental-oriented philosophy courses on the books – including an environmental ethics course – I took the opportunity to branch out with this course.
Below you’ll find two very different environmental philosophy courses. The first, from Fall 2022, focused specifically on philosophical questions surrounding ecological restoration. The second, from Fall 2024, focused specifically on utopianism and eco-politics.
Sample Syllabi
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Fall 2022
I taught this course in my first semester at Northland College. The theme of this course was on philosophical questions surrounding ecological restoration, which allowed for significant discussion about the ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics of engagement with natural environments. The course also included a significant section on Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.
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Fall 2024
The theme of this course was utopianism and eco-politics. To engage this theme, we read Anthony Weston’s Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto and Ernest Callenbach’s classic, Ecotopia. For more theoretical tools to engage with both Weston and Callenbach, we also carefully worked through Murray Bookchin’s utopian social ecology via several of his essays.