For this class we finished Guest chapter 11 on “Environment and Sustainability” in Essentials of Cultural Anthropology. This was after talking about environmental case studies in the previous class.
We investigated the Margaret Mead quote: “People must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one” (in Guest, 352). Or with regard to sustainability:
By imagining for a moment life without humans or life in which humans are deeply enmeshed with other nonhuman life, can we also imagine a new collective, entangled future that can move us beyond our current environmental destruction? (Guest, 320)
The next class began taking on issues of Health.
Note that there was not a video recording of the class, but see the YouTube Playlist for the series. For an earlier treatment of similar themes, see Would the world be better off without humans? For an Intro-to-Anthropology version, see Anthropology and Sustainability: