England
This begins by introducing you to a key focus of the module – the relationship between the Earth as a lively place, full of dynamism and change, and Earth as a place to live, a place we make home. Through exploring issues including climate change, emerging infectious diseases, bio-char production, and global land grab, you’ll discover the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental issues that can do justice to both the biophysical and social causes of environmental change.
Next, you’ll explore biological life in its various dimensions, especially the contemporary challenge of how human lifestyles can place biological life at risk. Using the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as an example, you’ll investigate the relationship between biodiversity and economic development. In addition, you will consider whether the role of human activities as a driver of a sixth mass extinction supports the proposal that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.
You’ll consider the challenge of ‘water security’ in this block and how what appears as a reasonably achievable goal is enormously complicated in practice, often leading to controversy and conflict. Using case studies of water scarcity, water pollution, sanitation, and watercourse management, you’ll see that making the right amount of water available at the right quality in the right place at the right time is a massive – and increasingly difficult – achievement.
The fourth block focuses on the challenge of carbon and how it changes form and location over a variety of timescales from the geological to the everyday. You'll learn how and why much of the carbon that formed coal or oil millions of years ago is now being consumed as fossil fuels; about the contribution this makes to global climate change; and about the resulting push both for low-carbon technologies and research into planetary technical fixes like geoengineering.
This block addresses the challenge that food poses as a global environmental issue. Now that agriculture has become a key driver of environmental change, it is becoming increasingly clear that different ways of providing food have different environmental consequences. Using examples from across the food chain, you’ll explore the implications of this and why food has become such a key focus for those attempting to shift our production and consumption patterns in more sustainable directions.
The final block consolidates the module by demonstrating that the knowledge you'll have acquired, the skills you'll have practised, and the ideas you'll have traced throughout the module all add up to what we call an ‘environmental imagination’. This is a way of thinking about environmental issues that will serve you well, not only in any further studies but in your broader life. Using case studies of ecological restoration, climate-induced migration, and the Transition movement, your environmental imagination is put to work in analysing some of the key ways that people around the world are striving to create better environmental futures.