Functionality: A Yale Seminar
Society & Natural Resources Seminar
A podcast from the Yale School of the Environment's Society and Natural Resources Seminar.For 40 years, this seminar has taken up the most challenging issues of the day around the theme of how human societies organize themselves around natural resource use, and subsequently how human societies are themselves affected in turn by their environment. Today we live at a critical point in both the social and environmental history of our planet. Every day, democratic institutions slip toward authoritarianism, and every day our problematic biophysical planetary reality becomes more untenable. In this course, we take the position that we are living in a "reflexive moment," or a moment that demands us reconsider our patterns of thinking — from our understanding of how we ourselves fit into the world up to how decisions should be made on an international scale. In order to make sense of today's apparent complexities.