— COURSE —

EARTH IN CRISIS

Sociology 265EC

Fall 2019

This course will explore the causes, consequences, and possible outcomes of the climate crisis on a global scale, with attention to the social, political, economic, and cultural implications of the most recent science, the current and future impacts of climate change, climate governance and the global negotiations process, and climate justice activism.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a PDF: Earth in Crisis.  Sociology 265EC.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a Word Document: Earth in Crisis. Sociology 265EC.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

— COURSE —

THE WORLD IN 2050

Sustainable Development and its Alternatives

Sociology 130SD

Fall 2019

Why is this class important? Because it’s your future we’ll be trying to figure out!
This special course starts with the current crisis of the Earth and humanity, marked by economic insecurity, a lack of faith in political parties, pervasive cultures of violence, and now, the wild card that makes them all scarier – climate change.

But this course is about hope, imagination, and the roles all of us could play in building a far better world by 2050.

This means we will need to take action to deal with the most pressing problem of the 21st century, the problem of climate change. One major question addressed in this course has been posed by my friend Bill Barnes: “Can we create new, transformative narratives to inspire political movements able to force vigorous engagement with climate change?”

Background and Meaning of What We Are Going to Do Together

In 2012, climate activist and scholar Bill McKibben estimated the cap for maximum atmospheric CO2 [carbon dioxide, which along with methane is the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming] emissions at 565 gigatons as the upper limit for staying at or below a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise. With annual global emissions currently running around 30 gigatons a year, this cap was then roughly equal to a fourteen-year supply – till about 2026 – if “business as usual” trends of economic production and growth continued.

The terrifying part is that the estimate of the world’s already proven reserves of fossil fuels exceeds McKibben’s cap by five times. In other words, the richest corporations in the history of the world would have to forego four-fifths of their future earnings – by some estimates, an astronomical $20 trillion.

But instead, they are currently spending over $600 billion a year trying to discover new sources of fossil fuels – fracking, tar sands, deep-water drilling, Arctic oil, mountain-top removal – while each year the amount we can afford to burn decreases.

Unfortunately, meanwhile, the 2015 international climate treaty known as he “Paris Agreement” is not nearly adequate for the task, as the dominant parties to the climate negotiations continue to advance positions completely at odds with climate science, thus ignoring the terrible fact that humanity is on a collision course with nature that we cannot win.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or ICPP, is the world’s most distinguished body of climate scientists and others who are mapping the extent of our climate crisis. Their most recent assessment concluded that our only viable option would require massive (unspecified) social transformation. In the words of activist journalist Dahr Jamail:

A landmark UN report released in October [2018] served as an imminent warning that if governments fail to act swiftly and dramatically (and within the next dozen years), droughts, flooding, and increasingly extreme heat waves will increase drastically.

In the Paris Climate Change Agreement, global governments pledged to try to keep warming within a limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in order to prevent increasingly catastrophic impacts.

In the recent UN report, experts stated that without urgent and unprecedented changes, meeting the 1.5°C [the upper limit we can safely allow] would be impossible [italics and brackets added by JF].

The good news is that since at least 2007, a promising global climate justice movement has emerged behind the slogan “System change, not climate change!” and is making demands for a socially just, scientifically appropriate, and legally binding treaty. Governments who do not want to vote for it, or whose short-term interests and economic elites are not served by signing, will need to be persuaded or forced to do the right thing by their own citizens and Earth citizens everywhere – that is, by us.

* * *

The main focus of this course is to focus our sociological and ecological imaginations on creating the kind of society that might weather the climate storm that is coming and actually come out on the other side (or more realistically in the midst of it as it deepens) with societies far more suited to human well-being and thriving than the ones we presently have all around the world.

Along the way we will encounter such ideas as sustainable development, degrowth, transition towns, resilience, ecosocialism, buen vivir, and a slew of other alternatives to the present system, and we will read some of the best writing on these and other topics by their inventors, critics, activists, and others, including essays, fiction, and films, with a startlingly innovative and very “cool” collective project that you will work on throughout the quarter!

This course is about gaining useful knowledge that will enable positive action to secure a better future. This course is for you, about you, and ultimately will succeed or fail because of you and me – all of us – together.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a PDF: The World in 2050.  Sociology 265EC.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a Word Document: The World in 2050.  Sociology 265EC.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

— COURSE —

What’s Wrong with the World?  How Do We Fix It?

Perspectives and Solutions from the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences

INT 133B:  The Social Sciences

2019

Why is this class important? Because it’s your (our) future we’ll be trying to figure out how to fight for!

This special course opens upon the current crisis of the Earth and humanity, marked by economic insecurity, a lack of faith in political parties, pervasive cultures of violence, and now, the wild card that makes them all much scarier – climate crisis.

But this course is really focused on hope, imagination, and the roles all of us could play in building a far better world in our lifetimes.

Visionary climate justice scholar-activist Naomi Klein has said: “There is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives.” Sociologist Constance Lever-Tracy adds: “We must ultimately aim for a thorough going de-carbonisation, a halt to all emissions, by a complete revolution in the way we produce and live.”

This means we will need to take action to deal with the most pressing problem of the 21st century, the problem of climate change. Importantly, this means moving the world as rapidly as possible toward the most ambitious possible global climate and sustainable consumption goals, contributing to the strongest possible global social justice movement, and through both of these channels helping to bring about the creation of a low-carbon, peaceful, equitable, and deeply democratic future.

A simple working definition of sustainable development might be “a just and ecologically-based society”; the 1987 Brundtland Report – also known as Our Common Future – has given the most famous definition: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The main focus of this course is to train our sociological and ecological imaginations to co-create the kind of society that might weather the climate maelstrom that is coming and actually come out on the other side (or more realistically in the midst of it as it inexorably deepens) with societies far more suited to human well-being and thriving than the ones we presently have all around the world.

I believe that if we are to pass on a world worth living in to the next generation (that’s you!), this movement against the crises besetting us and for the collective project of climate justice – in the broadest sense of the term – must become the biggest (and most effective) the world has ever seen.

Background and Meaning of What We Are Going to Do Together

A growing international scientific consensus has emerged that there is now only a 50 percent chance that the official United Nations target of limiting the rise in average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius [about 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit] by the year 2050 would effectively avert irreversible climate change (and recent reports indicate that there is just a five percent chance of actually staying below 1.5 degrees).

In 2012, climate activist and scholar Bill McKibben estimated the cap for maximum atmospheric CO2 [carbon dioxide, which along with methane is the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming] emissions at 565 gigatons as the upper limit for staying at or below a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise.

With annual global emissions currently running around 30 gigatons a year, this cap was then roughly equal to a nineteen-year supply – till about 2030 – if “business as usual” trends of economic production and growth continued. The terrifying part is that the estimate of the world’s already proven reserves of fossil fuels exceeds McKibben’s cap by five times.

In other words, the richest corporations in the history of the world would have to forego four-fifths of their future earnings – by some estimates, an astronomical $20 trillion or more. But instead, they are currently spending over $600 billion a year trying to discover new sources of fossil fuels – fracking, tar sands, deep-water drilling, Arctic oil, mountain-top removal – while each year the amount we can afford to burn decreases. To their great dishonor most of the world’s political leaders are actually subsidizing the extraction of fossil fuels to the tune of another $600 billion annually.

Equally distressing, the 2015 international climate treaty known as the “Paris Agreement” is not nearly adequate for the task, since if every one of its non-binding country pledges are met, we are still headed for around three degrees of warming. The dominant parties to the climate negotiations continue to advance positions completely at odds with climate science, thus ignoring the terrible fact that humanity is on a collision course with nature that we cannot win. The words “fossil fuels” do not even appear in the Agreement.

Unfortunately, meanwhile, the 2015 international climate treaty known as he “Paris Agreement” is not nearly adequate for the task, as the dominant parties to the climate negotiations continue to advance positions completely at odds with climate science, thus ignoring the terrible fact that humanity is on a collision course with nature that we cannot win.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or ICPP, is the world’s most distinguished body of climate scientists and others who are mapping the extent of our climate crisis. Their most recent assessment concluded that our only viable option would require massive (unspecified) social transformation. In the words of activist journalist Dahr Jamail:

A landmark UN report released in October [2018] served as an imminent warning that if governments fail to act swiftly and dramatically (and within the next dozen years), droughts, flooding, and increasingly extreme heat waves will increase drastically.

In the Paris Climate Change Agreement, global governments pledged to try to keep warming within a limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in order to prevent increasingly catastrophic impacts.

In the recent UN report, experts stated that without urgent and unprecedented changes, meeting the 1.5°C [the upper limit we can safely allow] would be impossible [italics and brackets added by JF].

The good news is that since at least 2007, a promising global climate justice movement has emerged behind the slogan “System change, not climate change!” and is making demands for a socially just, scientifically informed, and legally binding treaty, sometimes called by activists at the negotiations a FAB (fair, ambitious and binding) treaty. Governments who do not want to vote for it, or whose short-term interests and economic elites are not served by signing, will need to be persuaded or forced to do the right thing by their own citizens and Earth citizens everywhere – that is, by us. One major question addressed in this course has been posed by my friend Bill Barnes: “Can we create new, transformative narratives to inspire political movements able to force vigorous engagement with climate change?”

This emphasis on finding new narratives puts us firmly in the domain of the environmental humanities and qualitative social sciences, the perspectives that inform this course. And it is an invitation to you – to all of us – to put our growing knowledge and imaginations to good purpose!

This course is thus about gaining useful knowledge that will enable positive action to secure a better future. This course is for you, about you, and ultimately will be driven by you.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a PDF: What’s Wrong With the World?  How do we Fix It?  Interdisciplinary Studies 133B.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a Word Document: What’s Wrong with the World? How do we Fix It?  Interdisciplinary Studies 133B.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

— COURSE —

What’s Wrong with the World?  How Do We Fix It?

Perspectives and Solutions from the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences

INT 133B:  The Social Sciences

Summer Session A 2018

In this course, we will investigate the future, asking what might the world look like in the year 2050?  What will be the state of climate change?  What will schools, cities, agriculture, jobs, nations, energy sources, technology, political systems, international relations, the global and local economy, and much more look like?  How will people make sense and meaning of their world? What future worlds can we foresee from where we are now, ranging widely and wildly from the awful to the utopian?  How will we get to the better worlds we hope to be living in?

Starting with the current political, economic, cultural, and climate crises of Earth and humanity, we consider alternatives to the present system – sustainable ecovillages, buen vivir, transition towns, degrowth, the rights of nature, and ecosocialism among them – and our roles in building what could possibly turn out to be a far better world by 2050. We will also consider the ways that climate change is being fiercely debated on the public stage through a careful look at the rhetoric of these debates.

This course will involve immersive, project-based work, with role playing, creative productions, individual and      group projects, and more.  This is not a multiple choice, mid-term and final class! Essential to these two courses that are one will be a collaborative model of discovering, curating, and analyzing material.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a PDF: What’s Wrong With the World?  How do we Fix It?  Interdisciplinary Studies 133B.  John Foran, UCSB, 2018.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a Word Document: What’s Wrong with the World? How do we Fix It?  Interdisciplinary Studies 133B.  John Foran, UCSB, 2018.

— COURSE —

CLIMATE JUSTICE ACTION

Perspectives and Solutions from

the Environmental Humanities

and Social Sciences

INT 133B: The Social Sciences

UCSB 2018

This course, offered only for the second time (the first was five years ago), and itself the result of activism on the part of students, explores the phenomenon and experience of activism, and is focused this quarter on climate justice activism.  For the purposes of discussion, we will start with a definition of activism as “efforts aimed in the direction of a deep transformation of a society toward greater economic equality and political participation, involving the actions of a strong and diverse popular movement.”

Movements advocating “justice” have collectively traced the limits of what human societies can and cannot achieve through utopian projects of active engagement.  The twentieth century was fundamentally shaped a handful of full-on social revolutions – which Theda Skocpol, perhaps the most well-known sociologist of revolutions, has define as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.”  In the twenty-first century, the nature of movements for what we might now call radical social change – in the sense of “a deep transformation of a society (or other entity such as a community, region, or the whole world) in the direction of greater economic equality and political participation, accomplished by the actions of a strong and diverse popular movement”–  has itself changed, as radical activists, reformers, dreamers, and revolutionaries globally have pursued nonviolent paths to a better world, intending to live and act as they would like that world to be.  That is, the ends of justice no longer are held to justify the means of violence, but the means of non-violent resistance reflect and guarantee the ends that they seek.

Meanwhile, with respect to the state of the planet, we now face a crisis of existential proportions.  It’s time to wake up!

The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in particular, the view of Dr. James Hansen, the world’s best-known climate scientist, point toward the need for urgent climate action that will limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (it’s already risen 0.9 degrees Celsius with another 0.6 degrees already in the pipeline, so…) or less and restore the Earth’s atmosphere to the scientifically established sustainable level of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (it passed the threshold of 400 ppm in May 2013 and continues to rise).

Meanwhile, in 2012 activist-scholar Bill McKibben noted that for an 80 percent chance to stay under 2 degrees, we would have to keep the total of all future greenhouse gas emissions under the equivalent of 565 gigatons of CO₂, but scarily, the proven reserves of all the fossil fuel corporations and oil and gas exporting countries come to 2,795 tons (annual emissions now run at more than thirty gigatons, and are going up, not down, and five years have passed so now the total carbon budget is close to 400 gigatons;  you can do the math on when we need to get to zero).  This means that 80 percent of these reserves have to be kept in the ground somehow and never extracted and burned.

On the side of hope, since 2007, or even earlier, a promising global climate justice movement has emerged behind the slogan “System change, not climate change!” making demands for a socially just, scientifically based, and legally binding climate treaty – instead, in 2015 to much fanfare we got the Paris Agreement, based on voluntary pledges of reductions by countries, which, even if all followed through, would lead to warming of over 3 degrees Celsius.  To get such a treaty, governments who do not want to vote for it, or whose short-term interests and economic elites are not served by signing, will need to be persuaded and/or possibly forced to do so by their own citizens and Earth citizens everywhere.

One of our primary goals, then, will be to develop an understanding of, and an appreciation for, the nature of climate justice activism today, on a global scale.  This highly interactive class will combine relevant historical context (case studies) and sociological analysis (theories and concepts useful for understanding how social change occurs and is made).  Students will come to understand the historical and sociological importance of organizing their communities, and develop a greater understanding of how to successfully apply those concepts to what will be perhaps the greatest of the twenty-first century social movements.

This course is organized around the following questions:

What is it like to be a global climate justice activist, and in particular to be a young or student activist?

What are some of the skill sets that lend themselves towards effective organizing? What is the benefit of mastering them?

What are the problems and prospects of climate activism for deep social change in the twenty-first century?

Finally, we will think about whether and how this movement can effectively address the greatest problem the global community will face in our lifetimes – runaway climate change and the social chaos it promises to bring in its wake.   And if this is possible, what forms might it take, and how could it achieve the goals of climate justice?

Students will engage in an innovative group planning process, a role play set in the future, and do research on an activist organization or strategy of their choice.

This course is about knowledge and positive action to secure a better future.

Visit the NXTerra Course Page for What’s Wrong with the World? How do we Fix it?

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a PDF: Climate Justice Activism.  Sociology 134A.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

DOWNLOAD THE SYLLABUS as a Word Document:  Climate Justice Activism.  Sociology 134A.  John Foran, UCSB, 2019.

— COURSE —

The World in 2050 (Sustainable Development and its Alternatives).  Sociology 265SD.  John Foran,  UCSB, 2018.

— COURSE —

The World in 2050 (Sustainable Development and its Alternatives).  Sociology 130SD.  John Foran, UCSB, 2017.