Week Fifteen: Evisioning More Sustainable Futures

As we wrap up the course this week and next, I want to give you time to think about how the issues you’ve debated in this course (from protected areas to conservation markets to global hunger) and themes you’ve engaged (from food and agriculture to water resources and livelihoods to climate, energy and atmosphere) might apply to your lives outside this class. How do perspectives from human-environment geography help us to engage with and critically dissect contemporary environment-resource-society debates? What is our own role in these debates, and how can we creatively envisage more sustainable and just trajectories of change?

Try to engage with these larger questions as you read about the struggle for competing development trajectories in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, an article which helps showcase the many struggles and efforts for greater social and environmental justice that are already underway. As author Naomi Klein characterizes it, this involves a battle between competing visions or social constructions of what Puerto Rico is. As she writes, “At the core of this battle is a very simple question: Who is Puerto Rico for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders? And after a collective trauma like Hurricane Maria, who has a right to decide?” What do you think?