According to the World Bank, an increase in global temperatures of more than 2°C by the year 2100 will likely submerge coastal cities from New York to Shanghai beneath rising seas. Yet as many theorists note, the global supply chains the World Bank helps facilitate also fuel global warming. How do we make sense of economic institutions warning us of disasters their actions may hasten? Why is there so much disagreement among scholars concerning the quickening pace of climate change alongside the emergence of supposedly postindustrial economies in the developed world? And what can we do about that pace today? This class surveys two sweeping transformations of social life in recent decades to pose such questions. Climate change, we will wager, can't be understood apart from the logistics revolution that made globalization possible: The massive freeway systems, ports, algorithms, microprocessors, and container ships transporting goods and money from one corner of the globe to another. Along the way we will pay particular attention to the uneven racial and gender dynamics governing who lives where, who acquires what they need to survive, and how they survive in a world arranged by the logistics revolution driving climate change today. |