Course Details

Every living organism dies, as do ecosystems and species, thereby perpetuating the “circle of life.” Because life feeds on life, death is indispensable to the healthy functioning of ecosystems and even evolution itself. One species, however, has developed the capacity to anticipate (and therefore dread) death and commandeer other species in service to increasing its numbers and its material consumption. With industrialization, anthropogenic species extinctions and ecosystem collapse, once limited to local and regional scales, became planetary. Humanity is now operating well outside the planetary boundaries that characterized the Holocene, the interglacial “sweet spot” during which civilization emerged. The implications are profound: not only are we facing the end of “nature” as something separate from human culture, we are also facing the possibility of civilizational death.

We will therefore ask ourselves: what are the political and ecological consequences of how individuals and societies approach death? While death is a fact of life, questions of who lives, who dies, who decides, and with what consequences are also political ones. Our discussion will therefore be informed by themes of justice, equity, power and authority, and political agency. At the same time, because mortality is also an intensely personal reality, we will deepen our selfinquiry through poetry, videos, contemplative practices, personal exploration, and political action.

We will explore the following topics:

• Secular, religious, spiritual and indigenous perspectives on death
• Ernst Becker’s “denial of death” thesis and more recent terror management theory
• The political and ecological consequences of various “immortality projects”
• The relationship between waste and death
• Linear economics (from resource extraction to production to consumption to waste) vs. regenerative living systems
• Anthropogenic species death and the mass extinction crisis
• How cultural attitudes about ecology and death inform the treatment of animals
• Pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and ecocide
• The political ecology of end-of-life care and the treatment of corpses
• Indigenous peoples and the relationship between the death of ecosystems and cultures
• The relationship between democracy and the political ecology of death
• Grief, hope, meaning, and political agency in the face of ecocide