Joshua Muldavin has a new Op-Ed in the Boston Globe. Read China’s not alone in environmental crisis on Boston.com.

He has also written a piece that appears on the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership’s website. 

Both publications are in Japanese.

The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. Thus we will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization�, as well as critical counterpoints, that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of ‘poverty’ and the making of the “Third World,� access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (The Green and Gene Revolutions), the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation states to ‘develop’ natural resources and agricultural production. Through an historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape but rarely determine the organization of resource use and agriculture. Rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism, we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. We will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification and biodiversity loss. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course examines the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance, alternative and community supported agriculture, community based resource management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice.

"Policy as warrant: environment and development in the Himalayan region," joint article with Piers Blaikie under revision for Political Geography.

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We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by third-world nation-states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and their policies. Throughout the course, our investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class—the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa, but also Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project beginning in the fall semester and completed in the spring. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions. Where possible, you will be encouraged to do primary research over the winter and spring breaks.