Functionality: A Yale Seminar: Recent Episodes
Society & Natural Resources Seminar
A podcast from the Yale School of the Environment's Society and Natural Resources Seminar.
For 40 years, this seminar has taken up the most challenging issues of the day around the theme of how human societies organize themselves around natural resource use, and subsequently how human societies are themselves affected in turn by their environment. Today we live at a critical point in both the social and environmental history of our planet. Every day, democratic institutions slip toward authoritarianism, and every day our problematic biophysical planetary reality becomes more untenable. In this course, we take the position that we are living in a "reflexive moment," or a moment that demands us reconsider our patterns of thinking — from our understanding of how we ourselves fit into the world up to how decisions should be made on an international scale. In order to make sense of today's apparent complexities.
In this episode, Yale School of the Environment student Brett Vecchiarelli reads a piece about the work he's been doing on organizational learning in environmental institutions. Why are environmental organizations so bad at learning from mistakes? What counts as a failure? What is failure? What follows is a conversation about just that...
In this episode, Yale College senior Anna Reside reads a piece about how she is thinking through what comes next for her after graduation. What follows is a conversation that expands out in a handful of unexpected directions...
In this episode, Yale School of the Environment Ph.D. student Thomas Harris reads a piece on forest land ownership and a wide range of complications therein. A wild seminar conversation follows...
This is the start of a dialogue at the Yale School of the Environment about how to take care of ourselves and our planet in the face of innumerable crises.