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Showing posts from March, 2018

Environment versus Development? Reflections on an LSE Lecture

I'm currently pursuing an MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is a reflection I wrote recently, cross-posted at the LSE Blog .  As a student of Environment and Development, I often leave my lectures feeling slightly unsettled. It is difficult to confront the complexities of the environment-development nexus without a sense of inevitable doom – the future of our existence on the planet seems bleaker by the day as more people adopt resource-intensive lifestyles fueled by the extractive economy. The culprit of this catastrophe is described through a range of catchphrases: institutional failures, climate change, unchecked capitalism, resource scarcity, socio-economic inequality … Where do we begin to address them? How do we disentangle and understand these issues in the first place? Dr. Barbara Harriss-White’s talk at the LSE last week did just this. Dr. Harriss-White looked at the bigger picture to exp