The birth of modernity in the western world marked a new way of thinking about the human being as an individual subject, independent and separate from nature. As inheritors of this framework, traditional ethical philosophy has left us ill-equipped for responding to the environmental crisis we face today. This course will interrogate various conceptions of nature and how they inform our relationship to the environment, our treatment of animals, and how we relate to our fellow human beings. Throughout we will question how certain conceptualizations of nature are tied to systems of racial, gendered, colonial, and classed oppression. Course topics will include: the Anthropocene, environmental justice, environmental aesthetics, the nature/culture divide, decolonial thought, the question of ‘wilderness’, Indigenous thought, ecofeminism, and ecological-Marxism.