Political Ecology is an emerging field that considers the relationship between power, governance, and environmental systems across varied scales. Students engage with the literature on political ecology in order to understand how human civilization and non-human nature have shaped each other through complex dynamics often marked by deeply unequal and intersecting power relations. We then apply these concepts to analysis of contemporary environmental crises, including climate change, habitat erasure, species extinction, and growing inequalities wrought by uneven access to resources. We will pay particular attention to how large scale factors such as urbanization and city form, governance and economies, knowledge and power shape environmental outcomes. We will draw on diverse critical approaches from world-systems theory, Marxism, eco-feminism, indigenous and decolonial perspectives, social ecology, complex systems ecologism, and posthumanism. We will also consider divergent responses taken by politically hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors to environmental crises, and the varied paradigms, policies, and actions they have proposed or implemented.