Introduction
This brief introduction to the course provides two complementary perspectives on the problem that efforts to promote sustainable development are trying to solve. Previewing the approach we will take throughout the course, one of these perspectives is global, the other local. Globally, it juxtaposes the rapidly increasing human well-being and rapidly increasing environmental degradation that have characterized the last two centuries of what many are now calling the Anthropocene epoch of the planet’s history. Locally, it immerses students in the challenge of managing a small fishery so as to avoid a “tragedy of the commons.”