Blood and Oil: New environmental studies class proves popular with students

Students are captivated by Alan Richards's lectures about the Middle East. Photo by J. McNulty.

In only two years, the new class Blood and Oil: Energy, the Middle East, and War has become legendary on campus.

Two days a week all winter, about 50 students crowded into a packed classroom to hear environmental studies professor Alan Richards demystify a part of the world that dominates the news, international politics, and the global economy.

"This class is about so much more than environmental studies," said Siobhan Gilmore, a junior who, like many students, heard about the class from a friend who took it last year. "There's so much history, and it's really complicated, but knowing the history makes it a lot easier to comprehend what's going on today with the war, the international oil business, our foreign policy. There are so many different forces acting in the Middle East."

Richards sets an ambitious agenda. His goals are twofold: to equip students with a historically based "multi-layered" understanding of the Middle East that will help them understand current events, and to help them develop an analytical approach to investigating other conflicts around the world.

"It requires a lot of work, and it requires that we think outside the box. We will bring the tools of economics, politics, psychology, and sociology to bear," Richards told the class on the first day. "This is a serious topic. People die every day. I assume you'll work."

An interdisciplinary scholar known for his powerful delivery, Richards proceeded to quote Samuel Beckett, Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, Harry Truman, Aristotle, Voltaire, Hobbes, and Machiavelli during that first lecture. Then he posed a question guaranteed to fill the room again two days later: "What are we doing in the Middle East? I would argue that very little of what's happening is necessary for U.S. national interests."

Skyler Hackley, a senior majoring in environmental studies and philosophy, called Richards a "commanding" lecturer and one of the best instructors he's had at UCSC. "He prepares every lecture, and it's an incredible experience just to listen to him talk," said Hackley. "He's so well-informed. He cuts away any misconceptions."

Richards paces back and forth as he lectures, underscoring key points on the blackboard until his hands are yellow with chalk dust. He often sums up complex material with dry understatements, such as "This subject is deeply weird."

Such moments of levity are infrequent but welcome as Richards undertakes the Herculean task of presenting 20 lectures, each of which could be the focus of a 10-week class. He draws connections between today's tensions and the stresses that raged through Europe and the United States during their own periods of rapid industrialization and social transformation during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. "The Middle East and North Africa are undergoing their own great transformations now," said Richards. "They are undergoing economic changes, social changes, and demographic changes."

Two-thirds of the population of the Middle East is under the age of 30, more people are educated than ever before, and huge numbers have moved to the cities in search of opportunities. Yet the rising aspirations of youth are being met by soaring rates of unemployment, government ineptitude and corruption, and an international political and military crisis. "As always, it is a confluence of forces that's creating the profound dissatisfaction we see today," said Richards.

Historically, "great transformations" have always been accompanied by dramatic revolutions in energy use, and Richards challenges students to see how historical patterns of energy consumption--first of wood, then coal, and now oil--drive political alliances and provoke violent confrontations. "Middle East violence is not exceptional," he said. "It is to be expected."

Richards is perhaps an unlikely source of such eye-opening revelations, given that he grew up in Texas, the son of a petrogeologist who taught at Southern Methodist University. But he was never drawn to the oil business. Instead, he studied Arabic and Middle East Studies at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in economic history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He spent two years in Cairo, where he was director of the UC Education Abroad Program and worked as a consultant to the World Bank and the United Nations, and then did contract work out of Washington, D.C., with the Agency for International Development before joining the UCSC faculty in 1976. His expertise has been sought by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and by military strategists at the U.S. Central Command in Florida, who invited him to brief top Pentagon officials in 2004 about the war in Iraq, and his textbook, A Political Economy of the Middle East, is a classic.

"He knows so much," said Gilmore. "Some classes are difficult to sit through, but in his, it's 'Tell me more.'"

Richards says he likes to teach classes "about things that matter," and he feels he is making a difference.

"Americans understand fundamentally nothing about the Middle East," he said, faulting the U.S. educational system, the mainstream media's superficial coverage of the region, and an insular national mindset. "It's very gratifying to be told by students things like, 'Wow, I never had any idea about any of this,' and 'Things look really different to me now.'"

For him, the threat of climate change has only increased the urgency of his message. "If we don't break our dependence on fossil fuels, which is oil and also coal--coal is even worse--as a species, we are cooked, quite literally," he said.

Leadership will be key to the ability of the United States to break its oil habit, according to Richards, whose students learned about the 20-percent drop in U.S. oil consumption that took place in the 1970s during Jimmy Carter's administration. "There are straightforward things we could do that could dramatically change our patterns of energy use," he said.

That message is welcome news to Erin Middleton, a senior majoring in environmental studies and mathematics who is taking a course from Richards every quarter this year "because he's that cool."

"I think it's phenomenal, the way this class has broadened my mind," she said. "I'm finally understanding some links." Although a more interactive class might appeal to some students, Middleton said she never tires of Richards's lectures. "There's so much I want to hear him say. And he does such a good job of showing that we know a lot about this and that change is possible."

Middleton is less optimistic about the war and the humanitarian aspects of the conflicts in the Middle East--and with good reason, according to Richards.

"Our presence in Iraq destabilizes the Middle East, although most Americans believe the opposite," he said. "So our first task is deconstructing these socially inherited ideas. And that's the good news. None of this is genetically programmed. It isn't in our bone marrow. We can decide to do things differently."

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