This 1-credit lecture series introduces students to theory and practice in fields related to the environment, sustainability and climate change. Students gain insight into how their liberal arts education and skills in critical thinking and analysis apply to a variety of environmental issues and sustainability contexts. Speakers, including distinguished alumnae, are drawn from the five colleges, the Pioneer Valley and beyond. S/U only. This course can be repeated for credit.

This course is designed to develop a student’s abilities as an environmental problem-solver through practice. The problems come in two forms: a campus or local problem related to environmental sustainability or resilience and the problem of what to do with one’s life. To address each, students engage in a semester-long group project that addresses a real-world environmental issue or question (projects vary from year to year) and a more individualized examination of the student’s own values, career aspirations and skills.

This course focuses on the interpretation and communication of environmental issues and solutions from multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Using contemporary environmental issues as a foundation, this course emphasizes careful assessment of both message and audience to design effective communication strategies for complex issues.

This course introduces students to research and application in the field of agroecology, with a focus on community-based approaches. The course covers both conceptual and practical content, including the evolution of the field of agroecology as it gained prominence in scientific, policy, planning, social movement, and farming practices. A special emphasis is placed in discussing the different expression of agroecology as a science, a social movement, and a practice across urban and rural regions.

Why has the U.S. Congress failed to address so many environmental issues since the heyday of the 1970s? What can the current administration do on climate and environmental justice without Congress? Where is environmental policy being made if not in Congress? This course explores the political, economic, legal, ethical and institutional dimensions of the environmental policy making process. The focus is on understanding policy-making systems at a range of scales and how to influence and improve them. Prerequisite: ENV 101 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 25.

This course offers an introduction to the methods and key debates in environmental history, the history of the relationship between humanity and the “rest of nature.” Since the 1970s, environmental historians have used an environmental lens to examine politics, economy, religion, gender, race, migration, art, music, literature and culture. In addition to typical archives of texts and other historical remnants created by people, environmental historians also avail themselves to “natural” archives, including the ice core, tree-ring and lake sediment samples collected by climate scientists.

In this laboratory complement to ENV 201, students use a variety of methods to gather and analyze different types of environmental data (quantitative, qualitative, spatial). Corequisite: ENV 201. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

While focusing on topical environmental issues, students learn how to gather, analyze and present data using methods from the natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from multiple sources, including laboratory experiments, fieldwork, databases, archival sources, surveys and interviews. Emphasis is on quantitative analysis. Environmental topics vary in scale from the local to the global. Corequisite: ENV 202. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, characterized by the accelerating impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. All over the globe, humans have transformed the environment and have sometimes created catastrophic dynamics within social-ecological systems. Scientists have studied these phenomena for decades, alerting both the general public and policy-makers of the consequences of human actions. However, despite convincing evidence of environmental degradation, humans continue to radically transform their environment.