This is a required co-requisite laboratory for ES 101.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Environmental Studies, with a focus on climate change. Major concepts that will be examined include: the state of scientific research, the role of science, politics, and economics in environmental decision-making, and the importance of history, ethics, and justice in approaching climate change. The central aim of the course is to help students develop the interdisciplinary research skills necessary to pose questions, investigate problems, and develop strategies that will help us address our relationship to the environment.

Predictions for Earth's future climate require both an understanding of the fundamental processes that control climate today and knowledge of how Earth's climate behaved over the past 4.5 billion years. In this course we will discuss the processes that control the Earth's climate, such as the Earth's energy balance, and will explore the tools and archives available to scientists for studying past climate conditions, e.g., atmospheric CO2 levels, ocean productivity, temperature, and ice-sheet volume. We will then march through time, starting with Earth's early climate and ending with projections for future climate scenarios. This course will consist of class activities, discussions, problem sets, and a possible optional field trip.

Exploring the relationship between art and the environment, this course will focus on the land of the United States as it has been shaped into forms ranging from landscape paintings to suburban lawns, national parks, and our own Wellesley College campus. Among the questions we will consider are: What is “nature”? What do we value in a landscape and why? How are artists, architects, and landscape designers responding to environmentalist concerns?

Who else lives in human-dominated environments, and how do plants and animals interact with landscapes that people have modified or even completely restructured? How does the diversity and abundance of species in these habitats affect the health and resilience of these ecosystems, including the humans? And how might human interventions influence the persistence of other species in an area? In this course we will build our collective understanding of biodiversity and explore how this understanding can inform the design and management of spaces we share. We will consider habitats from agricultural landscapes to suburban parks to buildings, and connect directly with diverse species and habitats on our remarkable campus.

The stories we tell about the world make certain futures possible, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. This course reveals how Western historical, theoretical, and scientific ways of knowing understood both women and nature as inferior and thus needing to be controlled. Pushing back against the ideas of any inherent binary separations between sex/gender and nature/culture, we will examine feminist ecological possibilities for planetary futures. Learning from the intertwined histories of environment, race, and gender, that have led to both personal and global inequity and disaster, we will also engage solutions that imagine different futures. Recognizing that solutions to environmental problems require a feminist attunement, we can start to understand the implications that our ethical commitments have to the future of life on the planet.

Tax carbon? Label genetically modified crops? Ban endocrine disruptors? In this course, an interdisciplinary capstone experience for the ES major, we will engage with such questions and related environmental sustainability issues as public writers. Students will choose one environmental issue, which will be the focus of their environmental “beat” during the semester. They will draw on an interdisciplinary toolset from environmental studies to analyze and communicate the scientific, economic, political, and ethical dimensions of pressing policy issues. Students will conduct independent research to produce weekly articles, such as op-eds, blog posts, press releases, book reviews, policy memos, and interviews with environmental professionals. Class sessions will be organized as writing workshops focused on the interdisciplinary analysis and content of student work.