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.

This course focuses on the social science explanations for why environmental problems are created, the impacts they have, the difficulties of addressing them, and the regulatory and other actions that succeed in mitigating them. Topics include: externalities and the politics of unpriced costs and benefits; collective action problems and interest-group theory; time horizons in decision-making; the politics of science, risk, and uncertainty; comparative political structures; and cooperation theory. Also addressed are different strategies for changing environmental behavior, including command and control measures, taxes, fees, and other market instruments, and voluntary approaches. These will all be examined across multiple countries and levels of governance.

This course examines the relationship between nature and society in American history. The course will consider topics such as the decimation of the bison, the rise of Chicago, the history of natural disasters, and the environmental consequences of war. There are three goals for this course: First, we will examine how humans have interacted with nature over time and how nature, in turn, has shaped human society. Second, we will examine how attitudes toward nature have differed among peoples, places, and times, and we will consider how the meanings people give to nature inform their cultural and political activities. Third, we will study how these historical forces have combined to shape the American landscape and the human and natural communities to which it is home. While this course focuses on the past, an important goal is to understand the ways in which history shapes how we understand and value the environment as we do today.

For international environmental problems, widespread international cooperation is both important and quite difficult. Under what conditions have states been able to cooperate to solve international environmental problems? Most international efforts to address environmental problems involve international law-how does such law function? What types of issues can international environmental law address and what types can it not? This course addresses aspects of international environmental politics as a whole, with particular attention to the international legal structures used to deal with these environmental problems. Each student will additionally become an expert on one international environmental treaty to be researched throughout the course.

Equine cultural studies has become one of the most exciting fields to emerge out of Critical Animal Studies for how it looks at the intersection of humans and horses across histories, cultures, and the humanities. Some of the questions our course explores include: Did Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) inspire the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention Against Cruelty to Animals as well as the backlash against Victorian women’s corsets? Is there a feminist way to ride a horse? How does feminist thought offer a unique interrogation of race, flesh, and femaleness that sheds new light on equine studies? Have longstanding government programs and nonprofit rescue organizations helped or hindered the management of wild herds of horses? How has the horse been an integral partner in therapeutic healing in both Native and Indigenous communities as well as in non-Native communities?

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.

The humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences are indispensable to understanding the climate crisis. Drawing on perspectives from across the liberal arts, the course instructors will plumb the depths of the climate crisis and imagine the possible ways of responding to it. What can the role of climate in human history reveal about our uncertain future? How do social constructions, including race and gender, shape our understanding of this problem? How have diverse cultures of the world related to nature and climate and how can our own relationships to nature and climate inform our responses? Can the arts help us to reconceive the crisis? How can the sciences help us assess and adapt to our future climate? Can we leverage psychological processes to change individual attitudes toward the environment? By examining such questions, we aim for deeper knowledge, both of the climate crisis and of the power of liberal arts education.

Humans and their environment make up a complex and dynamic system. As with all ecological systems, key components are the availability and use of resources and the interactions with other species - both of which have important impacts on the nature and stability of the system itself. This course investigates these far-reaching concepts by examining topics such as the broad implications of thermodynamics, energy and material flows through human and natural systems, natural resource management, and the conservation of resources and biodiversity. We will also explore the role of science and technology in surmounting previous limits (e.g. energy use and agricultural yields), as well as the implications of inherent limits that may never be broken. Laboratory work will focus on quantitative skills and modeling tools used to examine a range of systems.

From ancient pastoral poets to Amanda Gorman, how have writers made nature their subject? What can literature tell us about the diverse and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments? How do historical and cultural differences inflect writing about nature? Does the prospect of climate catastrophe impel writers to reimagine traditional genres? We’ll explore such questions through a broad selection of poetry and lyrical prose, countering circumscribed notions of environmental writing as a predominantly white or cis straight male realm and seeking to illuminate the vital connections between environmentalism and social and racial justice.

Readings from the English pastoral tradition and its classical roots; Shakespeare, the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins; foundational American poets Dickinson and Whitman; and a broad selection of 20th- and 21st-century poets such as Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, Audre Lorde, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Ed Roberson, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Pattian Rogers, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Annie Finch, dg nanouk okpik, Camille T. Dungy, Jennifer Chang, Ada Limón, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Prose by Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy, and Helen Macdonald.

In this course we will consider the historical, social, and political life of nature in its many guises and from an anthropological perspective. What is the relationship between resource control and the consolidation of power? How have social movements and development agencies mobilized ideas of participatory conservation to achieve their goals, and how have these same concepts been used to exclude or to reproduce inequality? We will explore themes such as the relationship between race, nature, and security; intellectual property and bioprospecting; and the lived effects of the many “green,” “sustainable,” and “eco-tourism” projects now attracting foreign travelers around the world. Additionally, the course will introduce students unfamiliar with socio-cultural anthropology to ethnographic research methods, ethical dilemmas, and the craft of ethnographic writing.

Social understandings of the relationship between human health and the environment are visible and malleable in moments of crisis, from industrial disasters, weather-related catastrophes, and political conflict, as everyday events like childbirth and routine sickness. But these understandings vary dramatically across time and community. This course addresses the complex dynamics at work in the representations of and responses to health and the environment that emerge during moments of crisis. By studying the way these constructions are shaped by social, political, technological, and moral contexts, we will analyze the role of nature, knowledge, ethics and power in such contemporary problems as human migration, hunger, debility, and disease. The class will together consider the meaning of crisis and how it is shaped by social systems such as gender, sexuality, ability, class, and race.

The emergent structure and function of ecosystems are regulated by feedbacks between biological and physical systems from the microscopic to the global scale. We will study how ecosystems cycle carbon and nutrients and how the energy balance of ecosystems influences climate. We will also examine the role that humans play in managing, creating, and using services from ecosystems in our current era of rapid global change. Synthesizing these concepts, we consider the role of protected areas in preserving ecosystem functioning. Students will develop statistical skills working with authentic long-term ecosystem ecology datasets. Students in this course will develop independent data analysis projects that include scientific communication through presentations, writing, and visual displays of data.

When we talk about food, we think about personal passions, individual diets and eating behaviors, but we might also think about cultural traditions, consumption disparities and food insecurities, about public health and sustainability, animal rights, deforestation, and genome edited crops. Clearly, the topic challenges us to address difficult questions of intersectionality (of the personal and the political, the local and the global, the human and the non-human). In this seminar we will learn to translate academic discourses into public writing formats that might include op-eds, social media posts, (cook) book reviews, Wikipedia entries, restaurant reviews, and portraits of food activists.