Courses

 

Environmental Studies Courses

ENVI 100(S) LEC Introduction to Weather and Climate

How is it that we have such a hard time predicting if it's going to rain next week, but we can be confident in projections of future climate change decades from now? This course will explore how fundamental laws of physics determine why air moves and changes, creating the wind, clouds, precipitation, and extreme events that form our weather. Building off of our understanding of the atmosphere, we'll look at longer time scales to develop an understanding of earth's climate system, global heat and moisture transport, climate change, and the ways that humans can change our planet. We will use weather and climate models to learn how scientists and meteorologists predict future conditions. Labs include benchtop experiments, data analysis projects, and self-scheduled meteorological observations. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 101(F, S) LEC Nature and Society: An Introduction to Environmental Studies

Environment and society interact on scales from the local to the global. This course explores these interactions and introduces students to the interdisciplinary methods of environmental studies. We will investigate the social, political, and historical aspects of environmental problems -- including environmental racism, species extinction, climate change, and more -- as well as their possible solutions. We will survey policy-making and activism in a variety of contexts and will examine art, literature, film, music, maps, advertisements, and other cultural objects. Throughout the course, we will ask how unequal distributions of power affect people and environments. Case studies, readings, discussions, and field exercises will help students develop their understanding how natural systems influence and are influenced by human activities. [ more ]

ENVI 102(S) LEC Introduction to Environmental Science

Environmental Science is an interdisciplinary field that develops scientific and technical means for assessing and mitigating human impacts on the environment. This course provides an overview of the discipline in the context of the interconnected global earth system: the geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Students are introduced to scientific methods from physics, chemistry, geology, and biology that are used to examine real-world case studies at global and local scales. Topics may include: climate change, air and water pollution, resource extraction and management, land use change, and their effects on environmental quality, biodiversity, and human health. During weekly fieldwork and laboratory sessions, students gain hands-on experience in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data that can be used to make recommendations for addressing local environmental issues. [ more ]

ENVI 103 LEC Global Warming and Environmental Change

Last offered Fall 2022

Earth is the warmest it has been for at least five centuries, and the surface of our planet is responding. From extreme floods and drought to landslides and wildfires, the natural processes that shape Earth's surface are tied to temperature and precipitation. People are beginning to feel the impacts, but in different ways depending on where they call home. In this course, we will investigate how climate change is altering landscapes and the natural processes that support them, highlighting all the ways that people are being affected today. Ultimately, we will develop an understanding of the consequences of climate change that connects physical processes with geography. Specific topics include foundations of the Earth system, plate tectonics and the construction of landscapes, Earth materials, rivers and flooding, hillslope processes, coastal processes, and climate impacts on natural resources such as fresh water and soil. Labs will use local field sites and analytical exercises to evaluate recent cases that reflect an interaction of the landscape and climate. We will also visit and engage with Black communities and community leaders across New England who are grappling with the unjust distribution of resources to mitigate climate impacts and who have been disproportionate bearers of environmental risk. [ more ]

ENVI 104 LEC Oceanography

Last offered Fall 2022

The oceans cover three quarters of Earth's surface, yet oceanography as a modern science is relatively young: the first systematic explorations of the geology, biology, physics and chemistry of the oceans began in the late 19th century. This introduction to ocean science includes the creation and destruction of ocean basins with plate tectonics; the source and transport of seafloor sediments and the archive of Earth history they contain; currents, tides, and waves; photosynthesis and the transfer of energy and matter in ocean food webs; the composition and origin of seawater, and how its chemistry traces biological, physical and geological processes; oceans and climate change; and human impacts. [ more ]

ENVI 105(F) LEC The Co-Evolution of Earth and Life

Our planet is about 4.6 billion years old and has supported life for at least the last 3.5 billion of those years. This course will examine the relationship between Earth and the life that inhabits it, starting with the first living organisms and progressing to the interaction of our own species with the Earth today. Students will investigate the dynamic nature of the Earth-life system and learn about the dramatic changes that have occurred throughout the history of our planet. We will ask questions such as: How did the Earth facilitate biologic evolution, and what effects did those biologic events have on the physical Earth? When did photosynthesis evolve and how did this biological event lead to profound changes in the world's oceans and atmospheres? How and why did animals evolve and what role did environmental change play in the radiation of animal life? How did the rise and spread of land plants affect world climate? How do plate tectonics, glaciation, and volcanism influence biodiversity and evolutionary innovation? What caused mass extinctions in the past and what can that teach us about our current extinction crisis? Labs will involve hands-on analysis of rocks, fossils, and real-world data as well as conceptual and analytical exercises; field trips will contextualize major events in Earth history and will help students learn to read the rock record. Through these investigations, the class will provide a comprehensive overview of Earth's dynamic history. [ more ]

ENVI 108 LEC Energy Science and Technology

Last offered Fall 2021

Energy use has skyrocketed in the United States and elsewhere in the world, causing significant economic and political shifts, as well as concerns for the environment. This course will address the physics and technology of energy generation, consumption, and conservation. It will cover a wide range of energy sources, including fossil fuels, hydropower, solar energy, wind energy, and nuclear energy. We will discuss energy use in transportation, manufacturing, building heating and lighting, and energy storage. Students will learn to compare the efficiencies and environmental impacts of various energy sources and uses. [ more ]

Taught by: Henrik Ronellenfitsch

Catalog details

ENVI 109(F) LEC Oceans and Society

Oceans impact society in many ways: they provide much of our protein, they hide untapped mineral wealth, their circulation regulates global climate, they transport and accumulate our plastic garbage, marine storms batter coastal infrastructure, and sea-level rise threatens communities. However, despite the oceans' importance throughout history--for trade, as a source of food, and because of their unpredictable dangers--we know shockingly little about them. More than 6000 people have reached the summit of Everest, Earth's highest elevation; but only 22 have visited Challenger Deep, the deepest point below the ocean surface. We have mapped the surfaces of Mars and Venus in far more detail than the topography of Earth's ocean basins. New marine organisms are discovered regularly. And we still don't fully understand the complex details of how ocean and atmosphere work together as the planet's climate engine. In this course, you will examine ocean science themes with direct societal relevance that are also at the forefront of scientific investigation. Topics will be selected based on current events, but are likely to include deep sea mining, meridional overturning, sea level rise, atmospheric rivers, and aquaculture. By taking focused dives into a range of subjects you will learn about the evolution and operation of the ocean as a physical and geological system as well as investigating the intersections between ocean functions, climate change, and human societies. Exercises and discussions will foreground active learning. A field trip to the Atlantic coast will integrate experiential investigation of the intersection between coastal change, extreme weather, and communities. The aim is to have energised interdisciplinary discussions about topics of pressing societal relevance, to understand some of the fundamentals of ocean science, to develop expertise in gathering and distilling information by researching new topics, and thereby to improve critical and analytical thinking. [ more ]

ENVI 110 TUT The Anthropocene: Nature and Culture in the Human Age

Last offered Spring 2018

In 2016, a group of scientists appointed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that keeps the official timetable of earth's history, argued that the planet has entered a new age known as the Anthropocene. Their questions were epochal: Has humanity become a geological force as powerful as those that have shaped the planet's deep past, such as ice sheets and asteroids? Have we truly entered "the human age," and if so, when did it begin and what does it all mean? This course will ask how researchers from different fields have sought to answer these questions. Just as important, it will ask how they became questions in the first place. Where did the idea of the Anthropocene come from? What are its social, political, and ethical implications? How we have arrived at this new understanding of our planet and ourselves? And what can this major intellectual shift-a shift that has already begun to send waves far beyond the academy into the worlds of art, literature, politics, and religion-tell us about the construction of environmental knowledge in the twenty-first century? Readings will come primarily from the environmental social sciences and humanities, including works by nineteenth and early twentieth-century environmental thinkers, but will be supplemented with material from the natural and environmental sciences. Topics will include climate change, mass extinction, urbanization, and deforestation. Our focus throughout will remain on ways of knowing, imagining, and representing global environmental change in an era of ever-expanding human influence. [ more ]

ENVI 134(F) LEC The Tropics: Biology and Social Issues

Biology and Social Issues of the Tropics explores the biological dimensions of social and environmental issues in tropical societies, focusing specifically on the tropics of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and the Caribbean. Social issues are inextricably bound to human ecologies and their environmental settings. Each section of the course provides the science behind the issues and ends with options for possible solutions, which are debated by the class. The course highlights differences between the tropics and areas at higher latitudes while also emphasizing global interconnectedness. It begins with a survey of the tropical environment, including a global climate model, variation in tropical climates and the amazing biodiversity of tropical biomes. The next section focuses on human population biology, and emphasizes demography and the role of disease particularly malaria, AIDS and Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2). The final part of the course covers the place of human societies in local and global ecosystems including the challenges of tropical food production, the interaction of humans with their supporting ecological environment, and global climate change. This course fulfills the DPE requirement. Through lectures, debates and readings, students confront social and environmental issues and policies from the perspective of biologists. This builds a framework for lifelong exploration of human diversity in terms of difference, power and equity. [ more ]

ENVI 201 LEC The Geoscience of Epidemiology and Public Health

Last offered Spring 2023

The Coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the many ways that diseases can be transmitted in the environment. As a society we are becoming aware of the many ways that geological processes and materials and influence human health, in ways both beneficial and dangerous. This course unites geoscience, biomedicine and public health approaches to address a wide range of environmental health problems. These include water-related illnesses (e.g. diarrhea, malaria); minerals and metals, both toxic (e.g. asbestos, arsenic) and essential (e.g. iodine); radioactive poisoning (e.g. radon gas); and the transport of pathogens by water and wind. In many cases, the environmental health problems disproportionately affect marginalised populations, contributing to greater disease and death among poor communities and populations of colour. We will examine the broad array of dynamic connections between human health and the natural world. We will discuss the social justice implications of a range of environmental health problems. And we will examine current research into how coronaviruses, such as the one causing COVID-19, are transported in the environment. This course is in the Sediments and Life group for the Geosciences Major. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

Catalog details

ENVI 202(S) STU Critical Practice of Architecture: Theories, Methods, and Techniques 

In this course, students will transform an architectural or urban space through design interventions that contribute to reorienting public perception, imagination, and politics. Skills taught include methods and techniques for critical architecture practice, including architecture drawing, 2D graphic design, and 3D modeling (digital and physical). Students will also build on design strategies (e.g., spatial hijacking and détournement), community architecture, and visual techniques to rethink normative understandings of space and time. Through selected readings and discussions, we will examine key ideas that have inspired design thinking and activism. The class culminates in a presentation to external reviewers and a final exhibition. [ more ]

ENVI 203(F) LEC Ecology

This course combines lectures & discussion with field and indoor laboratory activities to explore factors that determine the distribution and abundance of plants and animals in natural systems. The course begins with an overview of global environmental patterns and then builds from the population to ecosystem level. Throughout the course, we will emphasize the connection between basic ecological principles and current environmental issues. Selected topics include population dynamics (competition, predation, mutualism); community interactions (succession, food chains and diversity) and ecosystem function (biogeochemical cycles, energy flow). Laboratory activities are designed to engage students in the natural history of the region and build skills in data analysis and scientific writing. [ more ]

ENVI 204(F) LEC Colonialism, Capitalism and Climate Crisis

Evolutions are part of human existence. These changes are not necessarily natural, uniform or linear across space and time. As colonial conquests sought to capture, dominate and exploit vast swathes of land, nature and people, supported by economic theories, violent, wide-ranging and long-term changes profoundly altered the environment and human-nature relationships. This course examines these transformations, specifically attending to the relationship between colonized/colonial (hu)man, nature and non-human species, drawing in perceptions of nature and the economy. Our starting point for this intellectual journey is the colonial imprint on human-ecological relations i.e. economic man, or Sylvia Wynter's conception of "ethno-class man" and "homo-economicus". We will consider social difference especially race as a central conjuncture of the changing relationship of capitalism and social organization relative to natural resource extraction, techno-scientific knowledge, industrial development and resulting accumulation of greenhouse gases that induce climate and ecological crises. We will also examine economic perspectives of climate change as a market failure, loss of economic value or a financial risk to stock portfolios that may be at odds with humane ways of organizing our collective planet. This course exposes the hierarchies of social difference and resulting inequalities (class, race, gender, species) under climate crisis to advance reparative and decolonial understandings. Drawing upon experiences from social, labor and environmental movements for climate justice, students will be able evaluate situated political economic responses to the climate crisis. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

Catalog details

ENVI 206 SEM Global Environmental Politics

Last offered Spring 2021

This course examines the history and current status of international environmental cooperation and conflict. We will consider the interactions of nation-states, multilateral international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and social movements in the formation of transnational environmental policy and treaties. We will also examine non-state approaches to global environmental challenges. After reviewing competing explanations for the causes of global environmental problems and diverse disciplinary approaches to studying those issues, we will read case studies covering a range of topics. These include fresh water conflict, fisheries and oceans, climate change, waste and pollution, agriculture, pesticides, population and development, wildlife, forestry, and consumerism. The reading assignments are drawn from the fields of environmental and foreign policy history, political science, international relations, geography, and anthropology in order to develop an interdisciplinary approach to international policy analysis. The written assignments are a series of policy briefs. You will also be responsible for two oral presentations during the semester, related to the policy briefs. [ more ]

Taught by: April Merleaux

Catalog details

ENVI 207 LEC Economic Geology and Earth Resources

Last offered Fall 2019

"If it can't be grown, it must be mined." We depend on the solid Earth for a huge array of resources. The metal in your soda can, the plastic in your Nalgene, the components of your computer, the glass in your window, the hydrocarbons being burned to keep you warm in the winter or to transport you in cars or aircraft, the cars and aircraft themselves: all are made of materials mined from the Earth. Right now there are more people building more houses, paving more roads, making more vehicles, more electronics, and more plastic packaging-all with geologic materials. As demand soars in both established and growing economies, and as we realize the environmental damage that can result from resource extraction and processing, the importance of understanding Earth's resources increases. Finding new deposits and managing those we have requires insight into the geology that underlies the location and origin of strategic Earth materials. This class introduces the geologic processes that control formation, distribution, and extent of materials reserves: dimension stone and gravel, base and precious metal ores, gemstones, petroleum, nuclear energy sources, and specialty materials for medical, technological, and military uses. This course is in the SOLID EARTH GROUP for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 208(F) SEM Saharan Imaginations

Deconstructing reductive Saharanism, which the course conceptualizes as a universalizing discourse about deserts, this course seeks to critically examine the myriad assumptions that are projected upon deserts across times and cultures. In addition to their depiction as dead and empty, deserts have become a canvas for the demonstration of religiosity, resilience, heroism and athleticism. Cultural production, particularly literature and film, do, however, furnish a critical space in which important questions can be raised about deserts' fundamental importance to different cultures and societies. Drawing on novels, films, and secondary scholarship, the course will help students understand how myth, memory, history, coloniality/postcoloniality, and a strong sense of ethics are deeply intertwined in the desert sub-genre of African, Euro-American, and Middle Eastern literatures. Whether grappling with transcontinental issues of climate change, cannibalization of biodiversity or overexploitation of natural resources, desert-focused cultural production invites us to interrogate the politics of space and place as well as mobility and spatial control as they relate to this supposedly dead nature. [ more ]

ENVI 209(F) LEC Modern Climate

What will happen to the Earth's climate in the next century? What is contributing to sea level rise? Is Arctic sea ice doomed? In this course we will study the components of the climate system (atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, biosphere and land surface) and the processes through which they interact. Greenhouse gas emission scenarios will form the basis for investigating how these systems might respond to human activity. This course will explore how heat and mass are moved around the atmosphere and ocean to demonstrate how the geographic patterns of climate change arise. We will also focus on climate feedback effects--like the albedo feedback associated with sea ice and glacier loss--and how these processes can accelerate climate change. In labs we will learn MATLAB to use process and full-scale climate models to investigate the behavior of these systems in response to increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 211 LEC Race, Environment, and the Body

Last offered Spring 2023

This course is organized around three distinct, but overlapping, concerns. The first concern is how polluting facilities like landfills, industrial sites, and sewage treatment plants are disproportionately located in communities of color. The second concern is the underlying, racist rationales for how corporations, in collaboration with state agencies, plot manufacturers of pollution. The final concern is how the environmental crises outlined in the first two sections of the course are experienced in the body. In reviewing a range of Black cultural productions--like literature, scholarship, music, and film--we will not only consider how environmental disparities physically affect human bodies, but also how embodiments of eco-crises lend to imaginaries of the relationship between the self and the natural world. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

Catalog details

ENVI 212 TUT The Economics and Ethics of CO2 Offsets

Last offered Fall 2022

Some electric utilities and other CO2 emission polluters are allowed to purchase carbon offsets to achieve a portion of their mandated emissions cuts, in effect, to pay others to reduce carbon emissions in their stead. Some individuals, college and universities, and for-profit and non-profit institutions have chosen voluntarily to purchase carbon offsets as a way of reducing their carbon footprint. But do offsets actually succeed in reducing carbon emissions? What separates a legitimate offset from one that is not? How should we measure the true impact of an offset? How do carbon offsets compare to other policies for reducing carbon emissions in terms of efficiency, equity, and justice? Is there something inherently wrong about "commodifying" the atmosphere? Is there something inherently wrong about selling or buying the right to pollute? Should colleges and universities be using the purchase of offsets to achieve "carbon neutrality?" [ more ]

Taught by: Ralph Bradburd

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ENVI 213(S) LEC Introduction to Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

We'll use economics to examine why we harm the environment and overuse natural resources, and what we can do about it. We'll study cost benefit analysis, pollution in general, climate change, environmental justice, natural resources (like fisheries, forests, and fossil fuels), and energy. We'll talk about how economists put a dollar value on nature and ecosystem services (as well as human health and life!), and the concerns involved in doing so. We will take an economic approach to global sustainability, and study the relationship between the environment and economic growth. Consideration of justice and equity will be woven throughout the whole semester. [ more ]

ENVI 214(F) LEC Mastering GIS

The development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has allowed us to investigate incredibly large and spatially complex data sets like never before. From assessing the effects of climate change on alpine glaciers, to identifying ideal habitat ranges for critically endangered species, to determining the vulnerability of coastal communities to storms, GIS has opened the door for important, large-scale environmental analyses. And as these technologies improve, our ability to understand the world grows ever greater. This course will teach you how to use GIS to investigate environmental problems. We will review fundamental principles in geography, the construction and visualization of geospatial datasets, and tools for analyzing geospatial data. Special attention will also be given to analysis of remotely sensed (satellite) imagery and to collection of field data. By the end of the course, you will be able to conduct independent GIS-based research and produce maps and other geospatial imagery of professional quality. [ more ]

ENVI 215 LEC Climate Changes

Last offered Spring 2023

Paleoclimatology is the reconstruction of past climate variability and the forces that drove the climate changes. The Earth's climate system is experiencing unprecedented and catastrophic change because of anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases and land use change. Paleoclimatology allows humans to put modern climate changes into the context of the history of this planet, and shows how and why it is unprecedented and catastrophic. Each climate event we study from Earth's past teaches us lessons on why the climate system responds to anthropogenic perturbations, what climate changes we're committed to in the future, how long-lasting they will be, and what climate consequences we can avoid if we take action and reduce greenhouse gas emissions sooner. In this course, we will discuss the major mechanisms that cause natural climate variability, how climate of the past is reconstructed, and how climate models are used to test mechanisms that drive climate variation. With these tools, you will analyze and interpret data and model simulations from climate events from Earth's history, and apply these findings to anthropogenic climate changes happening now and that are projected to happen in the future. Laboratories and homework will emphasize developing problem solving skills as well as sampling and interpreting geological archives of climate change. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 216 SEM Philosophy of Animals

Last offered Spring 2021

Animals are and always have been part of human life. To name just a few ways: We treat animals as companions, as food, as objects of wonder in the wild, as resources to be harvested, as testing grounds for science, and as religious sacrifice. The abstract philosophical question before us is, what are animals such that they can be all these things? In this course we aim to engage that abstract question through two more focused projects. Firstly, we will try to understand the mental lives of non-human animals. Secondly, we will try to make sense of the moral dimensions of our relationship to animals. Throughout we will aim to fuse a rigorous scientific perspective with more humanistic themes and philosophical inquiry. Topics include sentience, animal cognition, language in non-human animals, empathy and evolution, the history of domestication, animal rights, cross-cultural views on animals, arguments against and for vegetarianism and veganism, the morality of zoos, hunting and fishing, and pets and happiness. [ more ]

ENVI 217 SEM Landscape, Place and Power

Last offered Fall 2018

How does culture shape the way we imagine, use, and experience the physical environment, and how does the physical environment shape culture in turn? What can landscapes tell us about the values, beliefs, and ideas of the people who make them? What is the relationship between place and social power? This course will explore the various ways in which scholars from a broad range of disciplines have sought to answer these questions by incorporating insights from social theory and cultural criticism. Focusing on studies of place and landscape in the Americas from the time of European colonization to the present, it will examine key works from fields such as cultural geography, environmental history, ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, and anthropology, and it will survey the major methodological and theoretical commitments that unite these fields. [ more ]

ENVI 218 SEM "Ecologismo": Literature, Culture and the Environment in Latin America

Last offered Spring 2019

How have Latin American authors and artists responded to environmental concerns, from the logging and rubber booms that threatened the Amazon in the early 20th century to contemporary global warming? How do the realities of Latin American societies--including massive disparities of wealth and poverty; the cultural and political impacts of the region's indigenous populations; and the complex histories of colonialism, dependency and neoliberalism--inform Latin American responses to environmental issues? How does Latin America's environmental imaginary differ from those of the U.S. and Europe? In this course we will explore these issues and more through literature and other cultural texts from Latin America. We will consider short stories and novellas by authors including Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay), Luis Sepúlveda (Chile), Mempo Giardinelli (Argentina), and Ana Cristina Rossi (Costa Rica); poetry by Esthela Calderón (Nicaragua), Juan Carlos Galeano (Colombia), Homero Aridjis (Mexico); the paintings of Tomás Sánchez (Cuba); and feature films as well as shorter documentaries. In Spanish. [ more ]

ENVI 219 TUT Evolution of and on Volcanic Islands

Last offered Fall 2020

Plate tectonic theory accounts for the vast majority of volcanic islands in ocean basins. They form above mantle plume hot spots (Hawaiian and Galapagos Islands), subduction zones (Aleutian and Indonesian arcs), and mid-ocean ridges (Azores and Ascension Island). Iceland is unusual because it is located above a hot spot and the mid-Atlantic ridge. Each plate tectonic setting produces chemically distinctive magmas, and the lifespan of volcanic islands varies widely. Islands above hot spots may be geographically remote and emergent for only several million years, but be part of a long-lived sequence of islands that persists for over a hundred million years. In contrast, island arc volcanoes belong to long geographically continuous chains of volcanoes, commonly in close proximity to continents. This tutorial explores the geologic evolution and lifespan of volcanic islands from formation to submergence, and searches for correlations between these characteristics and plate tectonic setting. We will also consider how geographic isolation, areal extent, lifespan, and climate affect biological evolution on volcanic islands.There will be weekly tutorial meetings with pairs of students, and students will alternate writing papers on assigned topics. This course is in the Solid Earth group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 220(S) LEC Field Botany and Plant Natural History

This field-lecture course covers the evolutionary and ecological relationships among plant groups represented in our local and regional flora. Lectures focus on the evolution of the land plants, the most recent and revolutionary developments in plant systematics and phylogeny, the cultural and economic uses of plants and how plants shape our world. The course covers the role of plants in ameliorating global climate change, their importance in contributing to sustainable food production and providing solutions to pressing environmental problems. Throughout we emphasize the critical role of biodiversity and its conservation. The labs cover field identification, natural history and the ecology of local species. [ more ]

ENVI 222 TUT Examining Inconvenient Truths: Climate Science meets U.S. Senate Politics

Last offered Fall 2020

Former President Barack Obama once said: "There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate." While consensus regarding the causes and impacts of climate change has been growing steadily among scientists and researchers (and to some extent, the general public) over the past two decades, the U.S. has yet to confront this issue in a manner consistent with its urgency. This lack of action in the U.S. is at least partly due to the fact that science provides necessary but insufficient information towards crafting effective climate change legislation and the unfortunate fact that climate change has become a highly partisan issue. The primary objective of this tutorial will be to help students develop a greater understanding of the difficulties associated with crafting climate change legislation, with an emphasis on the role of science and politics within the legislative process. To this end, the tutorial will address how the underlying scientific complexities embedded in most climate policies (e.g., offsets, carbon capture and sequestration, uncertainty and complexity of the climate system, leakage) must be balanced by and blended with the different operational value systems (e.g., economic, social, cultural, religious) that underlie U.S. politics. Over the course of this tutorial, students will develop a nuanced sense of how and when science can support the development of comprehensive national climate change legislation within the current partisan climate. This course will take a practical approach, where students will craft weekly policy oriented documents (e.g., policy memos, action memos, research briefs) targeted to selected members of the current U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the committee that has historically held jurisdiction over a majority of the major climate change bills that have moved through the legislative process. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 223 TUT Colonial Landscapes: Latin America's Contemporary Environmental Literature

Last offered Fall 2014

"It is not by coincidence that our societies are both racist and anti-ecological," wrote the Chilean sociologist Fernando Mires in his now-classic study, The Discourse of Nature. This tutorial explores works of contemporary literature that implicitly and explicitly link Latin America's ongoing environmental crisis to the region's long and multi-layered history of colonialism: novels by Sylvia Iparraguirre (Argentina), Mayra Montero (Puerto Rico), Giaconda Belli (Nicaragua), Luis Sepúlveda (Chile); poetry by Homero Aridjis (México); essays by Octavio Paz (Mexico), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Brazil), and more. Representing a wide variety of geographies, literary styles and ideological perspectives, these writers nevertheless converge in challenging us to consider the effects of environmental crisis within structures of power that are radically unequal at the local, national, and global levels; and to recognize that consciousness of environmental vulnerability can prompt new forms of inclusion and community as well as exclusion. Topics to be explored also include the role of indigenous cosmologies in contemporary environmental politics, the place of urban ecologies within the environmental imaginary, and the ongoing debates among academic critics and others regarding the scope and methodologies of ecocriticism as an approach to Latin American literature. Students have the option of tutorial in Spanish or in English; partners will be assigned accordingly. Each tutorial pair will meet with me for one hour during the week, during which time we will discuss a 5-page paper that one of the partners has submitted the night before. This adds up to a substantial amount of (reading and) writing for each student in the course, i.e., six 5-page essays over the course of the semester. [ more ]

ENVI 224(F) LEC The Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Over the centuries, philosophers and historians have asked how societies evolved from simple hunter-gatherer bands to complex urban civilizations. Human prehistory and history have shown the repeated cycles of the rise, expansion and collapse of early civilizations in both the Old and New World. What do the similarities and differences in the development of these first civilizations tell us about the nature of societal change, civilization and the state, and human society itself? The course will examine these issues through an introductory survey of the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mesoamerica and South America. Classical and modern theories on the nature, origin, and development of the state will be reviewed in light of the archaeological evidence. [ more ]

ENVI 225 TUT Sustainable Food & Agriculture

Last offered Fall 2018

A tutorial course investigating patterns, processes, and stability in human-dominated, food production systems. The course will examine sustainable food and agriculture from an ecological perspective. Topics will include: changes in diversity, concentration, and scale, flows of energy, circulation (or not) of fertilizer nutrients, carbon balances in soils, and stability of food production, processing, and distribution ecosystems. A day-long field experience will take place on a local farm. [ more ]

ENVI 226 TUT Climate Data Analysis

Last offered Spring 2022

In this tutorial, students will learn how to access and work with the datasets that show how our climate is changing. The course introduces a series of analytical methods used in climate science, and students then apply those 'recipes' to data of their choosing to research parts of the climate system. Over the course of the term, a student might investigate the seasonality of global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, maps of sea level anomalies, and the impact El Niño patterns have on Western US rainfall. Students will present their findings, and their insights into the particular aspect of the climate system, at weekly tutorial meetings. Analytical approaches covered in the class include climatologies, time series analysis (trends, periodicity, and autocorrelation), anomaly maps, composites, and zonal/meridional averaging. As for regions and climate systems students can explore: the sky is the limit. This course is in the Oceans and Climates group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 228 TUT Water as a Scarce Resource

Last offered Fall 2017

For a variety of reasons including environmental pollution, urbanization, changing agricultural techniques, resource mismanagement, and the consequences of climate change, water is becoming a scarce resource even in places where it was relatively plentiful in the past, and it is likely to become an increasingly scarce resource over the coming decades. In this course we will use basic economic models to consider policy issues relating to water: Is access to water a basic human right, and if so, what market and non-market mechanisms should play a role in water allocation? Does public ownership of water improve the way it is provided and used? Why do societies differ in their approaches to allocating water and are some systems better than others? What does it mean to have a property right to water? Could private property rights to water help address the water pollution problem? How can societies change their water-related property rights, regulations and social institutions when individuals have implicit or explicit rights to the institutional status quo? Who has the right to water that crosses international boundaries? How should societies allocate water across generations? [ more ]

ENVI 229(F) SEM Environmental History

This course is an introduction to Environmental History: the study of how people have shaped environments, how environments have shaped human histories, and how cultural change and material change are intertwined. As such, it challenges traditional divides between the humanities and the sciences. Taking U.S. environmental history as our focus, we will strive to understand the historical roots of contemporary environmental problems, such as species extinction, pollution, and climate change. We will take field trips to learn to read landscapes for their histories and to examine how past environments are represented in museum exhibits, digital projects, and physical landscapes. And we will develop original arguments and essays based on archival research. It is imperative that we understand this history if we are to make informed and ethical environmental decisions at the local, national, and global scale. [ more ]

ENVI 230 SEM Geographies of Food Justice

Last offered Spring 2022

Recent scholarship & reporting clearly show inequalities of race, class, & gender in access to adequate, nutritious, & culturally appropriate food. Observers often call poor, segregated urban areas food deserts, evoking a landscape dominated by fast food & devoid of vegetables. Farmer & food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman instead refers to these places as experiencing food apartheid to emphasize that the inequalities are the result of structural racism. Notably, deserts & apartheid are both spatial metaphors, referring not only to the environments in which people eat, but also the systems of social, political, & economic power that define those places. This course considers the relationship between food, power, & geography by looking at such places. We ask: How does where people eat shape what they eat? What can we learn about structural racism & settler colonialism by looking at the diverse sites of food insecurity? How do people experience a globalized food system in uniquely localized ways? How do struggles over land & labor shape the possibilities for justice in the food system? Does it matter where our food is produced? We begin with an exploration of the concepts of food security, sovereignty, and justice. Subsequent units include a critical reevaluation of the concept of food deserts, drawing on works by scholars who question the term's usefulness. Next, we consider disruptions to indigenous hunting & fishing practices from settler colonialism-induced climate change & toxic contamination. Finally, we evaluate evidence about whether local food is the solution to the social and environmental problems with our food systems. We will read works by geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, planners, & journalists, among others. Several "lab" sessions throughout the semester introduce participants to data analysis tools used by policymakers and activists working on food security and justice. [ more ]

Taught by: April Merleaux

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ENVI 231(S) SEM Africa and the Anthropocene

Despite its low contributions to global carbon emissions, the continent of Africa is predicted to experience some of the worst effects of climate change. This interdisciplinary course investigates the causes and consequences of this troubling contradiction. It positions the African continent as an important site for understanding how legacies of empire, racial and gendered inequality, resource extraction, and capital accumulation impact contemporary global environmental politics. Students will engage theoretical texts, reports from international organizations, films, novels, and web-based content. Topics include: humanism/post-humanism; migration and displacement; representations of conflict; and sustainable development. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 232 SEM The Garden in the Ancient World

Last offered Spring 2022

Drawing on the literature, art, and archaeology of ancient gardens and on real gardens of the present day, this course examines the very nature and experience of the garden and the act of gardening. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, we will explore the garden as a paradise; as a locus for philosophical discussion and religious encounter; as a site of labor, conquest, and resistance; and as a place for solace, inspiration, and desire. This course will be grounded in crucial readings from antiquity, such as the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Sappho, Cicero, Lucretius, Vergil, Horace, Columella, and Augustine, and in the perspectives of more modern writers, from Jane Austen and Tom Stoppard to contemporary cultural historian George McKay. Ultimately, our goal is to analyze conceptions and expressions of beauty, power, and love-in the garden. All readings are in translation. [ more ]

ENVI 233 SEM Latin American Environmental Literature and Cultural Production

Last offered Spring 2021

This foundational course explores a wide array of ecocultural texts from Latin America, ranging from accounts of Europeans' first arrival to the crisis of mass extinction and anthropogenic climate change today. In between we consider an eclectic mix of styles and genres, including poetry, essays, prose fiction and speeches produced by a varied group of cultural agents. We read classic texts by canonical figures (José Martí's "Our América," the Popol vuh), which take on new meaning in the current context, as well as some little-known gems of ecological consciousness. Readings and discussion trace connections between environmental thought and the region's long and multi-layered history of colonialism, and students are encouraged to develop their own positions by responding to some of the leading theoretical discourses that animate the field of Latin American ecocriticism: decolonial and creole ecologies, ecofeminism, transcultural materialism, and postdevelopment. Conducted in English. [ more ]

ENVI 234 LEC Global Poverty and Economic Development

Last offered Spring 2023

Why are some nations rich while other nations are poor, and what can be done to end global poverty and promote shared prosperity? This course explores the historical determinants of global poverty and inequality, and analyzes the range of policy options available to promote economic development and equalize opportunities. Drawing on research in development economics, development studies, political science, and anthropology, we seek to understand the factors that shaped the global economy and contributed to the cross-country income disparities observed today. In addition, we'll use the tools of modern empirical microeconomics to assess the possibilities for eliminating global poverty and underdevelopment in the future. Undergraduate students will receive 200-level credit and should not register at the 500-level. [ more ]

ENVI 235 SEM Survival and Resistance: Environmental Political Theory

Last offered Spring 2022

Contemporary struggles to reverse environmental destruction and establish sustainable communities have prompted some political theorists to rethink longstanding assumptions about politics and its relationship to nature. Does the environment have "rights"? What, if anything, is the difference between an ecosystem and a political community? Is democracy dangerous to the planet's health? Are environmental protections compatible with political freedom? How is the domination or conquest of nature connected with domination and conquest within human societies? What does justice demand in an age of climate change? In this class, we will consider the promise and limits of political theory to illuminate present day environmental crises and foster movements to overcome them. We will engage classic texts that helped to establish political theory's traditional view of nature as a resource, as well as contemporary texts that offer alternative, ecological understandings of nature and its entwinements with politics. Class will be driven primarily by discussion. Students will have significant responsibility for setting the agenda for discussions through informal writing submitted prior to class. As a writing intensive course, attention to the writing process and developing an authorial voice will be a recurrent focus of our work inside and outside the classroom. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 238 LEC Sustainable Economic Growth

Last offered Fall 2021

Is it possible to have infinite economic growth on a finite planet? This question has sparked a great deal of inquiry across the social sciences. Some argue that we need to slow or even end economic growth to prevent environmental catastrophe. Others argue that market forces, especially changing prices and improved technology, will ensure that growth can continue unabated without significant negative consequences. Still others argue that government intervention is necessary to limit negative consequences of economic progress, but that effective interventions are still compatible with sustained economic growth. In this class, we will explore the insights that economics has to offer on this important question. We will start by considering the importance of finite inputs used in production, including fossil fuels, minerals, and land, among others. Then, we will consider whether undesirable byproducts of economic growth will prevent sustained growth. This second part of class will place a lot of emphasis on climate change. Throughout the class, we will pay special attention to the role that government intervention can or cannot play in promoting sustainable economic growth. This class will reinforce important concepts taught in introductory microeconomics and introductory macroeconomics. [ more ]

ENVI 239 LEC Introduction to Ecocriticism: North-South Dialogues on Nature and Culture

Last offered Fall 2010

This course will introduce students to the study of the relationship between literature and the environment, often referred to as 'ecocriticism,' through careful examination of Jean de Léry's 1577 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil and related texts. Léry's fascinating account of a yearlong stay among the 'cannibals' of Brazil gets at many of the themes and debates taken up by ecocritics today: How do political, economic, religious and philosophical factors influence individual and collective conceptions of 'nature' and its value? How do acts of reading and writing inform (or deform) our understanding of the 'natural' world? What is the role of aesthetics in environmental politics, and how can unspoken assumptions about race, gender, and cultural difference influence representations of global environmental issues like deforestation and global warming? Envi 239/Comp 238 fulfills the goals of the Exploring Diversity Initiative by contextualizing current questions of international environmental policy within the long history of colonialism, challenging students to think about cultural diversity as well as economic inequality as relevant to contemporary debates about the value and distribution of natural resources. In addition to Léry's History, we will also read landmarks of ecocritical theory by scholars including Lawrence Buell, William Cronon, Candace Slater and Jorge Marcone, as well as more recent literary interventions into environmental issues in the Americas. [ more ]

ENVI 240 TUT Conservation and Climate Change

Last offered Fall 2019

What does climate change mean for the future of Earth's 8.7 million-or-so species? This tutorial introduces students to an emerging literature on how climate change alters the distributions, behaviors, and interactions of plant and animal species. In it we will pay close attention to how to read a scientific paper and how to write about science from the discipline of environmental studies. Some of the questions we will consider include: How is scientific knowledge produced? What might the biotic world look like in 10, 100, and 1000 years? How are conservation and restoration practitioners responding to climate change? To what extent can local environmental management alter global trends? [ more ]

ENVI 241 SEM The Politics of Waste

Last offered Spring 2020

Waste is not just a fact of life, it is a political practice. To create and maintain political order requires devising collective means to pile up, bury, burn, or otherwise dispose of stuff deemed dirty or disorderly: waste management is regime management. In turn, our feelings of disgust for anything deemed waste shape political deliberation and action on environmental policy, immigration, food production, economic distribution, and much more. The very effort to define "waste" raises thorny political questions: What (or who) is disposable? Why do we find the visible presence of certain kinds of things or persons to be unbearably noxious? How should we respond to the fact that these unbearable beings persist in existing, despite our best efforts to eliminate them? What is our individual and collective responsibility for creating and disposing of waste? Serious inquiry into waste is rare in political theory and political science--perhaps understandably, given that the study of politics is shaped by the same taboos that shape politics. In this seminar we will openly discuss unmentionable topics and get our hands dirty (sometimes literally) examining the politics of waste. We will take notice of the erasure of waste in traditional political theory and work together to fill these gaps. To do so, we will draw on work in anthropology, critical theory, history, urban studies, and waste management science; representations of waste in popular culture; and experiences with waste in our lives. This course is part of a joint program between Williams' Center for Learning in Action and the Berkshire County Jail in Pittsfield, MA. The class will be composed equally of nine Williams students and nine inmates and will be held at the jail. An important goal of the course is to encourage students from different backgrounds to think together about issues of common human concern. Transportation will be provided by the college. *Please note the atypical class hours, Wed 4:45-8:30 pm* [ more ]

ENVI 242 SEM The Country and the City in the Classical World

Last offered Spring 2020

A growing urban-rural divide is defining political discourse around the world. The interrelation and tension between "city" and "countryside" are not new, however, but date back to the time when cities first began. How do cities occupy and transform, interact with and displace rural landscapes? What are the values, stereotypes, and ideals--as well as artistic, literary, and architectural forms--associated with the city and the countryside? What role does one play in the political, social, and economic life of the other? With a focus on ancient Greece and, especially, Rome, this course will combine archaeological evidence and contemporary scholarship with primary sources ranging from Hesiod, Theocritus, Vergil, and Propertius to Cato the Elder, Varro, Vitruvius, and Pliny the Elder, to examine an array of topics including land surveying and colonization; agrarian legislation; the urban food supply; rustic religion in the city; urban parks and gardens; and the concept of the pastoral. Together, we will explore the city and the countryside - not just as places, but also as states of mind. All readings are in translation. [ more ]

ENVI 243 TUT Reimagining Rivers

Last offered Fall 2021

In the era of climate change and widening inequality, how we live with rivers will help define who we are. Rivers are the circulatory systems of civilization, yet for much of modern history they have been treated as little more than sewers, roads, and sources of power. Today they are in crisis. Rivers and the people who rely on them face a multitude of problems, including increased flooding, drought, pollution, and ill-conceived dams. These problems will threaten human rights, public health, political stability, and ecological resilience far into the future unless we learn to manage rivers more justly and sustainably. Can we reimagine rivers before it is too late? This course will pursue this question by examining the social, cultural, and political dimensions of conflict over rivers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on scholarship from a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines and focusing on case studies in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, it will explore a diverse array of sources: film, fiction, ethnography, history, journalism, and more. [ more ]

ENVI 244(S) TUT Environmental Ethics

What ethical standards should guide our individual and societal choices when those choices affect current and future environmental conditions? This course will introduce students to fundamental concepts, methods, and issues in environmental ethics. Initial tutorial meetings will focus on theoretical materials that will background later discussions and will include classic readings from the environmental ethics literature (e.g., Leopold, Taylor, Rolston). Most sessions will pair readings about key concepts with specific cases that raise complex ethical issues, including the concept of moral standing and, e.g., people who do not yet exist, non-human individuals, species, and complex living systems; the concept of moral responsibility and complicity in environmentally damaging practices; the legitimacy of cost-benefit analysis as an environmental policy tool; and the valuation of human lives. [ more ]

ENVI 246 SEM Race, Power, & Food History

Last offered Fall 2021

Have you ever wondered why Spam is so popular in Hawaii and why Thai food is available all across the United States? Are you curious why black-eyed peas and collards are considered "soul food"? In this course, we will answer these questions by digging in to the histories of global environmental transformation through colonialism, slavery, and international migration. We will consider the production and consumption of food as a locus of power over the last 300 years. Beginning with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and continuing through the 20th century, we trace the global movement of plants, foods, flavors, workers, businesses, and agricultural knowledge. Major units include rice production by enslaved people in the Americas; Asian American food histories during the Cold War; and fat studies critiques of obesity discourse. We will discuss food justice, food sovereignty, and contemporary movements for food sustainability in the context of these histories and our contemporary world. Readings are interdisciplinary, but our emphasis will be on historical analyses of race, labor, environment, health, and gender. [ more ]

Taught by: April Merleaux

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ENVI 247 STU Race, Land and Settler (Racial) Capitalism: Ongoing Topics in (Dis)/(Re)possession

Last offered Fall 2022

This sequential studio course serves as an introduction to ongoing topics in colonialism, racial thinking, African Diaspora studies, Global, Caribbean, and local studies. We will examine how race, gender and class operate under racial capitalism and settler colonialism. The readings in this class will center the works of critical geographers, caribbeanist, scholars of the African Diaspora, Indigenous theorists, among other critical, anti-capitalist or decolonial scholars. Reading in this course will take up the question(s) of land and land-making; race, racialization, and racial thinking; alongside questions of space and place as they all relate to the various processes, projects and methods of (dis)/(re)possession. This course is the first part of a complementary course, which will be offered in the Spring, titled, "Race, Land, Space and (Dis)/(Re)possession: Critical Topics in Environmental Injustice and Subaltern Geographies," which tracks both the "historical breaks" and ongoing processes of (dis)/(re)possession to more contemporary materializations. Weekly in-class discussion will be combined with guest lectures in order to provide the opportunity for exploring how race, space and (dis)(re)possession can be understood geographically, and to also explain how a range of these territorializing processes operate in the transnational and local contexts.Those who take this studio course can expect to be actively engaged in directing their learning experience through research/final creative projects of their own selection. Sound, music and other audio engagements will also complement discussions in this course. Therefore, the capacity of deep listening, in-and-out of class, is mandatory. Sample topics covered in the course include the following: indigeneity and Blackness; dispossession and accumulation; environmental imperialism, war and colonial resistance. You are strongly encouraged to participate in both courses in this complementary sequence, but are not required to do so. [ more ]

Taught by: Allison Guess

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ENVI 249 SEM Food, Agriculture, and Globalization

Last offered Spring 2021

This course examines the history and current politics of the international political economy of food with a focus on how agriculture and food provisioning have been transformed through imperialism and globalization. We examine the interactions of corporations, nation-states, multilateral international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and social movements in the formation of a globalized food system. Topics include the historical antecedents of our present system, plantation agriculture, the influences of war and settler colonialism on global food production, Cold War transformations in the international food system, the origins of sustainable development discourse, international anti-hunger programs, fair trade and other labeling schemes, labor migration, the antiglobalization and local food movements, and neoliberalism. We will pay particular attention to theories about how producers and consumers are connected to one other through the political economy of food. The reading assignments are drawn from the fields of environmental, food, and policy history, and we will also read works from political scientists, international relations scholars, geographers, anthropologists, and advocacy organizations. [ more ]

Taught by: April Merleaux

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ENVI 250 SEM Environmental Justice

Last offered Fall 2021

How are local and global environmental problems distributed unevenly according to race, gender, and class? What are the historical, social and economic structures that create unequal exposures to environmental risks and benefits? And how does inequity shape the construction and distribution of environmental knowledge? These are some of the questions we will take up in this course, which will be reading and discussion intensive. Through readings, discussions, and case studies, we will explore EJ in both senses. Potential topics include: toxics exposure, food justice, urban planning, e-waste, unnatural hazards, nuclearism in the U.S. West, natural resources and war, and climate refugees. Occasionally, community leaders, organizers, academics, and government officials will join the class to discuss current issues. [ more ]

ENVI 251 Science and Militarism in the Modern World

Last offered NA

In 1961, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the global dangers of what he called the "military-industrial complex." In this course, we will interrogate the military-scientific complex, or the imbrication of militarism and scientific knowledge. This tutorial takes up a number of environmental themes, including the role of environmental science within military campaigns, conservation and environmental racism, nuclear waste and ecological contamination. Surveying conflicts from World War II through the present-day War on Terror, this course will investigate how environmental scientists, politicians, soldiers, activists, and artists have grappled with the intertwined legacies of science and militarism. Students will engage a range of textual materials including books, films, photographs, and news reports. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 252 TUT The Oceans and Climate

Last offered Spring 2015

The oceans are a fundamental part of Earth's climate system. Ocean currents redistribute heat and water vapor around the globe, controlling temperature and precipitation patterns. Marine phytoplankton blooms and air-sea gas exchange modulate the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. The dynamic interaction of the atmosphere and the sea surface results in multi-year climate variations such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. This course will examine gradual and abrupt climate shifts from Earth's history and the ocean's role in driving, amplifying or dampening the changes, the ocean's response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the projected impacts of continued emissions and climate change on the ocean in the coming decades and millennia. We will analyze articles from the scientific literature that lay out the theory on the ocean's influence on climate, reconstruct past climate and ocean changes, test the mechanisms responsible for those changes, and with that knowledge, project the consequences of continued anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Topics may include the climate effects of opening and closing seaways with plate tectonics, ocean feedbacks that amplify the intensity of ice ages, the instability of ocean circulation during ice-sheet retreat, the evolution of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation with changing carbon dioxide through the geologic past and the next century, ocean heat and carbon dioxide uptake during the last century and into the future, and the impact on sea level, seafloor methane reservoirs, ocean acidification, oxygenation and marine ecosystems. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 253 SEM Race, Land, Dis/Re-possession: Critical Topics in Environmental Injustice and Subaltern Geographies

Last offered Spring 2023

This course is an introduction to ongoing and contemporary topics in colonialism, racial thinking, African Diaspora and, Global and Caribbean studies, studies of 'the environment,' and dispossession. We will examine how race, gender and class operate under racial capitalism and settler colonialism as ongoing, sometimes continuous and discontinuous processes. The readings will center the works of critical geographers, caribbeanist, scholars of the African Diaspora, and other critical, anti-capitalist or decolonial scholars. Readings, as in AFR 234, will take up the question(s) of land and land-making; race, racialization, and racial thinking; of space and place as they all relate to the various processes, projects and methods of (dis)/(re)possession, both "past" and "contemporary." We will interrogate temporal binaries, settler time, notions of [the] "progress(ives)" and other bifurcated understandings of the world. This course is the second part of a complementary course, titled, "Race, Land and Settler (Racial) Capitalism," which focuses on the historical geography of processes of (dis)/(re)possession from a Black and Indigenous Atlantic perspective. In this iteration, weekly in-class discussion will be combined with guest lectures to provide the opportunity for exploring how race, space and (dis)(re)possession can be understood geographically, and to explain how a range of these territorializing processes operate. Sound, music and other audio will complement discussions. Therefore, the capacity of deep listening, in-and-out of class, is a grounding. Sample topics covered in the course include: indigeneity and Blackness; (dis)possession and accumulation; plantation geographies and economies; housing and houselessness; the problem of parks and conservation; prisons and carceral geographies; Black geographies; environmental racism and colonial resistance. You are strongly encouraged to participate in both courses in this sequence, but are not required to do so. [ more ]

Taught by: Allison Guess

Catalog details

ENVI 254(S) TUT Food, Forests, & Fungi: Environmental Health in the Anthropocene

This tutorial will examine the impacts of the climate crisis on human, environmental, and planetary health via the lens of food systems & plant medicines in the Anthropocene. We use anthropological, environmental, evolutionary, & ecological approaches to explore the ecosystems connecting humans, plants, animals, and fungi that have been massively disrupted by systems of industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, corporate food systems, and corporate biomedicine. We will dwell on the growing signs of our climate catastrophe including the sharp rise of global temperatures, floods, hurricanes, alongside declining freshwater reserves, melting cryosphere, and falling crop yields, that are helping produce a growing wave of hunger and climate refugees in every world region. Along the way, we will hear from and read about youthful climate activists from Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, Fridays for the Future, 350.org, and the Sunrise Movement who are designing and implementing innovative, local, and sustainable solutions to inaction, apathy, and inertia even as situations of internal migration or displacement, food scarcity, food sovereignty, water shortages, and other climate-related disruptions are increasing in both developing and developed parts of our globe. We learn how activist narratives intersect with wider movements to promote more local and circular economies of regenerative agriculture and forestry, ethically produced and sourced organic food, wild & cultivated botanicals, and complementary medicines that are healing both humans and the planet. [ more ]

ENVI 255 LEC Environmental Observation

Last offered Fall 2021

To study the environment, we need to observe and measure it. We collect data--numbers that represent system states--and analyze them to create understanding of the world we live in. Advances in technology create more opportunities to discover how the planet works. Through a survey of observational approaches (including weather stations, direct sampling, remote sensing, community-based monitoring, and other techniques), this course will investigate the process of turning a physical property in the environment into a number on a computer and then into meaningful information. We will explore both direct field measurements and remote sensing techniques, diving into how to choose the appropriate sensor for a scientific question, how sensors work, analysis approaches and statistical methods, and how to interpret the resulting data. We will also learn how to mitigate measurement bias through a combination of lab experiments and field work and how to make interpretations of measurements that accurately reflect what is being measured. The course will focus on the near-surface environment, including the atmosphere, water, and biosphere. Students will carry out a research project using observation techniques covered in class to explore a scientific question of interest. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 256(F) LEC Race, Environment, and the Body

This course examines the relationship between structural racism and racial/ethnic health disparities. Through class discussions of readings and media images, we will explore three topics: 1) how racism intersects with classism, sexism, and xenophobia to govern the implementation of local, state and federal health care policies; 2) how the uneven enforcement of health care policies ultimately produces differences in mortality, morbidity, and quality of life among various populations; and 3) anti-racist public health scholarship that offers strategies for creating racial health equity. [ more ]

ENVI 257(S) LEC Cities, Suburbs, and Rural Places

Long associated with cities in the scholarly and popular imagination, immigrants have increasingly settled in U.S. suburbs. Through the lens of new destinations for im/migrants, this course introduces spatial methods, perspectives, and concepts to understand cities, suburbs, and rural places and the relationships between these various spaces. We ask how geographically specific forces and actors shape these trends, as well as the spatially uneven outcomes of complex processes like globalization. This interdisciplinary course highlights racial, legal, economic, political, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of how transnational migrants become part of and create homes in new places. Through a range of textual materials (academic, technical, popular, visual), we explore why people migrate, the origin of the "illegal alien" figure, economic restructuring and local immigration policies, environmental justice, place-making and community development. Rooted in critical race geographies, case studies are often comparative across different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. West, South, Midwest, and Northeast. We analyze how documentation status and perceptions of illegality affect the lived experiences of Latines. This course will be mostly discussion-based, with grading based on participation, short writing exercises, three assignments, a midterm examination, and a final exam. [ more ]

ENVI 259 SEM New England Environmental History

Last offered Spring 2019

Have you ever wondered why there are few old-growth forests in New England? What Williamstown looked like before Williams was founded? How ideas about environmental preservation have changed over time? These are some of the questions we will explore in this course, which introduces students to the discipline of Environmental History through New England examples. During the semester we will: (1) read and discuss scholarship on the environmental history of New England and the world; (2) use case studies and field trips to examine how past environments are represented in museum exhibits,digital projects, and physical landscapes; (3) Develop a research paper based on original archival research [ more ]

ENVI 260(S) SEM Design and Environmental Justice

This seminar/digital art studio offers key literature to examine the relationship between design and environmental justice. It will help build a vocabulary to study the environment as disputed terrain between technological fixes and issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and colonial status. Students will develop textual/graphic projects about a chosen case study aiming to reorient public perception and imagination around environmental justice. Case studies include contemporary issues like "natural" disasters, eco-cities, and urbanization in the Global South and North. Skills taught include design-thinking and collaborative design, digital art (Photoshop), and participation in collective reviews and public presentations. The class culminates in a presentation to external reviewers and a final exhibition. [ more ]

ENVI 261(F, S) TUT Science and Militarism in the Modern World

In 1961, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the global dangers of what he called the "military-industrial complex." In this course, we will interrogate the military-scientific complex, or the imbrication of militarism and scientific knowledge. Surveying conflicts from World War II through to the present-day War on Terror, this course will consider how empire, networks of expert knowledge, resource extraction, environmental contamination, and land degradation have shaped the modern world. Students will engage a range of textual materials including books, films, photographs, and news reports. Course requirements include weekly writing assignments and participation in small group discussions. [ more ]

ENVI 263 SEM The Global Ocean: An Interdisciplinary Introduction

Last offered Spring 2021

Though it covers most of the planet, the ocean's importance to everyday life is easy to overlook. Its roles as a cultural symbol, resource, highway, and climate regulator make it essential to life around the world. This interdisciplinary course, team-taught by the faculty of the Williams-Mystic Program, will examine key issues in each of the world's oceans while introducing students to the ways these issues connect multiple disciplines and transcend physical, political, and imaginary ocean boundaries. By drawing on the expertise of the five professors -- from humanities, social sciences, and sciences -- this course facilitates the critical study of the ocean from an interdisciplinary perspective and helps them consider their own role in the shifting relationship between humanity and the ocean. This seminar-style course will meet twice a week online, with students assessed by their participation, response papers, and final project, while helping them apply interdisciplinary skills to pressing sustainability issues connecting the environment and society. [ more ]

ENVI 265 SEM Coral Reefs: Ecology, Threats, & Conservation

Last offered Fall 2020

Coral reefs are a fascinating ecosystem found throughout the world's tropical oceans. Corals can thrive in nutrient-poor oceans because of the mutualistic relationship with algal symbionts. And as a foundational species, corals provide a habitat for numerous species, possibly the highest diversity found on the planet. However, these complex and beautiful ecosystems are declining worldwide from a variety of local and global threats. In this course, we will explore coral reef ecology through an in-depth examination of the biotic and abiotic factors contributing to the ecosystem's functioning. We will also investigate the causes and consequences of threats to coral reefs, such as ocean warming, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. Finally, we will identify the many efforts worldwide to conserve coral reefs and promote their resilience. In this seminar course, you will demonstrate your proficiency through knowledge assessments, short writing reflections, a virtual coral fragmentation experiment, and a creative advocacy project. This course aims to deepen your awareness of the complex species interactions on coral reefs and the physical factors affecting coral survival while fostering hope through current conservation efforts. [ more ]

ENVI 266 SEM Reading Water

Last offered Spring 2021

Water has such profound and far-reaching influence on individuals, societies, and the planet that it simultaneously risks going overlooked and appearing clichéd. Human beings are made of it and need it to live, yet will die if immersed in it. It is venerated by cultures around the world, yet most people either cannot access clean water, or don't know where their clean water is piped in from. It covers the earth's surface, and has shaped it over eons, yet scientists are still not sure how it came to be here in the first place. This wide-ranging influence also presents challenges for traditional academic structures; thinking about water demands crossing times, spaces, and disciplines. This course will explore the wide-ranging and diverse ways water impacts individuals, cultures, and the environments they call home by drawing on a range of content: hydrology, literature, political theory, storytelling, geography, and more. To do this, we will also develop and examine methods of critically reading as "non-experts"--reading scientific articles as rhetorical objects and reading for scientific principles in literature, for instance--to explore what interdisciplinary thinking opens up (and inhibits), and thus how to effectively engage with and create interdisciplinary work. The goal here is not to define water's cultural or scientific importance, or to determine which disciplines "best" combine to explain water, or to come up with humanities-based solutions to "the water crisis." Rather, these texts, and the water that flows through them will help us explore the opportunities and limits of human perceptions of the other-than-human world. It will help us consider the extent to which those perceptions both shape, and are shaped by, a seemingly simple molecule. And it will help us imagine epistemologies and ontologies that account for the ways water simultaneously flows through us, around us, and through the deep geological history of the planet. Course Texts: Tristan Gooley -- How to Read Water (selections) Vandana Shiva -- Water Wars (selections) Luna Leopold -- Water, Rivers, and Creeks (selections) Richard White -- The Organic Machine Linda Hogan -- Solar Storms Marc Reisner -- Cadillac Desert Jesmyn Ward -- Salvage the Bones John McPhee -- "Atchafalaya" Emmi Itäranta -- Memory of Water Brenda Hillman -- "The Hydrology of California" [ more ]

Taught by: Ned Schaumberg

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ENVI 268 SEM Debating Ocean Biodiversity at the Intersection of Science and Policy

Last offered Spring 2021

Biodiversity in the ocean is facing an onslaught of challenges, both directly and indirectly. It is likely that we are undergoing a sixth mass extinction event, where diversity of life on earth is stunningly at risk. Fortunately, however, we are also finding innovative ways to solve issues and attempt to stave off these dramatic changes to our ecosystems. These solutions potentially have both positive and negative effects. Difficult tradeoffs must be weighed and decisions must be made as people wrestle with known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. In this class, we will explore five issues that relate to biodiversity in the ocean. You will have the opportunity to investigate one side of an issue, to collect supporting information, and to advocate for your position all while learning about current biodiversity issues in the ocean. You will be challenged to weigh conflicting evidence to find a positive outcome. Throughout the class you will practice critical thinking, evaluation, and synthesizing skills as you work with multiple viewpoints. Class time will include lecture, in-class group work, and student-led debates of timely, controversial issues. You will be assessed on summaries of information, reflections on topics, and a final project on an issue of your choice relating to ocean biodiversity. [ more ]

ENVI 271 STU Theatre & Environment: Site, Nature, Ecoperformance, Utopia

Last offered Spring 2022

What is theatre's relation to the environment, whether natural or social? How does the site, place, or ecology of a performance change its meaning and reception? What role can live performance play in grassroots campaigns for climate action or environmental justice? How can we use theatre to, in the words of adrienne maree brown, "practice, in every possible way, the world we want to see?" In this combined seminar/studio course, participants will work collaboratively to create a series of mini-performances based on four categories: site, nature/ecology, ecoperformance, and utopia. Acknowledging the deep inequities (racial, gendered, ethnic, class-based) that constitute all human and environmental interaction, we will work to understand how art's relationship to the environment is itself shaped by the historical legacies of empire and global capitalism. As a contribution to the work of the studio, each student will share independent research on an artist, activist movement, or collective of their choice, such as: Hito Steyerl, Ellie Ga, Marta Rosler, Joan Jonas, Paul Chan, Theaster Gates, Bread and Puppet, Punch Drunk, En Garde Arts, Artichoke Dance, Talking Birds, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and others. As a special project in the class, we will collaborate with The Zilkha Center to create performances that engage directly with topics relevant to the campus and surrounding community. This is a seminar and maker's course that invites students to create, develop, perform, and share their work with each other and, in some cases, public audiences. [ more ]

ENVI 273 SEM Politics without Humans?

Last offered Fall 2019

Are human beings the only beings who belong in politics? And is political involvement a unique or defining aspect of what it means to be human? Such questions are increasingly complex as the boundaries of "the human" become blurred by the rise of artificial intelligence, robotics, and brain implants: shifting attitudes towards both animal and human bodies; and the automation of economic and military decisions (buy! sell! attack! retreat!) that used to be the prerogative of human actors. How do visions of politics without humans and humans without politics impact our thinking about longstanding questions of freedom, power, and right? Can and should the link between humans and politics survive in an age in which "posthuman" or "transhuman" entities become central characters in the drama of politics? This class will consider these questions through readings, films and artifacts that bring political theory into conversation with science fiction, popular literature on the so-called "singularity" (the merger of humans with computers), science and technology studies, evolutionary anthropology, "new materialist" philosophy, and feminist theory. [ more ]

ENVI 275(S) SEM Environmental Science, Policy, and Justice

Environmental science is much more than collecting data. Scientific experts are often called upon--and often position themselves--to guide environmental governance, which means that science has (some) power over public life. What is, and what should be, the relationship between science, on the one hand, and the creation and implementation of environmental policy, on the other? In this seminar we will study how science shapes governance and how science itself is governed. We will explore how legislatures, agencies, and courts respond to scientific information and uncertainty. And we will learn about how communities facing environmental racism and injustice collect data and use it in their advocacy. Along the way, we will challenge the idea of a unified "scientific method," and we will think about how Western scientific knowledge relates to other ways of knowing, including non-Western sciences, embodied knowledge, and traditional knowledge. Topics include: international climate negotiation, chemical exposure, the regulation of biotechnology, agricultural policy, pandemic responses, and plastics and electronics waste. [ more ]

ENVI 280 Carbon dioxide uptake and our climate future

Last offered NA

Because of the failure to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, it is now clear that removal of carbon dioxide already emitted to the atmosphere is necessary to meet the 1.5 degree Celsius maximum warming target to avoid severe and irreversible consequences from continued greenhouse gas emissions. Natural carbon sinks have already taken up two thirds of the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and these terrestrial and marine systems are being investigated to determine if this uptake can be enhanced by geoengineering: human intervention to offset the impacts of climate change. In addition, technologies are being developed to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, though none are yet operating at a large enough scale and low enough cost. In this tutorial, students will study the terrestrial, near-coastal, and deep-ocean carbon cycles, and analyze both the capacity for future natural uptake, the potential augmented uptake that could be achieved by deliberate manipulation of these systems, and the impacts of these carbon cycle perturbations on ecosystems and humans. Students will evaluate the scientific basis behind real startup ventures and carbon credit schemes that capitalize on the exploding interest and investment in carbon uptake technologies. And they will write a research proposal for investigating and/or testing a scientifically compelling carbon uptake strategy. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 285 SEM Writing About Science and Nature

Last offered Spring 2016

Over the last few decades, the nature of nature has changed and so, necessarily, has nature writing. In this course we will read essays and articles by some of the most innovative science and nature writers working today. Students will also produce their own work. The class will include workshop sessions and group discussions. There will be frequent short exercises and a long final project. [ more ]

ENVI 287 LEC The Dynamics of Globalization: Society, Religion and the Environment

Last offered Spring 2010

This course offers a theoretical reflection on the social, cultural and environmental dynamics of globalization and their consequences for the nature and place of religion. Rather than argue for or against globalization, we first examine the nature of this new configuration and its relation to (post)modernity, asking questions such as: What are the cultural and social dynamics of globalization? What are the effects on the nature of the state and the political practices that take place in the global world? What are its environmental consequences? We then shift to examining the role of religion, arguing that its renewed relevance is a function of the socio-cultural transformations that globalization brings about, particularly the loss of community and the increasing atomization of individuals. We conclude by examining some of the perspectives created by the new religious expressions that attempt to respond to this situation, from personal spiritual quests as manifested in interest in Buddhism, ecology or mountain climbing, to various forms of fundamentalism, such as Evangelicalism, the fastest growing religious movement in the Americas, and the most radical forms of Islamicism. Reading list: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Bauman, Globalization; Kivisto, Multiculturalism in a Global Society; Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World; Ortner, Life and Death on Mt. Everest; Matthews, Global Cultura/ Individual Identity; Shuck, Mark of the Beast; Roy, Globalized Islam. [ more ]

ENVI 288(S) SEM Environmental Security: Policy Dilemmas and Solutions

Water wars. Climate refugees. Scarcity-induced conflict. These and other challenges shape collective discourses about the climate change present and future. This course explores the relationship between environmental and security issues. It surveys the emergence of environmental security as a field of study and a policy arena. Students will engage a range of materials, including policy documents from the United Nations, international non-governmental organizations, global think tanks, the United States Department of Defense, and other security agencies. Students will also explore critical scholarship on the possibilities and limitations of environmental security as a leading policy paradigm. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 291(S) TUT Religion and Ecology in America

This course examines the relationship between religious and environmental thought in America. Exploring a broad range of practices, symbols, and beliefs, we will examine the religious roots and branches of modern environmentalism. Rather than survey the formal teachings of organized religious groups, we will explore the creation and contestation of environmental meaning in the public sphere through literature, art, philosophy, and popular culture. How have writers, thinkers, and artists from different religious and cultural backgrounds shaped the way we think about nature? How have they shaped the way we think about politics, science, and social justice? How have they influenced each other to produce distinctively American forms of eco-spirituality? In pursuit of these questions, we will consider a diverse array of topics and cases, including struggles to protect Native American sacred places, the role of Black churches in fighting environmental racism, Protestant outdoorsmanship, Catholic climate activism, Jewish eco-mysticism, atheist biology, Buddhist therapy, and more. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 297 SEM Global Sustainable Development

Last offered Fall 2022

In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious multi-pronged effort to eliminate poverty, improve health outcomes, advance clean energy, address the effects of climate change, and support more equitable forms of life on earth. This course explores the historical antecedents and contemporary manifestations of global sustainable development, a constellation of ideas and a set of policy imperatives. This course will ask: what is sustainability and how did it emerge as a key paradigm in the present? Relatedly, how have different organizations and actors worked to address entrenched global challenges? Students will engage a range of materials, including policy documents from the United Nations, World Bank, and international non-governmental organizations. Students will also explore critical scholarship on the possibilities and limitations of global development. Together we will grapple with ways to build more sustainable futures. [ more ]

ENVI 298 SEM Cultural Geography

Last offered Fall 2022

Why do things happen where they do? What is the relationship between place and identity? How do history and politics shape the way people conceptualize space? What can landscapes tell us about the values, beliefs, and ideas of the people who inhabit them? Questions like these drive the vibrant field of cultural geography. Cultural geographers study how humans shape, experience, and imagine the material world. They explore the relationship between humans and their environment at scales ranging from the global to the local, and they ask how we may better understand ourselves and others by examining the places and landscapes we create. Drawing on case studies from around the world and exploring our local area, this class will survey the major theoretical, methodological, and empirical themes that have preoccupied modern geographers. Along the way, students will acquire some useful tools for making a world that is more beautiful, sustainable, and just. [ more ]

ENVI 300 SEM "'Rebel Ecologies': Black and Indigenous Struggles for Land and Life"

Last offered Spring 2023

This course will ask, what other socioecological models exist? We will weave together a study of differing, yet often converging or synergistic traditions of Black/Womanist eco-feminism that often confronts the social constructions of race, gender, class and sexuality, dominant religion as a means of social control, imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism; Ecosocialism which often frames ecology in terms of a mode of production beyond or outside of capitalism; and Indigenous perspectives on resistance to capitalist extraction, imperialism, and colonialism. Given ongoing struggles against the extraction of land and labor, the urgent calls raised in the present-day "climate strike," the COVID-19 Pandemic, Black-led pandemic rebellions, along with long(er) histories of land-based peoples around the planet opposing racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism, this class will explore not only what those in opposition to both extractivism and expropriation resist, but also what we want. We will critique binaries, settler notions of time and explore theories of change. Additionally, this class will look to an array of literature, film, sound, and other forms of cultural production in order to not just "locate," but describe and reveal rebel ecological visions emerging "from below." Ultimately this class will consider how the above ecological praxis can work simultaneously and within a sense of plurality, examining what we can learn from the work of activists, intellectuals, and defenders on the frontline. This course is an extension of Dr. Guess' concept of a "rebel ecology." [ more ]

Taught by: Allison Guess

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ENVI 301 SEM Climate Changes (Latin America): Aesthetics, Politics, Science

Last offered Fall 2019

In her 2007 book, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, philosopher Isabelle Stengers offers a chilling observation: "we are more badly equipped than ever for putting to work the solutions defined as necessary" to avoid the most devastating effects of global warming--the extinction of 25 to 75% of existing species; an increase in sea levels that will drown island nations and coastal cities; the breakdown of agricultural systems, leading to widespread famine; and the recurrence of powerful hurricanes and other so-called "natural" disasters. All of this, as Stengers and others point out, will create human upheaval, conflict and suffering on an unprecedented scale. This senior seminar examines works of literature, art and film that Latin Americans have produced in response to the catastrophic times in which we live. We will discuss the political, economic, and cultural histories that have led to our present moment, including neoliberalism, dictatorship, and the rise and fall of the leftwing Pink Tide. Through works of new and experimental fiction, poetry, film, performance and visual art, we will consider the lives and work of environmental activists, including Berta Cáceres and others who were murdered because of their outspoken opposition to extractive capitalism, examine the struggle for the decolonization of environmental knowledge, an epistemological battle increasingly waged on behalf of all living things, and experience the politics of mourning for the hundreds of thousands of life-forms disappearing from the planet. Cultural texts to be explored throughout the semester may include: La vorágine (José Eustasio Rivera, Colombia, 1924); Distancia de rescate (Samanta Schweblin, Argentina, 2014); Lo que soño Sebastián (Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Guatemala, 1995); Serras da desordem (Andrea Tonacci, Brazil, 2006); Boi Neón (Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil, 2015); American Fork (George Handley, USA, 2018). [ more ]

ENVI 303 SEM Cultures of Climate Change

Last offered Spring 2023

This course asks why people think and talk about climate change in such very different ways. Climate change is a physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified, and measured. But it is also an idea, and as such it is subject to the vagaries of cultural interpretation. Despite scientific agreement about its existence and its causes, many people do not see climate change as a serious problem, or as a problem at all. Many others see it as the most serious problem our species has ever faced. What are the sources of this disparity? Why can't we agree about what climate change means? How does something as complex as climate change become a "problem" in the first place? And what can its many proposed "solutions" tell us about the role of culture in environmental policy, politics, and decision-making. This course will explore a broad array of factors, from religion to race, class to colonialism. Emphasizing ethnographic and historical accounts of climate change as lived experience, it will apply a range of theories from the social sciences and humanities to case studies from around the world. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 304 SEM Sacred Custodians: Environmental Conservation in Africa

Last offered Spring 2023

In this seminar we will explore environmental conservation in Africa. In particular we will look at African ideas, ethics, and approaches to environmental conservation. Are there African ideas, ethics, and activities that are uniquely conservationist in nature? We will explore well-known African leaders to understand what spurred them to become conservationists, how they interpreted and communicated environmental crises. For example, Wangari Maathai is a world-renowned female scientist who established the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. This movement focuses on addressing the problem of de-forestation. Ken Saro-Wiwa was an activist in Nigeria who fought for and alongside local communities against multinational oil corporations. We will examine these and other African conservation practices alongside popular images of environmental crisis that place blame for environmental degradation on Africans. Students will be invited to critically study histories of environmental management on the continent and the emergence, development, and impact of the idea of conservation. We will unpack the rich histories of conservation efforts in Africa, such as resource extraction, game parks, desertification, wildlife and hunting, traditional practices, and climate change. [ more ]

ENVI 307(F) LEC Environmental Law

We rely on environmental laws to make human communities healthier and protect the natural world, while allowing for sustainable economic growth. Yet, despite 40 years of increasingly varied and complex legislation, balancing human needs and environmental quality has never been harder than it is today. Environmental Studies 307 analyzes the transformation of environmental law from fringe enterprise to fundamental feature of modern political, economic and social life. ENVI 307 also addresses the role of community activism in environmental law, from local battles over proposed industrial facilities to national campaigns for improved corporate citizenship. By the completion of the semester, students will understand both the successes and failures of modern environmental law and how these laws are being reinvented, through innovations like pollution credit trading and "green product" certification, to confront globalization, climate change and other emerging threats. [ more ]

ENVI 308 SEM Science and Politics in Environmental Decision Making

Last offered Spring 2018

This course explores the relationship between science and politics in environmental decision-making. How do legislators know when a species is endangered and warrants protection? What precautions should be applied in allowing genetically modified foods onto our plates? Can we, and should we, weigh the risks of malaria against the impacts of pesticides used to control those mosquitoes that transmit the disease? How has the global community come together to understand the risks from global climate change, and how has this understanding shaped our policy responses? What are some of the limits of science in shaping policy outcomes? In addressing these and other questions, we will pay particular attention to how power relations and existing institutions shape what knowledge, and whose knowledge, is taken on board in decision-making, be it at the local, national or global level. We will delve into how these dynamics shape policy outcomes and we will also examine novel approaches for incorporating the knowledge of traditionally disempowered groups, including indigenous and local communities. [ more ]

ENVI 310(F) TUT Design for the Pluriverse: Architecture, Urban Design, and Difference

The built environment has a critical role in shaping how people enact, reproduce, and refashion social relations over time. Spatial forms, such as architecture and urbanism, are enmeshed in relationships, contestations, and change processes. This studio tutorial investigates the role of different environments in supporting or preventing specific spatial practices and ensuring spatial justice. Using approaches from activist design, students will work in pairs to re-imagine spaces where different ways of being in the world can thrive and coexist--the pluriverse. Students will use a media they master to investigate a theme connecting design, the built environment (architecture and urbanism), and spatial justice. [ more ]

ENVI 311(S) SEM Environmental Literature and Film in Latin America

What use are aesthetics when the world is (literally) on fire? We will take up this question and others in a critical engagement with Latin American cultural production of the twentieth and twentieth centuries, especially works of literature and film that directly or indirectly engage with environmental crisis. Students can expect to explore a variety of media, forms and genres, including works that range from (more or less) mainstream to cutting edge. Our examinations of literature and film will be supported by theoretical writings produced in the Americas and other places. Writers and directors whose work may be considered include, but are not limited to: Lucrecia Martel, Ciro Guerra, Rafael Barrett, Samanta Schweblin, Ernesto Cardenal, Juan Rulfo, María Luisa Bombal, Eduardo Gudynas, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Isabelle Stengers. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 312 LEC Communities and Ecosystems

Last offered Fall 2019

An advanced ecology course that examines how species interact with each other and their environment and how communities are assembled. This course emphasizes phenomena that emerge in complex ecological systems, building on the fundamental concepts of population biology, community ecology, and ecosystem science. This foundation will be used to understand specific topics relevant to conservation including invasibility and the functional significance of diversity for ecosystem stability and processes. Lectures and labs will explore how to characterize the emergent properties of communities and ecosystems, and how theoretical, comparative, and experimental approaches are used to understand their structure and function. The lab component of this course will emphasize hypothesis-oriented field experiments as well as "big-data" analyses using existing data sets.The laboratory component of the course will culminate with a self-designed independent or group project. [ more ]

ENVI 315 SEM Ecocriticism

Last offered Spring 2020

How does the human imagination encounter its environment? This overarching question is of particular importance now, as the humanities struggle to address the ecological crises of our time. We¿ll read selections from the long tradition of environmentally-minded literary works in order to historicize concepts of nature and wilderness, as well as from more recent theoretical and creative writing that reflects an increasing awareness of climate change, toxic waste and pollution, habitat loss and species extinction, population expansion, and other forms of environmental catastrophe. Finally, we will explore via our own writing the ethical and aesthetic imperative to find ways of imagining this ever-changing relation between the imagination and the environment. [ more ]

ENVI 316(F) SEM Governing Cities by Design: the Built Environment as a Technology of Space

Like in the classic era, cities of the 19th century were metaphors for government: good government could not exist without good governance of the city. This creative seminar charts the transformation of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) as a technology of space to govern cities and citizens from the mid-19th century until the present. Through debates and case studies across geographies and historical timeframes, we will analyze how regimes of government shape and are shaped by the built environment. The seminar has a studio component that consists of an urban project where students will apply theories and approaches to a real case study using digital art (2D and 3D modeling). [ more ]

ENVI 318(S) SEM Myths and the Making of Latine California

California is home not only to the largest ethnic Mexican population in the USA but also to the largest Central American population, while also being home to long-standing Latine communities hailing from Chile to Cuba. Since the era of Spanish colonization, especially starting in 1769, California has been woven into fantastic imaginations among many peoples in the Americas. Whether imagined as Paradise or Hell, as environmental disaster or agricultural wonderland, as a land of all nations or a land of multiracial enmity, many myths have been inscribed onto and pursued within the space we call California. In a state whose name comes from an early modern Spanish novel, how did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What impact have these myths had on different Latine populations in the history of California, and how have different Latines shaped, contested, and remade these myths as well as the California landscape that they share with other peoples? In this course, we consider "myth" as a category of socially powerful narratives and not just a simple term that refers to an "untrue story." We examine myths by focusing on a few specific moments of interaction between the Latine peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest are select creation stories (found in Jewish, Christian, and Indigenous traditions), imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as part of Greater México, California as "sprawling, multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west," including its imagination as a technological and spiritual "frontier." [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 322 SEM Waste and Value

Last offered Fall 2022

What is trash and what is treasure? In what ways does value depend upon and necessitate waste, and how is the dialectic between the two inflected by culture? When we 'throw away' things at Williams College, where exactly do they go, and who handles them 'down the line'? What are the local and global economies of waste in which we are all embedded and how are they structured by class, race, caste, gender and nation? In this seminar we critically examine the production of waste - both as material and as category - and its role in the production of value, meaning, hierarchy and the environment. Readings include ethnographic accounts of sanitation labor and social hierarchy; studies of the political and environmental consequences of systems of waste management in the colonial period and the present; and theoretical inquiries into the relation between filth and culture, including work by Mary Douglas, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Karl Marx. Geographically the foci are South Asia, Japan, and the United States. There is also a fieldwork component to the course. In fieldtrips we follow the waste streams flowing out of Williams - to an incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, recycling and composting facilities and other sites - and students explore in individual, participant-observation-based research projects the everyday social life of waste in our communities. [ more ]

ENVI 331(F) LEC Geomorphology

Geomorphology is the study of landforms, the processes that shape them, and the rates at which these processes change the landscape in which we live. The course is designed for Geosciences majors and for environmental studies students interested in the evolution of Earth's surface and the ways our activities are changing the planet. We will examine the ways in which climatic, tectonic, and volcanic forces drive landscape evolution over relatively short periods of geologic time, generally thousands to a few millions of years. More recently, the impacts of human activity in reshaping landscapes, determining the movement of water, and changing climate could not be clearer. We will also examine how these impacts are affecting communities, including causes and possible solutions to environmental injustice. We will learn a range of practical skills for describing physical environments and for predicting how they change, including field surveys, GIS analysis, and numerical modelling. This course is in the Sediments and Life group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 332 SEM (De)colonial Ecologies

Last offered Fall 2021

What is the relationship between race, colonialism, and capitalism? How do such structures organize nature, including human nature? How do ideas of "nature" and "the human" come to structure race, colonialism, and capitalism? From the "discovery" and plunder of the "New World," to 18th-century claims that climate determined racial character, to the 21st-century proliferation of DNA tests underwriting claims to Indigenous ancestry, it is clear that race, colonialism, capitalism constitute asymmetric world ecologies, and give rise to interconnected liberation struggles. Anchored in the contexts of U.S. colonialism and racial capitalism, and drawing on environmentalist, Black Marxist, and feminist works, this course aims to expose students to a world history of colonial and decolonial ecologies. By the end of this course, students should be able to describe the historical foundations of dominant ideas, attitudes, and practices toward human and non-human natures. Students should also be able to analyze how such orientations toward human and non-human natures mediate the ways in which colonial, racial, gender, and sexual categories and structures inform and are (re)produced by U.S. institutions and in public areas such as the law, public policy, and property. Finally, students should be able to interpret how racialized and colonized peoples' visions, representations, and practices of liberation constitute decolonial ecologies that contend with, and exceed normative political, economic, and social categories of governance and systems of dispossession and exploitation. [ more ]

Taught by: Hossein Ayazi

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ENVI 335(F) SEM The Nile

For millennia, the Nile River has sustained civilizations in eastern and northern Africa. It was on the banks of this river that the great Egyptian empires were founded that led to the building of some of humanity's most astounding structures and artworks. While the Nile seems eternal and almost beyond time and place, now in the 21st century, the Nile River is at a historical turning point. The water level and quality is dwindling while at the same time the number of people who rely on the river is ever increasing. This alarming nexus of demography, climate change, and economic development has led to increasingly urgent questions of the Nile´s future. Is the Nile dying? How has the river, and people´s relationship with it, changed over the last century? This course will consider the history of the Nile and and its built and natural environment. After a brief overview of the role of the river in ancient Egypt, we will explore the modern political and cultural history of the Nile. By following an imaginary droplet flowing from tributaries until it makes its way into the Mediterranean Sea, we will learn about the diverse peoples and cultures along the way. We will evaluate the numerous attempts to manage and control the Nile, including the building of big dams, and the continuous efforts to utilize the river for economic development such as agriculture and the tourism industry. At the end of the semester we will consider the relationship of the major urban centers with the Nile and whether the tensions among Nile riparian states will lead to "water wars" in East Africa and the Middle East. [ more ]

ENVI 339(F) LEC Conservation Biology

Conservation Biology focuses on protection of the Earth's biodiversity. This course starts with an overview of biodiversity including patterns of species richness, causes of species loss (extinction), and the critical contributions of biodiversity to ecosystem function and human welfare. Then we analyze ways to conserve biodiversity at the genetic, population, species and community/ecosystem levels. Labs are field oriented, and focus on local New England communities and ecosystems. Labs emphasize knowing the dominant species in each system; they also stress how to collect and analyze the field data on ecological community structure and function that are critical to test hypotheses that relate to different conservation goals. [ more ]

ENVI 341 LEC Toxicology and Cancer

Last offered Spring 2018

What is a poison and what makes it poisonous? Paracelcus commented in 1537: "What is not a poison? All things are poisons (and nothing is without poison). The dose alone keeps a thing from being a poison." Is the picture really this bleak; is modern technology-based society truly swimming in a sea of toxic materials? How are the nature and severity of toxicity established, measured and expressed? Do all toxic materials exert their effect in the same manner, or can materials be poisonous in a variety of different ways? Are the safety levels set by regulatory agencies low enough for a range of common toxic materials, such as mercury, lead, and certain pesticides? How are poisons metabolized and how do they lead to the development of cancer? What is cancer and what does it take to cause it? What biochemical defense mechanisms exist to counteract the effects of poisons?
This course attempts to answer these questions by surveying the fundamentals of modern chemical toxicology and the induction and progression of cancer. Topics will range from description and quantitation of the toxic response, including risk assessment, to the basic mechanisms underlying toxicity, mutagenesis, carcinogenesis, and DNA repair.
[ more ]

ENVI 346 SEM Environmental Psychology

Last offered Fall 2022

This is a course on contemporary social psychology as it pertains to the natural environment. Our two primary questions in this course are: (1) how can research and theory in social psychology help us understand the ways in which people engage with threats to the natural environment?, and (2) how can social psychology help us encourage environmentally responsible behavior and sustainable practices? Because human choice and behavior play such an important role in environmental problems, a consideration of human psychology may therefore be an important part of environmental solutions. [ more ]

ENVI 348 SEM Beyond Cli-Fi: Climate Change Histories & the Arts of Resilience

Last offered Spring 2020

This interdisciplinary environmental humanities seminar begins with the premise that our present climate crisis is a political project of globalization propelled by capitalism and its cultural logic. Causes and consequences of climate change can only be understood by examining the historical trajectories of carbon-based economic, political, and cultural systems since the 19th century. We trace the intellectual genealogy of modern climate science, consider the politics of indigenous knowledge as related to extractivism, and examine literary and artistic engagements with the natural world. We pay particular attention to the narrative strategies that scientists and policymakers use to talk about climate, and we develop creative critiques of the dominant discourses. We use historical and cultural analysis to study social movement strategy and tactics among advocates for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. We begin and end with creative responses to climate crisis, always asking: How can we move beyond dystopia and defeatism? How might history inform social movements for climate resilience? How can the arts, theater, and literary production articulate a new politics of survival? What narrative forms enable and inspire climate action? [ more ]

ENVI 349 SEM Race, Development, and Food Sovereignty

Last offered Spring 2022

What does it mean to "settle" land? What racial encounters and acts of survival took place around the plantation? How have farmworkers and landowners faced off against government policies and "agribusiness" corporations? What was the "Green Revolution" and why did it happen? Agriculture as a relation to land based on domestication, enclosure, and commerce has long been a means of and justification for racial and colonial dispossession and exploitation across the Americas, including what is now the United States. At the same time, an array of embodied practices in relation to the land and one another complicate and contest these histories of racial and colonial dispossession. Broadly, this course aims to familiarize students with the historical and present-day entwining of colonial and racial dispossession, exploitation, and resistance at the heart of U.S. economies of agriculture. By the end of this course, students should be able to analyze how the historical foundations of U.S. agriculture have entailed and intertwined the taking of lands and removal of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of African peoples, mass migration, and various forms of exploitative labor. Students should also be able to assess how these historical foundations continued to serve as the material conditions reproduced throughout the course of the 19th and 20th centuries under discriminatory government policies and powerful "agribusiness" corporations, as well as the possibilities and limits of redress and reform through state and corporate action. Finally, students should be able to interpret how embodied practices in relation to the land and one another precede, exceed, and push against the logics and histories of racial and colonial dispossession. The course is organized around three units that interrogate economies of agriculture within and beyond the U.S. nation-state. Each unit interrogates a key period of time from the founding of the United States, through 20th-century Pax Americana, and on into the present. Finally, each unit does so while attending to the emergence and enactment of "food sovereignty" movements--efforts to foster a new international trade regime, agrarian reform, a shift to agroecological production practices, attention to gender relations and equity, and the protection of intellectual and indigenous property rights. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 351(F, S) SEM Marine Policy

Coastal communities are home to nearly 40% of the U.S. population, but occupy only a small percentage of our country's total land area. Intense population density, critical transportation infrastructure, significant economic productivity, and rich cultural and historic value mark our coastal regions as nationally significant. But, coastal and ocean-based climate-induced impacts such as sea level rise, ocean warming and acidification pose extraordinary challenges to our coastal communities, and are not borne equally by all communities. This seminar considers our relationship with our ocean and coastal environments and the foundational role our oceans and coasts play in our Nation's environmental and economic sustainability as well as ocean and coastal climate resiliency. Through the lens of coastal and ocean governance and policy-making, we critically examine conflict of use issues relative to climate change, climate justice, coastal zone management, fisheries, ocean and coastal pollution and marine biodiversity. [ more ]

ENVI 352 SEM After Nature: Writing About Science and The Environment

Last offered Spring 2018

Over the last few decades, the nature of nature has changed and so, by necessity, has nature writing. In this course we will read some of the classic works of nature writing as well as essays and articles by contemporary authors. The emphasis will be on producing our own work. The class will include workshop sessions and group discussions. There will be frequent short exercises and a long final project. [ more ]

ENVI 354 SEM Drugs, Empire, & Environment in Historical Perspective

Last offered Fall 2021

This course considers the political economy & environmental impacts of licit & illicit drugs. We begin with the premise that drugs are commodities that gained global significance in the context of liberalism & empire. Imperial nations--notably Britain--consolidated political & economic power in the 19th century by promoting the opium trade against the wishes of Chinese & Indian officials. Most illicit drugs originated as plants--cannabis, poppies, & coca. The production of these internationally traded agricultural commodities helped transform rural livelihoods & landscapes in the 19th century; attempts at suppressing drug crops in the 20th century have also had environmental impacts. After the turn of the 20th century, the United States led an international movement to end the opium trade. Since then, the War on Drugs has expanded as a means for the United States to exercise domestic & global power. Our focus is primarily illicit drugs, but historical shifts in the categories of licit/illicit are a key theme. Other themes include race & racism in drug policy, imperialism, agriculture, & debates over toxicity. The course is divided into four units, stretching from the 19th century through the present. First, we discuss British colonialism in India & China through the lens of the opium trade. Next, we study the emerging drug control regime, focusing on coca, cocaine, & Indigenous producers in the Andes in the 1940s & 1950s. The third unit looks at environmental justice activists who oppose pharmaceutical companies' waste disposal in Puerto Rico. Finally, we evaluate the environmental impacts of the recent cannabis boom. We ask whether the legal architecture on which the industry is built can overcome the colonial & racist legacies of drug control. Readings include works by historians, novelists, anthropologists, & public policy experts. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 363(F) LEC Environmental Organic Chemistry

This course introduces students to the methods used to assess the risks posed by organic chemicals to human, animal, and ecosystem health. Our goal is to develop a quantitative understanding for how specific features of organic molecular structure directly dictate a given molecule's environmental fate. We will begin by using thermodynamic principles to estimate the salient physiochemical properties of molecules (e.g., vapor pressure, solubility, charging behavior, etc.) that impact the distribution, or partitioning, of organic chemicals between air, water, soils, and biota. Then, using quantitative structure activity relationships, we will predict the degradation kinetics resulting from natural nucleophilic, photochemical, and biological processes that determine chemical lifetime in the environment. [ more ]

ENVI 364 LEC Instrumental Methods of Analysis

Last offered Spring 2022

Instrumental methods of analysis provide scientists with different lenses to observe and elucidate fundamental chemical phenomena and to measure parameters and properties at the atomic, molecular, and bulk scales. This course introduces a framework for learning about a variety of instrumental techniques that typically include chromatography, mass spectrometry, thermal methods, atomic and molecular absorption and emission spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and optical and electron microscopies. Students complete laboratory projects and gain hands-on experience and project planning skills to study molecules and materials of interest. This practical experience is complemented by lectures that cover the theory and broader applications of these techniques. Students also explore the primary literature and highlight recent advances in instrumental methods that address today's analytical questions. The skills learned are useful in a wide variety of scientific areas and will prepare you well for research endeavors. [ more ]

ENVI 368 SEM Technology and Modern Society

Last offered Fall 2017

With widespread use of new social media, controversial developments in such bio-technical practices as the cloning of mammals, rapid advances in various forms of telecommunication, and the increasing sophistication of technological weaponry in the military, the triumph of technology remains a defining feature of modern life. For the most part, modern humans remain unflinchingly confident in the possibilities technology holds for continuing to improve the human condition. Indisputably, technology has benefited human life in innumerable ways. However, as with other features of modernity, technology has also had significant, albeit largely unanticipated, social consequences. Working within a sociological paradigm, this course will focus on the less often examined latent functions of technology in modern society. It will consider, for example, the social effects of technology on community life, on privacy, and on how people learn, think, understand the world, communicate, and organize themselves. The course will also examine the effects of technology on medicine, education, criminal law, and agriculture and will consider such counter-cultural reactions to technology as the Luddite movement in early nineteenth century England, Amish agrarian practices, and the CSA (community supported agriculture) movement. [ more ]

ENVI 376 SEM Economics of Environmental Behavior

Last offered Fall 2022

A community maintains a fishery; a firm decides whether to get a green certification; you choose to fly home or stay here for spring break: behaviors of people and firms determine our impact on the environment. We'll use economics to model environmental behavior and to assess how policies can help or hurt the environment. Topics may study include: common pool resources, voluntary conservation, social norms and nudges, discrimination and justice, rationality, firm responses to mandatory and voluntary rules, voting and public opinion, and boycotts and divestment. We'll also build familiarity with the main methodologies of modern economic research: theoretical modeling, empirical analysis of observational data, and experiments. [ more ]

ENVI 380(F) SEM Animals and Society

How do humans and animals shape each other's lives? People encounter animals in farms, laboratories, zoos, wildernesses, and backyards, on purpose and by chance. They treat animals as family members, entertainment, food, vectors of disease, and objects of scientific wonder. Drawing on the works of biologists, philosophers, and feminist science and technology studies scholars, this seminar will examine our relationships with animals and help clarify our responsibilities to them. We will ask: What are the social and environmental consequences of consuming animals? Should humans swim with dolphins, feed manatees, use gene-editing to create species that can survive climate change? Should moral standing depend upon the ability to communicate or the ability to experience emotions like grief and joy? What can animal models tell us about human health and society, and when is animal otherness too large a gap to bridge? What might human violence toward animals tell us about sexism, racism, or capitalism, and what will human-animal relationships look like in the future? [ more ]

ENVI 386 SEM Environmental and Natural Resource Policy

Last offered Spring 2016

People all over the world depend on the environment and natural resources in countless ways, but human activities can degrade these resources in ways that reduce our wellbeing and that of future generations. In this class, we will use economics to reflect on how this harm comes about and how policy can help. The focus will be international, including developed and developing countries, and applied, building from examples of actual problems and policies. Economics brings useful tools to these conversations because we think carefully about modeling incentives, tradeoffs, and the (sometimes unexpected) consequences of our actions, and because of the empirical analysis on which modern economics relies. This class will primarily use microeconomics to understand how individuals, firms, and governments make decisions that affect the environment and resources, though some topics, like sustainable use of resources across generations and "green growth" measures, will be more macroeconomic in nature. Topics include pollution, climate change, cost benefit analysis, different ways of regulating environmental damage, renewable resources (e.g., forests) and nonrenewable resources (e.g., oil, land), the "natural resource curse," energy, and the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. Throughout, we will think not only about efficiency of policies, but also about equity and justice, and about their practical applicability in contexts including developing countries. [ more ]

ENVI 387 LEC Economics of Climate Change

Last offered Spring 2023

This course introduces the economic view of climate change, including both theory and empirical evidence. Given the substantial changes implied by the current stock of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, we will begin by looking at impacts on agriculture, health, income, and migration. We will consider the distribution of climate damages across poor and wealthy people, both within and across countries. Next we will study adaptation, including capital investments and behavioral changes. We will examine the sources of climate change, especially electricity generation and transportation, and think about optimal policies. Throughout the course we will discuss the limits of the economic approach, pointing out normative questions on which economic theory provides little guidance. [ more ]

ENVI 388 LEC Urbanization and Development

Last offered Spring 2014

At current rates of growth, the combined population of urban areas in developing countries will double in the next 30 years. The land area devoted to urban use is expected to double even more quickly. The costs of providing housing and infrastructure to accommodate this growth are enormous, but the costs of failing to accommodate urban development may be even larger. The decisions made in response to these challenges will affect the economic performance of these countries and the health and welfare of the urban residents. By affecting global patterns of energy use, these decisions will have broader impacts on the entire planet. This course will focus on these challenges. What are the economic forces that drive the process of urbanization, and how does the level of urbanization affect economic development? How are policies towards housing, transportation, public finance and development affected by urbanization? What policy choices are available, and which are most likely to succeed in dealing with the challenges of urban growth? [ more ]

ENVI 390(F) SEM The Nature of Nature

"Nature" is one of the most common words in English. And yet what does it mean? Is it primarily descriptive (all living things), or normative ("natural" foods, "human nature")? This course will consider some of the richly incoherent ways we think about the living world, paying particular attention to the difficulty of narrating processes that are too big, too small, too quick, or too slow for direct human apprehension. We'll explore the way popular nature writing mingles scientific reporting with implicit and explicit judgments about human identity, and take up the insoluble problem of our proper relation to animals. Considerable attention will be paid to the racial, cultural and class dimensions of contemporary forms of environmental consciousness. Writers studied will include Elizabeth Kolbert, Jem Bedell, William Cronon, and Charles Darwin. We'll also consider the intermediations of nature and technology in documentaries by David Attenborough and Lynette Wallworth, among others. [ more ]

ENVI 395 SEM Black Reparations Within/Beyond Borders

Last offered Fall 2022

Generations of Black people around the world have demanded restitution for the harms and legacies of enslavement, indigenous genocide and colonialism in order to advance social justice, new ways of living and freedom. In this way, freedom fighters, Black Power leaders, abolitionist movements, Pan-Africanists, maroons, Rastafarians, Black politicians, climate justice leaders, and revolutionary anti-capitalists have all put forward ideas on and approaches to reparations and reparatory justice. This course will analyze 'geographies of Black struggle' , the differences and commonalities among these approaches, the political strategies and movements, including responses to global climate change and socio-environmental disasters that advance reparations as a just remedy within and beyond borders. We give particular attention to Pan-Africanist and Black feminist perspectives, as well as liberal and popular struggles for reparations within the African diaspora across space and time. Do Pan-Africanism and Black feminism offer new visions for reparations movements in the 21st century? Employing speeches, writings, audio-visual content and documentary film from and about these earlier and emerging movements and their leaders, we will draw long lines between historical circumstances and drivers, and examine Black (un)freedoms within the context of calls for reparation today. [ more ]

Taught by: Keston Perry

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ENVI 397(F) IND Independent Study of Environmental Problems

Individuals or groups of students may undertake a study of a particular environmental problem. The project may involve either pure or applied research, policy analysis, laboratory or field studies, or may be a creative writing or photography project dealing with the environment. A variety of nearby sites are available for the study of natural systems. Ongoing projects in the College-owned Hopkins Forest include ecological studies, animal behavior, and acid rain effects on soils, plants, and animals. Students may also choose to work on local, national, or international policy or planning issues, and opportunities to work with town and regional planning officials are available. Projects are unrestricted as to disciplinary focus. Students should consult with faculty well before the start of the semester in which they plan to carry out their project. [ more ]

ENVI 398(S) IND Independent Study of Environmental Problems

Individuals or groups of students may undertake a study of a particular environmental problem. The project may involve either pure or applied research, policy analysis, laboratory or field studies, or may be a creative writing or photography project dealing with the environment. A variety of nearby sites are available for the study of natural systems. Ongoing projects in the College-owned Hopkins Forest include ecological studies, animal behavior, and acid rain effects on soils, plants, and animals. Students may also choose to work on local, national, or international policy or planning issues, and opportunities to work with town and regional planning officials are available. Projects are unrestricted as to disciplinary focus. Students should consult with faculty well before the start of the semester in which they plan to carry out their project. [ more ]

ENVI 402(F) CON Environmental Planning Workshop: Community Project Experience

In this class you apply your education to effect social and environmental change in the Berkshires. Students work in small collaborative groups to address pressing issues facing the region. Class teams partner with community organizations and local & regional governments to work with clients to develop solutions. You will learn while doing and contribute to the community. The field of environmental planning encompasses the built environment, such as housing, zoning, transportation, renewable energy, waste, neighborhood design; the natural environment, such as open space, farmland, habitat and species protection, natural resource protection, air and water pollution and climate change, and the social environment, such as racial zoning, recreation, placemaking, ecojustice, food security, and healthy communities. Skills taught include basic land use planning, GIS mapping, developing and conducting surveys, interview techniques, community-based research, project management, public presentations and professional report-writing. The class culminates in public presentations to the client organizations. The class hours include time for team project work, client meetings and team meetings with the professor. Recent project topics: https://ces.williams.edu/environmental-planning-papers/ [ more ]

ENVI 404 LEC Coastal Processes and Geomorphology

Last offered Fall 2022

Can people live safely along the coast? Recent events like SuperStorm Sandy and the Tohoku Tsunami have shown us how the ocean can rise up suddenly and wreak havoc on our lives and coastal infrastructure. Only educated geoscientists can evaluate the risks and define informed strategies to prevent future coastal catastrophes. Currently almost half the global population lives within 100 km of the coast, with a large percent of those living in densely populated cities (e.g., New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Sydney, Mumbai). Despite the growing risks and challenges associated with climate change and rising sea levels, the coastal population continues to grow rapidly. To help ensure these growing populations can live safely along the coast requires a detailed understanding of the processes that shape the coastal zone. These processes act across a variety of scales, from deep-time geologic processes that dictate coastal shape and structure, to decadal-scale processes that determine shoreline position and evolution, to weekly and daily processes such as storms and tides. This course will provide an in-depth look at the forces--wind, waves, storms, and people--that shape the coastal zone, as well as the geologic formations--sandy beaches, rocky cliffs, barrier islands, deltas, and coral reefs--that are acted upon and resist these forces. Coastal dynamics are strongly affected by human interventions, such as seawalls, dredged channels, and sand dune removal, as well as by sea level rise and changes in storm frequency and magnitude associated with climate change. Finally, the course will provide students with a perspective on how the U.S. seeks to manage its coastal zone, focusing on sea level rise and coastal development. This class will include a quantitative lab that will use MATLAB software to model and evaluate various coastal processes. Students will gain a basic understanding of MATLAB functionality, and will be asked to independently apply what they have learned to various data sets provided by the instructor. [ more ]

ENVI 405 SEM Geochemistry: Understanding Earth's Environment

Last offered Fall 2017

Rocks, water, air, life: what comprises these interconnected components of the Earth system? How do they interact today, and how did these interactions differ in the past? In this course we will study how chemical elements are distributed in the Earth, cycle through the Earth system, and act together to produce a planet that is habitable. As Earth's landscapes and oceans, and the life they harbor, have evolved through time, they have left an imprint in the geological record that we can read using geochemical tools such as molecular fossils, elemental ratios, and stable and radioactive isotopes. Topics include the synthesis of elements in stars, the formation and differentiation of planet Earth; radiometric dating; the major constituents of the atmosphere, rain, rocks, rivers and the ocean; how they're linked by chemical weathering and biological activity; and reconstruction of past environments and ecosystems. Students will explore these topics through lecture; reading and discussing articles from the scientific literature; and collecting, analyzing and interpreting data from environmental samples. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major. [ more ]

ENVI 410 SEM The Cryosphere

Last offered Spring 2022

The Earth's climate system is often described in terms of its spheres, including the atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, oceans, and the cryosphere. The cryosphere is the naturally occurring ice on Earth in all its many forms: snow, glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, frozen lakes and rivers, and permafrost (frozen soil). These parts of the climate system may seem remote, but have implications for climate and weather around the world. Melting glaciers and ice sheets have already contributed to sea level rise, and are projected to do so even more in the future. This course will explore the cryosphere, including snow, sea ice, permafrost, and glaciers through lectures, hands-on and data analysis labs, reading journal articles, and a final project. A spring break field trip to Alaska offers the opportunity to get boots-on-the-snow experience with glaciers, sea ice, and permafrost. As a 400-level seminar, this capstone course is intended to build on and extend knowledge and skills students have developed during previous courses in the major. [ more ]

ENVI 412 SEM Senior Seminar: Perspectives on Environmental Studies

Last offered Spring 2021

The Environmental Studies and Maritime Studies programs provide students with an opportunity to explore the myriad ways that humans interact with diverse environments at scales ranging from local to global. The capstone course for Environmental Studies and Maritime Studies, this seminar brings together students who have specialized in the humanities, social studies and the sciences to exchange ideas across these disciplines. Over the course of the seminar, students will develop a sustained independent research project on a topic of their choice, and they will have opportunities throughout the semester to meet with guest speakers to discuss environmental work outside the academy. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

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ENVI 413 SEM The Big Ideas: Intended and Unintended Consequence of Human Ambition

Last offered Fall 2022

What have been the most consequential ideas of the last 100 years? This course will explore some of the more audacious and ambitious plans to alter natural and urban environments in the late 19th century to the early part of the 21st, specifically those that sought to improve the human condition through science, engineering, and technology. By building big bold things, politicians around the globe sought to bring prosperity to their nation and embark on a path of modernity and independence. Through an intellectual, political and environmental history of major construction projects such as the building of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam, extensive river valley developments in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, and utopian and futuristic city planning in western Asia, students will consider how, with the benefit of hindsight, to best evaluate the feasibility of such bold schemes. Who has benefitted and who has not, what have been some of the unanticipated consequences, what was sacrificed or neglected, and what do these projects tell us about the larger processes of global capitalism, decolonization, and climate change? [ more ]

ENVI 419 SEM Going to Ground: Considering Earth in the Arts of Africa

Last offered Fall 2015

Drawing its inspiration from the landmark exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (National Museum of African Art, 2013), this seminar explores how earth has been conceptualized and integrated into African artistic thought as material, metaphor, geography, environment, and intervention, and how this interpretive flexibility has allowed it to become a symbol of power and presence in African art-making from prehistory to the present. The seminar will also focus on the ways in which earth has been used in contemporary art towards addressing the growing problems of pollution, unsustainable development, and the widespread depletion of earth-based natural resources in Africa. Over the course of this seminar, students will develop a knowledge base of earth-related issues that have been addressed in African artistic production, and engage with various cross-disciplinary methodologies to critically analyze the conceptual and aesthetic strategies deployed in these works. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with specialists from diverse disciplines and fields towards fleshing out their knowledge base. [ more ]

ENVI 420 SEM Architecture and Sustainability in a Global World

Last offered Fall 2020

What does it mean to create a sustainable built environment? What do such environments look like? Do they look the same for different people across different times and spaces? This course takes these questions as starting points in exploring the concept of architectural sustainability, defined as "minimizing the negative impact of built form on the surrounding landscape," and how this concept can be interpreted not only from an environmental point of view, but from cultural, political, and social perspectives as well. Over the course of the class, students will explore different conceptualizations of sustainability and how these conceptualizations take form in built environments in response to the cultural identities, political agendas, social norms, gender roles, and religious values circulating in society at any given moment. In recognizing the relationship between the way things are constructed (technique of assembly, technology, materials, process) and the deeper meanings behind the structural languages deployed, students will come to understand sustainability as a fundamentally context-specific ideal, and its manifestation within the architectural environment as a mode of producing dialogues about the anticipated futures of both cultural and architectural worlds. [ more ]

ENVI 421 SEM Latinx Ecologies

Last offered Spring 2020

An August 2015 Latino Decisions poll found that Latinxs, more than other ethnic groups in the U.S.A., are deeply concerned about climate change and the "environment". How and why might some Latinxs be disproportionately impacted by climate change? How have a few distinct Latinx theorists and activists imagined and constructed ecology? How are struggles for environmental justice related to broader Latinx concerns with and constructions of place? This seminar will examine a few moments in distinct Latinx histories and geographies such as California migrant farmworkers and the struggle over pesticides, urban movements over waste management such as the Young Lords' garbage offensive, food justice movements and urban gardening, as well as literary and theological representations of affective and sacred ecologies such as Helena María Viramontes' Their Dogs Came With Them and Ecuadoran-U.S. ecofeminist Jeanette Rodríguez's theological texts. Evaluation will be based on class participation, presentations, annotated bibliography, short writing assignments, writing workshop participation, and a final 20-page research paper. [ more ]

ENVI 423 SEM Global Change Ecology

Last offered Fall 2019

Plants and animals are increasingly faced with rapid environmental change driven by human activities across the globe. How do they cope with challenges imposed by climate change, altered nutrient cycling, biological invasions, and increased urbanization? What are the impacts of organismal responses at the population and community level? This course uses an integrative approach to understand the impacts of global change at multiple levels of biological organization in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. We examine how global-scale environmental changes affect the distribution and abundance of species and alter community organization. We also consider the physiological and behavioural mechanisms underlying species responses and the role of acclimation versus adaptation in coping with rapid environmental change. Finally, we learn the analytical tools used to predict future responses to global change. Class discussions will focus on readings drawn from the primary literature. [ more ]

ENVI 430 SEM Race, Identity, Nature

Last offered Spring 2021

From 18th-century claims that climate determined character to the 21st-century proliferation of DNA tests underwriting claims to Indigenous ancestry, race, colonialism, identity, and "nature" operate as interconnected terrains of power. Anchored in the contexts of U.S. colonialisms, racialization, and accumulation, this course aims to expose students to the cultural politics of "nature" as a way of "doing" American Studies. Specifically, this course investigates formations of and struggles against U.S. colonialisms, racialization, and accumulation via the many symbolic and material iterations, negotiations, and contestations of the contingent relations between and among human and non-human natures. Organized around a significant research paper and weekly written responses, this course ultimately aims to foster students' critical writing, reading, analytical thinking, and comparative inquiry skills across such contexts and sites of contestation, and across texts of different genres and media. We will work with a wide range of primary sources, including published fiction and poetry, legal documents, newspaper articles, speeches, recorded songs, and films, photos, paintings and other visual culture. By the end of this course, students should be able to describe the historical foundations of dominant ideas, attitudes, and practices toward non-human natures, as well as analyze how ideas of "nature" mediate the ways in which colonial, racial, gender, and sexual categories and structures inform and are (re)produced by U.S. institutions and in public areas such as the law, public policy, and property. Finally, students should be able to interpret how racialized and colonized peoples' visions, representations, and practices of liberation with regard to relations with non-human natures and the materiality of land precede, contend with, and exceed normative political, economic, and social categories of governance and systems of dispossession and exploitation. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

Catalog details

ENVI 450 SEM Senior Seminar: Environmental Ethnography

Last offered Fall 2021

A key question orients this course: What can the embodied, place-based, and detailed approach of ethnographic study bring to our understandings of the environment? This upper-level seminar will explore this question through classroom discussions and a semester-length research project. Students will engage different styles of environmental ethnography while undertaking their own ethnographic projects involving the Williams College community and surrounding areas. Students will learn to work across different kinds of evidence as they draft fieldnotes, code fieldwork data, extrapolate key ideas from their fieldwork materials, and discover new ways of building environmental knowledge. Students will use these materials to collectively assemble an edited volume of ethnographic snapshots to be presented to the wider Environmental Studies community at Williams. [ more ]

ENVI 454 SEM Climate Change Physiology

Last offered Fall 2020

Animals are increasingly faced with rapid climate change driven by human activities across the globe. How do they cope with challenges imposed by increasing temperature? And, how might physiological mechanisms at the organismal level scale up to influence population processes? This course uses an integrative approach to understand the impacts of climate change at multiple levels of biological organization in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. We examine physiological mechanisms underlying animal responses and the role of acclimation versus adaptation in coping with rapidly shifting thermal environments. We then consider the impacts of these mechanisms on whole organism performance and their consequences for population persistence. Finally, we learn the analytical tools used to incorporate physiological mechanisms into ecological models to predict future responses to global climate change. Class discussions will focus on readings drawn from the primary literature. [ more ]

Taught by: Sonya Auer

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ENVI 460 SEM Communicating Climate Change

Last offered Spring 2023

Long-term, probabilistic thinking about scary scenarios is hard. When the relevant time frames extend to centuries and millennia, it is really hard. And when the degree of scariness is determined by sciences that very few people understand, it is really, really hard. This describes the challenge of climate communication. No matter what your interests or career paths might be, you will need to be able to communicate effectively about environmental problems, often with people who see them very differently from you. It is difficult to communicate about any problem across social, political, and cultural divides. But environmental problems present special challenges. For one thing, they typically involve complicated, contested science. For another, their effects are often difficult to perceive yet potentially devastating in their consequences, especially for future generations and marginalized people. For yet another, their solutions often seem hopelessly difficult to implement. And finally, they are thoroughly entangled with almost every other problem we face, from pandemics to racism to wealth inequality. How do we communicate clearly, persuasively, and responsibly about something so complex? This seminar brings together students with interests in the humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences to seek answers to this fundamental question. Over the course of the seminar, we will explore research on climate change communication in a diverse array of fields while seeking to put our findings into practice locally, working together as a team to solve concrete climate communication problems here in our community. [ more ]

ENVI 465(S) SEM Solutions to the Biodiversity Crisis

The biodiversity crisis is one of the greatest challenges of our century. Faced with climate change, persistent pollution, and habitat fragmentation, species are declining locally and globally. In this upper-level seminar we will integrate knowledge from the natural sciences, social sciences, policy, arts, and the humanities to design and implement biodiversity interventions. Through readings, discussions with experts, and applied projects, we will learn how biodiversity conservation and restoration can be socially just; how spaces can be designed to promote the flourishing of life; and how much local environmental management can alter global trends. We will also envision what the biotic world might look like in 10, 100, and 1000 years and consider who gets to decide which species live and which die, and who should decide. [ more ]

ENVI 470(S) LEC Science for Environmental Justice

Economically challenged communities and communities of color are disproportionately affected by environmental contamination and disturbance. Although environmental racism caused by industrial pollution has been made clear in scholarship for some time, the integrated stresses of climate change and industrial contamination are now triggering new challenges to life in underprivileged communities. Resolving environmental injustice will require meaningful engagement from scientists across a range of disciplines, from chemistry and the geosciences to ecology and public health. In this senior seminar, you will learn about the history of the environmental justice movement while examining how science has been used to address cases of environmental contamination and mismanagement. You can expect experiences in field data collection, laboratory analyses, and numerical modeling, skills that are required to assist communities suffering from environmental injustice. And we will work in partnership with residents of Tallevast, Florida, who have long suffered from the impacts of groundwater contamination and governmental neglect. This partnership will involve a residential field trip to Tallevast during spring break, where you will undertake an environmental study in support of the community. [ more ]

Taught by: TBA

Catalog details

ENVI 478 SEM Cold War Landscapes

Last offered Spring 2022

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union set in motion dramatic changes to the natural and built environments of many nations between 1945 and 1991. Nuclear test and missile launch sites, naval installations, military production operations, and border securitizations are just a few of the most obvious ways in which the stand-off between the two countries altered rural and urban landscapes around the world. But one can also see the Cold War as setting in motion less immediately direct but nonetheless profound changes to the way that many people saw and planned for the environments around them, as evidenced, for instance, by the rise of the American suburb, the reconstruction of postwar Europe, and agricultural and industrial initiatives in nations across the globe. We will begin this seminar by exploring several distinct "Cold War landscapes" in the United States and North America. We will then move on to examining others in Europe and the Soviet Union. Our approach to our topics will be interdisciplinary throughout the semester, with the additional goal of helping students frame their final projects. Students are encouraged to write their research papers on any geographical area of the world that interests them. [ more ]

ENVI 491 TUT The Suburbs

Last offered Spring 2023

The suburbs transformed the United States. At the broadest level, they profoundly altered spatial residential geography (especially in terms of race), consumer expectations and behavior, governmental policies, cultural norms and assumptions, societal connections, and Americans' relationship to nature. More specifically, the different waves of post-World War II suburban development have both reflected large-scale shifts in how power and money have operated in the American political economy; and set in motion deep-seated changes in electoral politics, in Americans' understandings of how their income should be used, and in how the built landscape should be re-imagined. This tutorial will explore the rich historical literature that has emerged over the last twenty years to provide students with a history of the suburbs, to see the suburbs as more than simply collections of houses that drew individual homeowners who wanted to leave urban areas. We will focus most of our attention on the period from 1945 through the 1980s. Some of the questions we will consider will include: how did the first wave of suburban development bring together postwar racial and Cold War ideologies? Is it possible, as one historian has argued, that suburbs actually created the environmental movement of the 1960s? And how have historians understood the role that suburbs played in America's conservative political turn, leading to the election of Ronald Reagan? [ more ]

ENVI 493(F) HON Senior Research and Thesis: Environmental Studies

Environmental Studies senior research and thesis; this is part of a full-year thesis (493-494). [ more ]

ENVI 494(S) HON Senior Research and Thesis: Environmental Studies

Environmental Studies senior research and thesis; this is part of a full-year thesis (493-494). [ more ]