This course considers how environmental racism shapes urban inequality. We will discuss how racial and gender bias have conditioned proposals for the future of cities and the planet. We will also address how people who have experienced racial and gender marginalization have formed relationships with land, water, and non-human life in response to crisis. We will address environmentalist work in geography, critical race studies, city planning, queer and trans theory, and disability studies along with novels, journalism, and film to analyze how ideas of race and gender and questions of urban and planetary futures have informed one another.

This seminar explores how writers and artists--alongside scientists and activists--have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.

For agrarians, farms and fields are prized over boardrooms and shopping malls. Agrarianism values hard work, self-sufficiency, simplicity and connection with nature. For some today, it is a compelling antidote to globalization and consumerism. This course examines American agrarianism past and present and its central role in our national imaginary, tracing the complex and contradictory contours of a social and political philosophy that seeks freedom and yet gave way to enslaving, excluding, and ignoring many based on race, immigration status, and gender. A focus will be on new agrarianism and movements for food, land, and social justice.

Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.

This seminar addresses the field of "indigenous art" to unsettle current understandings of self and alter representation. Focusing on South America and drawing parallels with the Americas and Oceania, it investigates studies of material and immaterial culture from the perspective of indigenous world-makings. Attention will be paid to how indigenous arts speak to the dilemmas of self-governance, biocultural diversity, and conservation. We will also address forms of decolonization of Amerindian arts that are at play in museums, festivals, and environmental storytelling, with indigenous artists and intellectuals as their protagonists.

How do global engagements with nuclear things affect latent colonization in contemporary and future ecologies and generations? How are toxic effects of nuclear things (re)presented through scientific, technological, political or cultural intervention? We explore material, technoscientific, and cultural transmutations of nuclear things (radioisotopes, bombs, medical devices, energy, waste) and the work of (re)making those transmutations (in)visible. The course draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks / case studies in science and technology studies, the social sciences, art and environmental humanities to think with nuclear things.

The course focuses on the social forces that shape design thinking. Its objective is to introduce architectural and urban design issues to build design and critical thinking skills from a multidisciplinary perspective. The studio is team-taught from faculty across disciplines to expose students to the multiple forces within which design operates.

As part of the search for solutions to climate, water and energy challenges in a rapidly urbanizing world, it is crucial to understand and reassess the environmental challenges and potential of the exurban wasteland. This interdisciplinary course aims to add theoretical, pragmatic and cultural dimensions to scientific, technological, and policy aspects of current environmental challenges, in an effort to bridge the environmental sciences, urbanism and the humanities focusing on the transformation of the Meadowlands, the large ecosystem of wetlands, into a State Park.

Analysis of fundamental processes in the hydrologic cycle, including precipitation, evapotranspiration, infiltration, streamflow and groundwater flow.

A modern view of water resources, from the physical and engineering principles appealing to CEE students to the broader historical and social aspects of sustainable development of interest to the environmental sciences and humanities. Teams of students will develop interconnected design projects on water distribution, hydrologic hazards, and sustainable use of soil and water resources, with emphasis on interdisciplinary communication among stakeholders. Guest lectures will cover some of the historical, political, and legal aspects of the works, complemented by a visit to the world-renown hydraulic infrastructure of the Catskills-NYC aqueduct.

This course is an opportunity to reimagine engineering as a liberatory and collective practice that challenges systems of domination, inequality and environmental exploitation in cities. Interdisciplinary readings and films on topics ranging from urban water systems to algorithmic policing will examine how social and environmental injustices in cities have been produced or reinforced through engineering designs while also exploring new frameworks for designing just cities. Students will put these frameworks into practice by participating in a conceptual design studio, focused on the radical redesign of urban infrastructures and technologies.

Life processes depend on over 25 elements whose bioinorganic chemistry is relevant to the environment (biogeochemical cycles), agriculture, and health. CHM 544 surveys the bioinorganic chemistry of the elements. In-depth coverage of key transition metal ions including manganese, iron, copper, and molybdenum focuses on redox roles in anaerobic and aerobic systems and metalloenzymes that activate small molecules and ions, including hydrogen, nitrogen, nitrate, nitric oxide, oxygen, superoxide, and hydrogen peroxide. Appreciation of the structure and reactivity of metalloenzyme systems is critical to understanding life at the molecular level.

Roman history courses usually cover the grand narratives based on the more traditional, literary evidence. Usually these courses leave no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the new and different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light in fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM as they consider humanistic questions. Through different case studies and hands on activities, students will learn about different scientific, technological and mathematical methods and how knowledge of the past draws on multiple disciplines.

This course uses microeconomic analysis (specifically, tools drawn from demand/supply analysis, development, trade, and public economics) to study issues related to agriculture and food. These include the role of agriculture in the global economy and in economic development; biofuels; the Green Revolution and GMOs; agriculture and the environment/climate change; agricultural trade and trade disputes; hunger, famines and food aid; and food insecurity and obesity in the U.S. The course assesses whether farm, food and nutrition policies in poor and rich countries, including the U.S., address current challenges.

Filmmaking is a mural art. Due to the contemporary ubiquity of screens, our physical environment is increasingly eclipsed in the human experience. Yet vernacular filmmaking does not simply replace our physical nature, rather lets it emerge just as terroir wines reveal the natural environmental factors of winemaking without industrial tempering. Less industrial, more poetic film production can teach us a more respectful relation to our environment. Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

What are biofuels, and why are we making them? How can they help address our energy needs in a warming planet? What are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation biofuels? What is the controversy surrounding the food versus fuel debate? Will thermocatalysis or genetic engineering improve biofuel production? Can we make biofuels directly from light or electricity? These are some of the questions we will answer through discussions during lecture. In precept we will discuss primary literature, relevant news reports, and studies on the socio-economic impact of biofuels. Grades are based on participation, HW assignments, 3 short quizzes, and one final project.

The Paris Accord signaled a global consensus on climate risks and the need for a rapid switch to clean energy. Not well comprehended are the scale and pace of the needed transformations. Bottlenecks encountered during rapid, large-scale change, must be anticipated and addressed to achieve climate goals. Princeton's Net-Zero America study (2021) provides highly-granular insights on the scale and pace of change and on impacts to the environment, finances, jobs and more. Students will build on that study to analyze sub-regional energy transitions through multi-disciplinary lenses to assure the successful decarbonization of the U.S.

How can literature and film bring to life ideals of environmental justice and the lived experience of environmental injustice? This seminar will explore how diverse communities across the globe are unequally exposed to risks like climate change and toxicity and how communities have unequal access to the resources vital to sustaining life. Issues we will address include: climate justice, the Anthropocene, water security, deforestation, the commons, indigenous movements, the environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice, and the imaginative role of film makers and writer-activists.

Humans are increasingly affecting environmental systems throughout the world. To understand the environmental impacts, quantitative modeling tools are needed. This course introduces quantitative modeling approaches for environmental systems, including global models for carbon cycling; local and regional models for water, soil, and vegetation interactions; models for transport of pollutants in both water and air; and models for population dynamics and the spread of infectious disease. Students will develop simple models for all of these systems and apply the models to a set of practical problems.

A large number of chemicals designed for one purpose are now known to have a second, completely unexpected ability to disrupt estrogen, testosterone, thyroid hormone, and hormones that control metabolism. Examples include BPA and phthalates that leach from plastics; many pesticides; flame-retardants; chemicals used to make Teflon and stain-repellent materials. Many of these end up as personal and environmental contaminants, which can interfere with health and reproduction in both humans and wildlife. This seminar examines landmark discoveries, explores current research, and looks at emerging policy and regulatory action.

Explores the diverse connections between America's national development and natural environment. It examines how the U.S. originated, then expanded to cover a continental land mass, and the ways that expansion changed the nation. It analyzes how, why, and with what consequences major parts of the U.S. economy--for instance, farming, energy, services and government--have grown or in shrunk. It looks at how and with what results the U.S. has incorporated different ethnic and racial groups. It shows how, why, and with what outcomes it has historically globalized and conducted its foreign policy, and offers insights into current landscapes.

Examining the relationship between law and environmental policy, this course focuses on cases that have established policy principles. The first half of the seminar will be conducted using the Socratic method. The second half will allow students to reargue either the plaintiff or defendant position in a key case, which will be decided by the classroom jury.

Climate scientists have long agreed that climate change is real, potentially dangerous, and caused largely by humans. Despite these warnings, however, policymakers have still not taken significant action to limit greenhouse-gas emissions--in part because scientists talk mostly to each other, in technical terms most of us cannot understand. That is where science communicators come in. This class will give students the basic scientific knowledge; the narrative ability; and the technical skills to translate climate science into compelling stories, largely in video, that can help lead to greater public understanding of this crucial issue.

Addressing global ecological and societal degradation depends on humanity practicing regenerative, or reciprocal, relationships with nature. Evidence suggests that we are collectively capable of producing restorative technological, behavioral, and social solutions, but they must be applied holistically across all human actions at every scale. We explore sustainability challenges in the context of ethics, justice, and behavioral psychology, including visits with experts, and survey-based investigations on campus. Students will be presented with real-time decision-making needs at Princeton, with an opportunity to influence those decisions.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

ENV 380, Cities, Sea Level Rise and Environmental Humanities focuses on sea level rise and its impacts on cities around the world, considering both the relevant environmental science and related literature and art. Given the global span of the texts engaging the issue of sea level rise, issues of culture and difference will be central to this course. It will consider how ideas, meanings, norms and habituations differ from one location to another and how these differences manifest in and are informed laws and social practices as well as arts and literature.

This course locates itself at the intersection and juxtaposition of medical and environmental anthropologies in order to perpetrate a double movement: how are bodies - human and other - implicated in processes often figured as environmental; and how can exploring a diverse range of embodiments might open ways into denaturalizing `environment' as simply what exists outside of bodies. How do we write about the environment, about bodies, and their relationship? Topics include climate change, toxic contamination, multispecies ethnography.

Sea Level Rise, Islands and the Environmental Humanities explores how islanders, predominantly but not exclusively in the Pacific and the Caribbean, are experiencing sea level rise and how they are engaging it in literature, art and film. Students in the seminar will also learn about the environmental science and policy related to sea level rise. They will consider solutions being put forward to address the impacts, such as managed retreat; hard engineering, such as building sea walls or artificial islands; or soft engineering, such as preserving and restoring natural buffers, be they coral or oyster reefs, mangrove marshes or wetlands.

Studies concepts, methods, and projects that have shaped the environmental humanities (EH) as a transdisciplinary field. Compares EH approaches to environmental sciences and environmental movements while considering the field's intellectual commitments to, among others, narrative, epistemology, cultural critique, and social and ecological justice. Examines current EH collaborations and centers that address extractive capitalism and the climate crisis through variously community-based, site-specific, and public work. (These include the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, KTH EH Laboratory, and Oregon Center for Environmental Futures.)

Humans have profoundly altered the chemistry of Earth's air, water, and soil. This course explores these changes with an emphasis on the analytical techniques used to measure the human impact. Topics include the accumulation of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) in Earth's atmosphere and the contamination of drinking water at the tap and in the ground. Students will get hands on training in mass spectrometry and spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of air, water, and soil and will participate in an outreach project aimed at providing chemical analyses of urban tap waters to residents of Trenton, NJ.

The course covers concepts related to the chemistry of inorganic and organic materials found in the pristine and contaminated settings in the Earth surface environments, with an introduction to the modern field sampling techniques and advanced laboratory analytical and imaging tools. Different materials characterization methods, such as optical, infrared, and synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy and microscopy, will also be introduced. Field sampling and analysis of materials from diverse soil and coastal marine environments will be the focus during the second half of the semester.

Glaciers and ice sheets are important elements of Earth's global climate system. This course introduces undergraduate and graduate students to the history of ice on Earth, contemporary glaciology, and the interactions between climate, glaciers, landforms, and sea level. Drawing from basic physical concepts, lab experiments, numerical modeling, and geological observations, we tackle important physical processes in glaciology, and equip students with data analysis and modeling skills. Students will gain an appreciation for the importance of ice sheets for the global climate system, and the large gaps that remain in our understanding.

Microbes were the first life forms on Earth and are the most abundant life forms today. Their metabolisms underpin the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and other important elements through Earth systems. This course will cover the fundamentals of microbial physiology and ecology and examine how microbial activities have shaped modern and ancient environments, with the goal of illustrating the profound influence of microbial life on our planet for over 3 billion years.

The word 'ecology' evokes the scientific discipline that studies the interactions between and among organisms and their environments, and also resonates with the environmental movement of the sixties, green politics, and conservation. This course explores the historical development of ecology as a professional science, before turning to the political and social ramifications of ecological ideas. Throughout the course, we will situate the history of ecological ideas in their cultural, political, and social context.

What do you know about Marxism? Public discourse and academia in the U.S. often dismiss Marx and the Marxist method: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; Marxists ignore race, gender, culture, and the environment; the Communist Manifesto sums it all up; Soviet totalitarianism proved its utopian failure. Is all this true? Let's test it. Let's take Marxism seriously. This course begins with fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Preobrazhensky, Trotsky, and Lenin and then expands to study how the social and natural sciences have used the method to explain key processes in their domains.

The forests of the tropics, especially of Latin America, are the areas of the world that gain the most attention from the land change science community. This class will examine the global-level forces that lead to changes in land-use and land-cover in Latin America's forested landscapes. Using images obtained of swidden landscapes, we will examine how changes in Latin America's forest cover are used to perpetuate the myth that the region's poor are responsible for observed changes. Drone-derived data and indicators of people's perceptions of wildlife will help us examine the drivers of change in the region.

Amazonia is a vital nexus for planetary survival. This course focuses on the world's largest tropical forest and the ancestral home of over one million indigenous peoples, now threatened by deforestation and megafires. Further degradation will have disastrous consequences for its peoples, biodiversity, rainfall and agriculture, and global climate change. Combining perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities, we will critically examine projects to colonize, develop, and conserve the Amazon over time and reflect on the agency of indigenous peoples, maroon and riverbank communities and their creative modes of existence.

This course provides an overview of fundamental physical mechanisms behind sustainable energy technologies, including solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectricity. Physics of the greenhouse effect, projected Earth's climate changes, as well as socio-economic impacts on energy uses and greenhouse-gas emissions are reviewed. Variability, dispatchability, and areal power density of energy resources are discussed. Energy efficiency, energy storage, as well as transmission and distribution of electric power are touched upon.

This course describes natural patterns arising from instabilities in nature, and discusses their importance in the environment. We will analyze phenomena at various scales, as diverse as wave breaking at the ocean surface, internal mixing in the atmosphere and the ocean, volcanic plumes, convection cells in the atmosphere, the break-up of fluid ligaments or bubble bursting at an interface. The course will detail mathematical tools (linear and non-linear stability analysis, symmetry arguments, solutions to non-linear equations such as shocks and solitons), as well as present laboratory and numerical demonstrations of the instabilities.

Overview of the issues surrounding global energy supplies, oil's unique physical and economic properties, and its role in shaping the political economy of the Middle East and U.S. strategic interests in the region. Discuss availability of energy sources, the state of technology, the functioning of energy markets, the challenges of coping with global climate change and the key role of the oil reserves in the Middle East. Then focus on the history of oil in the Middle East and its impact on societies in the region.

Do plants think? Do forests have a language? Are our bodies separate from the environment? Are we substantially different from what we once called "nature"? Such questions have been emerging in philosophy and literature, bringing to light new forms of knowledge that are both integrative and holistic. This seminar will discuss the visual arts, literature and musical experiments produced by thinkers (Indigenous or otherwise) who can help us imagine a planet where, differently from our current world, we may still be able to survive.

This seminar will consider the modern South Asian coastline to understand the past, present, future of coasts in an era of climate change. Historical maritime trade routes, massive development projects, and rising influence of environmental change all shape the South Asian coast as a new frontier of resource control. Students will explore the cultural political desires and discontents that become entangled in coastlines, search for alternative imaginations of life that people mark out on the coastline. In doing so, we move towards an environmental justice perspective of the South Asian coastline.

Students will learn techniques of wildlife surveillance photography using remote cameras to photograph animal populations on and around Princeton's campus. The photographs and apparatus will be considered as both ecological research and works of art. As such, the methods and results will be critically examined for population index studies as well as philosophical ramifications. A final exhibition of the images will highlight the secret wilderness of the area while posing questions about our relationship to non-human animals and the narrative ramifications of the gaze of surveillance photography.