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.

What is the relationship between 'catastrophe' and human beings, and how has 'catastrophe' influenced the way we live in the world now? This course investigates various types of catastrophes/disasters around the world by mobilizing a variety of theoretical frameworks and case studies in the social sciences. The course uses an anthropological perspective as its principal lens to comparatively observe often forgotten historical calamities throughout the world. The course is designed to explore the intersection between catastrophe and culture and how catastrophic events can be a window through which to critically analyze society and vice versa.

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.

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 covers pollutant chemicals in the environment with a focus on water and soil. The focus is on hazardous and toxic chemicals such as benzene, trichloroethane, pesticides and PCBs. In this course, environmental chemistry serves as a vehicle for study of chemical thermodynamics. Students gain an understanding of Gibbs free energy, chemical potential, and fugacity, and the universal applicability of thermodynamics to describe equilibrium and kinetic processes such as phase partitioning.

This class introduces the components of the hydrologic cycle and their interconnections in a rigorous, quantitative manner. The class focuses on exercises using observational data. There is a modeling and data analysis component using Python and Jupyter Notebooks.

The course provides the theoretical bases for a quantitative description of complex interactions between hydrologic cycle, vegetation and soil biogeochemistry. The first part of the course focuses on modeling the water, carbon and energy dynamics within the soil-plant-atmosphere system at timescales ranging from minute to daily; the second part incorporates rainfall unpredictability and provides a probabilistic description of the soilplant system valid at seasonal to interannual timescales. These concepts are important for a proper management of water resources and terrestrial ecosystems.

Students will learn to identify, understand, and (perhaps) reconcile conflicts between human activities such as farming, forestry, industry, and infrastructure development, and the conservation of species and natural ecosystems. We will also explore the role of biodiversity in providing critical ecosystem services to people. We will examine these topics in an interdisciplinary way, with a primary focus on ecology, but also including consideration of the economic and social factors underlying threats to biodiversity.

How do wild organisms interact with each other, their physical environments, and human societies? Lectures will examine a series of fundamental topics in ecology--herbivory, predation, competition, mutualism, species invasions, extinction, climate change, and conservation, among others--through the lens of case studies drawn from all over the world. Readings will provide background information necessary to contextualize these case studies and clarify the linkages between them. Laboratories and fieldwork will explore the process of translating observations and data into an understanding of how the natural world works.

The course presents anthropogenic global changes and their impact on sustainable design. The course focuses on understanding the underlying principles from natural and applied sciences, and how new basic Internet of Things digital technology enables alternative system analysis and design. Material is presented in 2 parts: 1) Global Change and Environmental Impacts: studying our influences on basic natural systems and cycles and how we can evaluate them, and 2) Designing Sustainable Systems: addressing challenges of disease transmission in our built environment using sensors and data to rethink how we design and use space.

The course will focus on emerging science and technologies that enable the transition from our traditional linear economy (take, make, waste) to a new circular economy (reduce, reuse, recycle). It will discuss the fundamental theories and applied technologies that are capable of converting traditional waste materials or environmental pollutants such as wastewater, food waste, plastics, e-waste, and CO2, etc. into valued-added products including energy, fuels, chemicals, and food products.

The dynamics of the emergence and spread of disease arise from a complex interplay between disease ecology, economics, and human behavior. Lectures will provide an introduction to complementarities between economic and epidemiological approaches to understanding the emergence, spread, and control of infectious diseases. The course will cover topics such as drug-resistance in bacterial and parasitic infections, individual incentives to vaccinate, the role of information in the transmission of infectious diseases, and the evolution of social norms in healthcare practices.

Americans have built and preserved an astounding variety of environments. The course examines the evolving complex of incentives and regulations that drove the choices of where and how places developed. It focuses on how land-use and environmental planning encourage or discourage growth and can mitigate or intensify environmental, social, and economic effects. We examine the latest tools for building and protecting the American landscape. Special topics include transportation, food and agriculture, environmental justice, and climate change. Analysis will be from historical, policy-oriented, and predictive perspectives.

This course addresses inequality in the context of sustainability, focusing on India with comparison to the USA and global trajectories. Students will explore social inequality and inequality in access to basic services; exposure to environmental pollution and climate risks; participation in governance; and, overall outcomes of sustainability, health and wellbeing. They will learn key theoretical frameworks underpinning inequality and equity, measurement approaches, and explore emerging strategies for designing equitable sustainability transitions, drawing upon engineering, spatial planning, public health, and policy perspectives.

Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics will provide students the opportunity for experiential learning and regional engagement with a range of important environmental topics by pairing intensive topical readings from the environmental social sciences, humanities, and sciences with field-based pedagogy. ENV 347 will proceed in three thematic modules, each of which will be anchored by a field trip to a relevant site in the region (Eg. New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York City). The intensive seminar enhances ENV's goals of broad-based, interdisciplinary approach to environmental topics through locally engaged research and practice.

This course is an introduction to earth system modeling for students interested in global environmental issues. Students will use results from a model coupling ocean, atmosphere and land to examine how the system responds to human activities and natural climate variations. In small groups, they will brainstorm mitigation and geo-engineering solutions, and assess their impact on future warming and the components of the Earth system (e.g. precipitation patterns, ocean acidification). This course is designed to give students a critical thinking about climate models and climate solutions, their strengths and their limitations.

Improve your spoken and written French while studying some urgent topics in French environmental politics, from climate change and energy politics to environmental racism, food safety, animal rights, and degrowth. How is the French case unique? What is a ZAD and "un grand projet inutile"? What happened at Plogoff and Larzac? How do class, race, and gender intersect with the exploitation of nature? What exactly is "ecofascism" anyway? Discussion and creative projects will focus on films, bandes dessinées, literature, art, and essays; the course is writing- and speaking-intensive.

Which human activities are changing our climate, and does climate change constitute a major problem? We will investigate these questions through an introduction to climate processes and an exploration of climate from the distant past to today. We will also consider the impact of past and ongoing climate changes on the global environment and on humanity. Finally, we will draw on climate science to identify and evaluate possible courses of action. Intended to be accessible to students not concentrating in science or engineering, while providing a comprehensive overview appropriate for all students.

Which human activities are changing our climate, and does climate change constitute a major problem? We will investigate these questions through an introduction to climate processes and an exploration of climate from the distant past to today. We will also consider the impact of past and ongoing climate changes on the global environment and on humanity. Finally, we will draw on climate science to identify and evaluate possible courses of action. Intended to be accessible to students not concentrating in science or engineering, while providing a comprehensive overview appropriate for all students.

This course discusses the processes that control Earth's climate - and as such the habitability of Earth - with a focus on the atmosphere and the global hydrological cycle. The course balances overview lectures (also covering topics that have high media coverage like the 'Ozone hole' and 'Global warming', and the impact of volcanoes on climate) with selected in-depth analyses. The lectures are complemented with homework based on real data, demonstrating basic data analysis techniques employed in climate sciences.

This course seeks to understand the 'how' of Earth history by integrating many branches of Earth system science including geochronology, paleomagnetism, tectonics, petrology, paleoclimate, sedimentology, geochemistry, and geobiology. Through a detailed study of the relevant datasets, models, and theories, students in this course will engage and struggle with these seemingly disparate fields to arrive at a better understanding of how an imperfect geologic record can be used to produce an accurate representation of our planet's history.

Covers topics including origin of elements; formation of the Earth; evolution of the atmosphere and oceans; atomic theory and chemical bonding; crystal chemistry and ionic substitution in crystals; reaction equilibria and kinetics in aqueous and biological systems; chemistry of high-temperature melts and crystallization process; and chemistry of the atmosphere, soil, marine and riverine environments. The biogeochemistry of contaminants and their influence on the environment will also be discussed.

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.

This course discusses the processes that control Earth's climate - and as such the habitability of Earth - with a focus on the atmosphere and the global hydrological cycle. The course balances overview lectures (also covering topics that have high media coverage like the "Ozone hole" and "Global warming," and the impact of volcanoes on climate) with selected in-depth analyses. The lectures are complemented with homework based on real data, demonstrating basic data analysis techniques employed in climate sciences.

Anthropologist Sidney Mintz famously explored connections between sugar, capitalism, and modern global history. This course borrows his approach to explore the ways that sugar - with reference to other commodities such as coffee and petroleum - have shaped societies in the Caribbean and Latin America (and, less obviously, Europe, Africa, and Asia). Through short stories, poems, archival documents, essays, novels, films, and art about sugar and its worlds, students will study histories of enslavement and marronage, environmental history, Cold War tensions, modernization, and major literary, filmic and artistic movements.

Course introduces use of economics in understanding both the sources of and the remedies to environmental and resource allocation problems. It emphasizes the reoccurrence of economic phenomena like public goods, externalities, market failure and imperfect information. Students learn about the design and evaluation of environmental policy instruments, the political economy of environmental policy, and the valuation of environmental and natural resource services. These concepts are illustrated in a variety of applications from domestic pollution of air, water and land to international issues such as global warming and sustainable development.

This course will teach STEM & non-STEM majors how to write about research in STEM fields with clarity and a bit of flair. Goal will be to learn to convey technical topics to non-experts in a compelling, enjoyable way while staying true to the underlying facts, context and concepts. We'll do this through readings, class discussion, encounters with professional writers and journalists of all sorts, across several different media. Most important of all, students will practice what they learn in frequent writing assignments that will be critiqued extensively by an experienced science journalist.