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.

This course focuses on Indigenous world-makings in the Anthropocene. We will reflect on how the current climate crisis is actively being produced through the destruction of Indigenous worlds. Two key anthropological questions guide our seminar: How do Indigenous groups differently understand world endings? How are Indigenous peoples resisting neocolonial and extractivist violence? We will work mainly with ethnographic writings, films, journalistic reports, and artworks, with a focus on Indigenous perspectives. Starting in Amazonia, we will develop a comparative perspective of Indigenous worldings across the Americas.

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.

The course introduces the basic chemical and physical processes of relevance in environmental engineering. Mass and energy balance and transport concepts are introduced and the chemical principles governing reaction kinetics and phase partitioning are presented. We then turn our focus to the applications in environmental engineering problems related to water and air pollution.

Students will learn different methods required for data analysis and interpretation of processes related to water and the environment. The emphasis will be on formulating questions, choosing appropriate statistical tools for a given problem, and drawing appropriate conclusions from the analyses. The course will cover concepts related to statistical inference and common probabilistic models, linear regression, and expose the students to non-parametric statistics; the students will also learn how to perform these analyses using the R programming language. Statistical methods will be introduced through use of hands-on analyses with real data.

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.

Ecological systems at local to global scales. Students will examine fundamental methods of analyzing ecosystems,and apply these methods to questions about climate change and the global food system. Lectures cover theoretical elements and examples from the primary literature. Coursework emphasizes critical reading of scientific literature, written expression of scientific arguments, collaboration in group projects, and in-person presentation of findings to an audience.

The course presents global anthropogenic impacts on the environment and their relationship to sustainable design. It focuses on understanding principles of applied sciences, and how IoT and Digital Fabrication facilitates rapid and deployable sensors and systems to make and analyze designs. Part 1) Global Change and Environmental Impacts: studying influences on basic natural systems and cycles and how we can evaluate them to rethink building design. Part 2) Designing Sustainable Systems: address learned synergies between making buildings more efficient and less prone to disease transmission through alternative heating cooling and ventilation.

ENV 210A offers an introduction to the scientific and technological dimensions of the nexus of global environmental problems: climate change, the carbon cycle, biodiversity loss, and food and water for 9 billion people. The course will provide students the scientific foundations to understand each of these complex environmental problems, first in isolation and then in its interaction with the others. By the completion of the course, students will be able to understand major scientific reports on the interacting environmental challenges of the 21st century. All sections of ENV 210A will meet together for lecture and precept each week.

ENV 210B offers an introduction to the scientific and technological dimensions of the nexus of global environmental problems: climate change, the carbon cycle, biodiversity loss, and food and water for 9 billion people. The course will provide students the scientific foundations to understand each of these complex environmental problems, first in isolation and then in its interaction with the others. By the completion of the course, students will be able to understand major scientific reports on the interacting environmental challenges of the 21st century. All sections of ENV 210B will meet together for lecture and lab each week.

This immersive, multimedia course invites us to come to our senses in creative ways, exploring climate crises like melting ice, rising oceans, deforestation and displacements. We will come alive to hidden worlds, kayaking the Millstone and trips to Manhattan, engaging animal and environmental studies. Through film, images and writing, we explore the vital ways environmental issues intersect with gender, race and sexualities. Themes include: wilderness; national parks; violent settler colonialism; masculinities; militarization; Indigenous knowledges; animal intelligence and emotions; slow violence; the commons; and strategies for change.

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.

This workshop will expose participants to some of the most dynamic, adventurous environmental nonfiction writers while also giving students the opportunity to develop their own voices as environmental writers. We'll be looking at the environmental essay, the memoir, opinion writing, and investigative journalism. In the process we'll discuss the imaginative strategies deployed by leading environmental writers and seek to adapt some of those strategies in our own writing. Readings will engage urgent concerns of our time, like climate change, extinction, race, gender and the environment, and relations between humans and other life forms.

This course is an introduction to Earth system modeling for students interested in global environmental issues. Students will use results from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Earth system models coupling ocean, atmosphere and land to examine how the system responds to human activities. In small groups, they will brainstorm mitigation and geo-engineering solutions and assess their impact on climate. This course is designed to give students a critical thinking about climate models and climate solutions, their strengths and their limitations.

What constitutes the current conjuncture in global environmental governance, and in what ways and to what ends is biological life-human and non-human-made part of neoliberal environmental projects? This course will use the concept of neoliberal natures to explore the challenges rapid global environmental change pose for conservation, sustainability and ecosystem health in the contemporary era. We consider the ecological and political implications of growing efforts to enroll material nature in market-based environmental schemes, and explore how these schemes unfold across different contexts to shape social and environmental sustainability.

How have French writers, thinkers, and activists addressed the growing environmental crisis in recent decades? In what ways does their work converge? We look here at how fiction and thought-often inspired by the work of activists-have confronted this challenge. Themes include climate change; agribusiness and factory farming; development and (de)growth; nuclear risk; environmental justice and health; species extinction; the attention economy; and ecofeminist and decolonial thought. Novels, essays, and BDs paired with landmark works by thinkers such as Gorz, Guattari, Serres, Latour, Descola, Zask, Morizot, Pelluchon, and Ferdinand.

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.

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.

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.

The media of literature, art, science and knowledge formation in general depend on a constant supply of so-called 'natural resources' such as fibers, metals, wax, vinyl and rare earths. This seminar combines discourse-analytical approaches from literary and media studies and the history of science with new methods of media ecology, critical infrastructure analysis and environmental studies to critically analyze these medial resource dependencies at different scales, both local and global, interrogating the normative, epistemic, aesthetic, geopolitical and economic frameworks that have co-constituted modern media.

Studies of war and society rarely address environmental factors and agency. The relationship between war and environment is often either reduced to a simple environmental determinism or it is depicted as a war against nature and ecosystems, playing down societal dynamics. The seminar explores the different approaches to the war-environment-society nexus and highlights how and why the three spheres should be studied in conjunction. The objective is to assess how and why environmental and societal factors and forces caused and shaped the conflicts and how in turn mass violence shaped societies and how they used and perceived their environments.

What is the social basis for the production and distribution of carbon emissions, the source of human-induced climate change? Which people, companies, and countries are responsible? On whom do the effects fall? What makes change possible? We examine the institutions that try to govern carbon emissions, with a focus on different types of governments, social movements, and private firms. We consider how these actors are both similar and different across rich and poor countries, and across the global, national, and urban scales. And we debate proposed solutions that rely on the analyses and evidence that we have studied earlier in the course.

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.

People have converted almost half of the world's native habitats to agriculture (excluding desert and ice) and harvested more than 75% of the remaining forests. This conversion has contributed more than a quarter of the greenhouse gases people have added to the atmosphere and has been the primary cause of biodiversity loss. In the next 30 years, the world is on a path to convert vast additional areas and harvest vastly more forests to meet rising demands for food, wood, and energy.

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.