Environmental Studies

The Environmental Studies focus area supports students in their interdisciplinary engagement with the cultural, ethical and political, and socio-ecological dimensions of climate change and contemporary environmental challenges. Through critical engagement with real-world environmental issues, we analyze the social, political, and economic systems that give rise to them and the policies and the environmental and ecological justice movements that respond to them. We develop skills for understanding the entanglement of social and more-than-human worlds and ecologies. We also attend to the roles of Indigenous communities in environmental and ecological protection, as well as the impacts of environmental disruption on Indigenous lifeways.

Students are strongly encouraged to take 2 of four foundation courses to gain a base of understanding in environmental studies.

We explore topics such as: 

• The impacts of environmental change, species extinction, pollution of air and water on different human communities and more than human beings as well as responses to these changes in the forms of political action, community-based remediation, environmental education, and local and global policy.
• The role of human activities in ecological change locally and globally.
• Critical analysis of root causes of contemporary environmental challenges.
• Inequitable distributions of environmental harm, different human-environmental relations including ideas about human superiority to non-human life, and the ways that social actions have environmental effects and how environmental harms have social, cultural, and spiritual effects.
• Environmental movements and activism, education, communication, art, and social and political engagement with environmental issues, including the global rights of nature and more than human rights legal movement and the role of Indigenous communities and values in enshrining these rights in the law.
• Environmental concepts such as: conservation, sustainability, environmental justice, rights of nature, Anthropocene, more-than-human worlds, multi-species relations, and rights of nature.

---

Foundational courses

ENVS 689 – The Political Ecology of Global Environmental Change	(3)
ANTH 610 – Environment in the Anthropocene: Life Beyond the Human	(3)
ENVS 608 – Questioning Extinctions	(3)
ANTH 591 – Ethnobiology: Traditional Knowledge of Plants, Animals, and Land in Contemporary Global Context	(3)

Electives

Grouped study

grouped study environmental studies electives

ANTH 610 – Environment in the Anthropocene: Life Beyond the Human	(3)
EDST 630 – Transformative Learning for Social Change	(3)
EDST 632 – Global Education	(3)
ENVS 608 – Questioning Extinctions	(3)
ENVS 670 – The Nature of Nature: Ecology, Non-human life, and Human Obligations	(3)
ENVS 689 – The Political Ecology of Global Environmental Change	(3)
GLST 651 – Critical Approaches to Global Change	(3)
GOVN 540 – Global Governance and Law	(3)
HERM 501 – Issues in Heritage Resources Management	(3)
HERM 542 – Issues in Planning Historic Places	(3)
HERM 672 – Heritage and Risk Management	(3)
INST 511 – Indigenous Knowledge and Education	(3)
MAIS 603 – Community Development	(3)
MAIS 604 – Planning and Action for Community Change	(3)
MAIS 620 – Digital Storytelling	(3)
MAIS 625 – Critical Perspectives in Cultural Studies	(3)
MAIS 635 – Equality in Context	(3)
MAIS 663 – Critical Race Theory in Global Context	(3)
MAIS 665 – Cultural Studies: Reflections, Democratic Possibilities, and Futures	(3)
WGST 505 – Decolonizing Mental Health	(3)

Individualized study

individualized study environmental studies electives

ANTH 591 – Enthnobiology: Traditional Knowledge of Plants, Animals, and Land in Contemporary Global Context	(3)
LTST 551 – World Literature	(3)
LTST 637 – Black Atlantic Literature and Culture	(3)
MAIS 640 – Grounded Theory, Exploration, and Beyond	(3)