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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Rising oil and electricity costs disrupt the economy and help fuel global insecurity. Clearer understanding of how fossil-fuel consumption contributes to global climate change is increasing demand for renewable sources of energy and for more sustainable campus environments. What sources of energy will supply Williams College and nearby areas in the twenty-first century? How will campus buildings, old and new, continue to be attractive spaces while making far more efficient use of heat and light? How can the College help support local farms? This course is a practical introduction to renewable sources of energy, including conservation, principles of sustainability, and to their application to the campus environment. Topics covered include: biological sources of energy (biomass, biogas, liquid fuels), wind energy, geothermal and solar energy, energy efficiency and the environmental impacts of using renewable energy. Lectures, field trips and individual projects emphasize examples from the campus and nearby area.
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3.00 Credits
In contemporary societies, race remains an enduring impediment to the achievement of equality. Generally understood as a socially meaningful way of classifying human bodies hierarchically, race manifests itself in a number of arenas, including personal experience, economic production and distribution, and political organization. In this course, we will explore how race emerges in local and global environmental issues, like pollution and climate change. We will begin with a review of some of the landmark texts in Environmental Studies that address "environmental racism," like Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie and David Pellow's Garbage Wars. We will examine how and to what extent polluting facilities like landfills, oil refineries, and sewage treatment plants are disproportionately located in communities of color; we will also pay attention to how specific corporations create the underlying rationale for plotting industrial sites. After outlining some of the core issues raised in this scholarship, we will turn to cultural productions--like literature, film, and music--to understand how people of color respond to environmental injustice and imagine the natural world.
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3.00 Credits
Economists love free markets, but many people fear that market-driven economic growth and consumption are endangering the natural environment. In fact, core economic theories predict that people and firms, left to their own devices, will often tend to pollute too much, conserve too little, overfish common waters, and cut down too many trees. These predictions seem to be borne out by the world's environmental problems. Fortunately, economics offers tools to address these issues, and these tools are increasingly gaining attention in the policy world. In this course, we will survey environmental and natural resource economics, fields that work to inform policy with attention to both natural assets and human needs. We will focus on real-world problems, mostly from a microeconomic perspective. Underlying issues in these fields include: why markets might be inefficient where the environment and natural resources are concerned; whether and how to value the benefits we receive from the environment; and how to carefully evaluate policies. We will study the economists' perspective on sustainability and we'll discuss how sustainability, growth, and human wellbeing relate to each other. We will study the use of non-renewable resources (like oil) and renewable resources (like trees and fish), and we will spend some time talking about energy and energy policy. We will examine issues related to pollution, looking at traditional "command and control" regulations and at market-based pollution control policies. Climate change is a pressing global problem, and we will study current and proposed climate policies and the role economics can play. We may cover other topics, including international development, food, agriculture, and water.
Prerequisite:
Economics 110
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3.00 Credits
This class provides a practical look at fast-evolving methods used to integrate information about the earth's surface with spatial data collected by disciplines such as archaeology, economics, the field sciences, history and political science. Remote sensing involves collection and processing of data from satellite and airborne sensors to yield environmental information about the earth's surface and lower atmosphere. Remote sensing allows regional mapping of rock materials, analysis of vegetation cover and measurement of urban areas and land-use change over time. A Geographic Information System (GIS) links satellite-based environmental measurements with spatial data such as topography, transportation networks, and political boundaries, allowing display and quantitative analysis at the same scale using the same geographic reference. This course covers concepts of remote-data capture and geographic rectification using a Global Positioning System (GPS), as well as principles of remote sensing, including linear and non-linear image enhancements, convolution filtering, and image classification. Principles of GIS include display and classification, spatial buffers, logical overlays and techniques of spatial analysis. Weekly labs focus on training in the application of techniques using data from the region and other areas of North America.
Prerequisite:
At least one introductory course in Biology, Environmental Studies, or Geosciences
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3.00 Credits
How does culture shape our use and imagination of the physical environment? This is the central question of the environmental humanities. This course will explore the various ways in which scholars from a broad range of disciplines have sought to answer this question by incorporating insights from social theory and cultural criticism. Focusing on studies of social and cultural conflict in the United States and Latin America from the time of European colonization to the present, it will examine key works from fields such as environmental history, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, and cultural geography, and it will survey the major methodological and philosophical commitments that unite these fields. Emphasis will be placed on the ideological critique of modernity. How have scholars made environmental sense of liberalism, capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, and racism? How have these isms influenced our relations with the natural world, and how can the humanities help us both understand and change these relations for the better? With its emphasis on the critical theorization of inequality and cross-cultural interaction, this course fulfils the Exploring Diversity requirement.
Prerequisite:
Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
What does sustainability mean in the context of agricultural practice, food production, and consumption? This course encourages students to think analytically and critically about the meanings and practices of sustainability in the context of food and agriculture. We examine diverse regional and historic contexts to explore how concerns about sustainability in relation to agricultural production and food consumption emerged, and explore the contemporary incarnations of sustainable agriculture in organic, fair trade, and local agriculture as well as in debates around food miles, biofuels, and genetic modification. Cutting across each of these individual topics, we will think about the connections between production and consumption, ecology and society. By the end of this course, it is expected that students will develop a multifaceted understanding of the social, political and cultural dimensions of sustainable food and agriculture.
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3.00 Credits
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 systemics and phylogeny, and characteristics of plant families and cultural and economic uses of plants, native species. The labs cover field identification, natural history, and ecology of local species.
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3.00 Credits
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.
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3.00 Credits
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?
Prerequisite:
Economics 110 or equivalent
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3.00 Credits
Since consumers were first introduced to the promise of "better living through chemistry," society has had to wrestle with the impacts, often far removed in place and time, resulting from a rapid proliferation of hazardous chemicals and wastes. Policy responses, be they at the local, national or global scale, are often limited to reactionary efforts to counter releases into the environment, are constrained by the prevalent use of the technologies in question, and further bring to the fore key challenges of environmental justice and risk management. How then are we to regulate DDT without adversely affecting our fight against mosquito-borne malaria? How might we preserve the ozone layer while still maintaining the benefits of food preservation through refrigeration? How can we reap the benefits of the electronic age without condoning the steady flow of electronic waste affecting workers' health and environments in developing countries? Emphasis will be placed on both understanding the politics that bring about, and allow us to address, these problems. We will be examining in particular novel policy responses, including Europe's precautionary safe-use law, citizen-science initiatives and consumer-driven certification schemes.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101 or permission of instructor
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