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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between religious and environmental thought in the modern United States. Focusing on the complex and closely linked legacies of Christianity, secularism, and popular spirituality, we will explore the religious and anti-religious roots of contemporary environmental discourse. Along the way, we will pursue a set of vexing questions about environmental thought: Is environmentalism a religion? If so, what kind of religion is it? If not, why not (and why do we even ask)? Is anti-environmentalism religiously motivated? Could religion be the cause of our ecological crisis? Could it be the solution? For answers, we will look to the writings of thinkers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry, as well as a number of lesser-known authors. We will read these authors alongside recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities to understand how their thinking was influenced by social and environmental trends such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and globalization. We will also ask how religion has intersected with gender, race, class, and ethnicity to shape environmental politics in the twenty-first century. Finally, we will pay particularly close attention to episodes of conflict and cooperation between the environmental movement and religious conservatives during the past forty years, and we will analyze popular religious media from this period alongside the writings and visual productions of environmentalists.
Prerequisite:
Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary course introduces the theories, approaches, methods, and legal framework of environmental planning and provides students with experience in the planning and design process through project work in the Berkshire region. The first part of the course introduces the students to planning literature through analysis and discussion of case studies. The midterm project is an urban design exercise. In the second part of the course students tackle an actual planning project. Small teams of students (3-4), working in conjunction with an experienced community member "client," and under supevision of the instructor, conduct a planning project, using all the tools of an environmental planner. The project work draws on students' full range of academic work, extracurricular interests and activities, and applies interdisciplinary knowledge and methodologies. The course includes several student presentations and culminates in a public presentation of each team's planning study and a project report. This course also includes field trips, town meetings, interviews, survey work, and computer mapping labs.
Prerequisite:
Environmental Studies 101 and Biology/Environmental Studies 203, or permission of instructor; open to juniors and seniors only
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3.00 Credits
This course asks why people think and talk about climate change in such very different ways. Climate change is a physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified, and measured. But it is also an idea, and as such it is subject to the vagaries of cultural interpretation. Despite scientific agreement about its existence and its causes, many people do not see climate change as a serious problem, or as a problem at all. Many others see it as the most serious problem our species has ever faced. What are the sources of this disparity? Why can't we agree about climate change? How does something as complex and confusing as climate change become a "problem" in the first place? This course will explore a broad array of factors, from religion to race, class to colonialism. It will focus especially closely on the communication of scientific knowledge, risk perception, and environmental ethics, and it will apply a range of theories from the social sciences and humanities to a set of concrete case studies In the climate change debate, culture matters. By investigating how culture shapes the politics and policy of climate change, students will develop the interpretive skills required to understand not just this most contentious of issues, but environmental issues in general.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101
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3.00 Credits
We rely on environmental laws to make human communities healthier and to protect the natural world, while allowing for sustainable economic growth. Yet, despite 40 years of increasingly varied and complex legislation, balancing human needs and environmental quality has never been harder than it is today. Environmental Studies 307 analyzes the transformation of environmental law from fringe enterprise to fundamental feature of modern political, economic and social life. ENVI 307 also addresses the role of community activism in environmental law, from local battles over proposed industrial facilities to national campaigns for improved corporate citizenship. By the completion of the semester, students will understand both the successes and failures of modern environmental law and how these laws are being reinvented, through innovations like pollution credit trading and "green product" certification, to confront globalization, climate change and other emerging threats.
Prerequisite:
Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
An advanced ecology course that examines how organisms interact with each other and with abiotic factors. This course emphasizes phenomena that emerge in complex ecological systems, building on the fundamental concepts of population biology and ecosystem ecology. Lectures and workshops explore how communities and ecosystems are defined, and how theoretical, comparative, and experimental approaches are used to elucidate their structure and function. Field laboratories emphasize hypothesis-oriented experiments, some of which will continue with laboratory analyses; field trips introduce the diversity of natural communities and ecosystems in New England. Extensive use will be made of the 75-year database of the Hopkins Memorial Forest. Students will engage in a self-designed term project.
Prerequisite:
Biology/Environmental Studies 203 or 220
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3.00 Credits
"Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory...I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." As far as we know, the name "California" was first written in this passage by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ca. 1510. Within a few decades, it came to be placed first on the peninsula of Baja California and then upon a region stretching up the Western coast of North America. What aspects of this vision are still drawn upon in how we imagine California today? How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west."
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the relation between ideas and practices relating to nature, food and agriculture, and specific formations of place, locality and region. Through this course we will lay conceptual and theoretical foundations for understanding the productions of place, nature, food and agriculture, and the interconnections among them. How do socially constructed ideas about nature, agrarian landscapes, and even particular environmental qualities such as soil and water, shape the formation of categories such as city, country, and region or even of specific food products? Through what processes do particular food products come to be distinctively place-based? How do we understand the seeming shift to place-based agriculture and food production, in the context of an industrialized and increasingly intricate global food system that has often homogenized and standardized food production? How is locality produced through food and agriculture, and how are food and agriculture produced through claims to locality and place? These interconnections, and the relations of power interlaced in them, are salient in contemporary praxis, and the course builds on grounded, conceptual understandings to explore contemporary phenomena such as the appellation d'origine controlee in France's wine producing regions, the development of Geographic Indication within the World Trade Organization, the formation of "Organic Uttarakhand" that is the subject of my own research, and the affective economies generated through artisanal food production. Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together scholarship in anthropology, social and cultural history, sociology, and cultural geography, this course aims to foster expansive, grounded and critical understandings about the connections among nature, food, agriculture and place-making in historic and contemporary formations of modernity.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101
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3.00 Credits
This seminar draws on the last four decades of international efforts to regulate the environmental commons. The process of negotiating and implementing international environmental treaties will be a core focus of the course, yet emphasis will also be placed on emerging non-state means of addressing global environmental challenges. A variety of challenges faced in global environmental policymaking (compliance, participation by civil society and industry, incorporation of science, efficiency.) will be examined through the study of several international regimes, including on climate change, endangered species, biodiversity, biosafety and chemicals management.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
"Nature" is a central concern of British Romantic-era writing, which engages and celebrates sublime prospects, tucked-away violets and field mice, bird song, stinging frosts and glorious morns. Indeed, "nature" could be said to have been invented, or at least constructed anew, in this period, partly in response to the ecological crises brought on by the rapid industrialization and imperial expansion occurring at the same time. This course will examine Romantic-era constructions of nature and the natural world; we will also attend to how these constructions have shaped our current environmental and ecological concerns and discourses. Primary readings will include texts by Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, John Clare, and at least some contemporary environmental writing; we will also read philosophical and theoretical essays by Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schiller, Michel Serres, Lawrence Buell, Timothy Morton and others.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
What is a poison and what makes it poisonous? Paracelcus commented in 1537: "What is not a poison? All things are poisons (and nothing is without poison). The dose alone keeps a thing from being a poison." Is the picture really this bleak; is modern technology-based society truly swimming in a sea of toxic materials? How are the nature and severity of toxicity established, measured and expressed? Do all toxic materials exert their effect in the same manner, or can materials be poisonous in a variety of different ways? Are the safety levels set by regulatory agencies low enough for a range of common toxic materials, such as mercury, lead, and certain pesticides? How are poisons metabolized and how do they lead to the development of cancer? What is cancer and what does it take to cause it? What biochemical defense mechanisms exist to counteract the effects of poisons? This course attempts to answer these questions by surveying the fundamentals of modern chemical toxicology and the induction and progression of cancer. Topics will range from description and quantitation of the toxic response, including risk assessment, to the basic mechanisms underlying toxicity, mutagenesis, carcinogenesis, and DNA repair.
Prerequisite:
Chemistry 156; may be taken concurrently with Chemistry 251/255; a basic understanding of organic chemistry
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