Areas of Study
Our areas of study are the foci of our curriculum, inform our custom pathways through the program, and reflect potential career trajectories.
Environmental Science
The scientific process, principles, and methodologies required to understand the interrelationships within the natural world. We cover how Earth’s physical, chemical, and biological components interact with each other, their effects on the environment, and how they impact global systems such as climate, water, energy, and air among many others. We also investigate the complexities of humans interactions with the environment, including biodiversity, human population growth, ecosystem services, biogeochemical cycles, food resources, climate change, pollution, waste production, and sustainability.
Environmental Justice
Understanding how environmental issues impact communities, peoples, and places in ways often tied to issues of power, access, and opportunity in a given society and on a global scale. Delving into case studies, community mobilizations, data utilization strategies, advocacy campaigns, and vulnerability indicators and more, coursework in this area explores historical and contemporary justice issues across a range challenges like food, water, energy, health, land, and more, with a focus on cultivating skills and tools for transformation.
Environmental Culture
The European Environment Agency defines this area as: “The total of learned behavior, attitudes, practices and knowledge that a society has with respect to maintaining or protecting its natural resources, the ecosystem and all other external conditions affecting human life.” We focus on how environmental issues are framed across media from social networks and movements to performances and narratives. We seek to understand the meaning of environmental and climate challenges and to develop mechanisms for transforming our understanding of them.
Environmental Governance
The intersection of environmental issues with law and economics, focusing on decision-making processes, power dynamics, and policy impacts. We explore how decisions are made and conflicts addressed, power and policymaking at local, regional, national, and international scales, and how legislative initiatives are deployed in environmental campaigns. Central themes will include how positions are articulated and conflicts addressed, how private- and public-sector entities address sustainability issues, and how legislative initiatives are deployed in environmental campaigns.
Core Competencies
Our core competencies are the toolkit needed to pursue our areas of study. You’ll develop expertise and experience with the following:
Environmental Science and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Build a foundational and integrated understanding of the core knowledge in the fields of environmental and sustainability studies, to engage in critical, systematic, and interdisciplinary analysis of interconnected and interdependent human and ecological systems.
Global Communities & Local Impacts & Actions
Develop the knowledge and behaviors that inform responsible local and global action to address environmental and sustainability challenges.
Diverse Perspectives
Develop mindsets and practices for responding to ecological problems through direct and sustained engagement with diverse perspectives, with humility and respect.
Justice and Ethics Lens
Cultivate an understanding of the past and future of environmental inequities and differentiated environmental risk impacts, especially for marginalized communities, in the context of future action and intergenerational justice and ethics.
Innovation & Changemaking
Develop and practice the capacities to collaborate and lead on environmental change issues, in spaces that are constantly changing and uncertain.
Sense of Hope & Agency
Formulate a sense of personal and communal agency, grounded in the realities of the state of the environment, and guided by hope and the heart, in order to move from crisis to possibility.