Environmental Studies Courses

The ES Major or Concentration begins (in most cases for Sophomores or First-Year Students) with an introduction to environmental studies, a class focusing on global environmental problems viewed from a scientific perspective but treated within the larger context of political, economic and ethical concerns. Students then select additional courses from a specific track. These track course choices provide a significant focus on discipline-centered studies of the environment, and include areas such as environmental history and ethics, conservation biology, earth system science, environmental chimistry, literature of the environment, and environmental policy. Choices for the remainder of the requirements include a number of off-campus studies as well as a large selection of courses from the other tracks, and some from allied departments. Examples of the former include winter ecology, desert ecology, and tropical ecology, or participation in programs in Costa Rica, south India, Australia, or Superior Studies in northern Minnesota. The capstone seminar, required of ES majors, is also an option as one of the elective choices for the Concentration.

Current Offerings


ES 137: Introduction to Environmental Studies
ESPS 201: Global Environmental Politics
ES 202: The Culture of Nature
ES 222: Campus Ecology
BIES 226: Conservation Biology
ES 232: Environmental Policy and Regulation
ES 245: Global Climate Change
ES 255: Remote Sensing & Geographic Info. Systems
ES 270: Nature and the American Landscape
ESPS 276: Environmental Politics
ES 281: Food Justice
ES 283: Polar Literature
ES 381: Adv. Topic: Imaging Environmentalism
ES 381: Adv. Topic: Landscape & Regional Change in the Arctic
ES 399: Senior Seminar In Environmental Studies


FALL
EnvSt 381A:  Imagining Environmentalism  
(Arts & Humanities) - Jim Farrell
It’s been almost 50 years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, and the environmental movement has grown significantly. Most  Americans, however, are not environmentalists and most Americans live in ways that aren’t sustainable. This research seminar explores the environmental history of the last fifty years, and especially the ways in which words and images have affected and reflected changing American beliefs and behavior. Students will read intensively for the first half of the semester, before embarking on original research projects that illuminate the many ways that modern Americans are making environmental history.

EnvSt 381B:  Landscape and Regional Change in the Arctic
(Natural Science) - Charles Umbanhowar
Broad regional and landscape-level changes in the Arctic are increasingly in the news and include the northerly movement of the forest-tundra treeline, expansion of shrubs, and increasing numbers of shallow lakes as permafrost melts.  These changes have important regional and global implications for energy, carbon, and hydrological balance.  Students in this course will read and discuss the primary literature during the first half of the semester, and in the second half of the semester engage in a project to document landscape changes over the past 60 years in the low arctic tundra of northern Manitoba and potentially the Siberian Arctic.  Prior completion of ES 255 is helpful but not required.

JANUARY
EnvSt 281 Top: Food Justice
(Social Science) Michelle Garvey
With a pinch of unrest borne from inequitable food systems, a spoonful of revolutionary ideas and approaches to social equity, and a dash of inspiration from the environmental justice movement, food justice is a recipe for nutritional, environmental, and economic nourishment, on local and global scales.  The course will seek to unearth the root causes of food-related injustices, asking what roles poverty, trade policies, corporate power, technology, and energy production play in shaping some of the major “food groups” of the course: food deserts and swamps, farming practices and subsidies, water rights, diabestity epidemics, world hunger, biopiracy, and gendered foodways.  Students will also sample supplemental issues related to food justice, like how normalized habits in the U.S.—neocolonial culinary practices or meat and dairy consumption, for example—further marginalize groups already othered by dominant food systems.  While the course is designed to incite significant indigestion, it will attempt to sew the seeds of justice by serving up an array of discussion surrounding alternative consumption and production practices from seed to table, across the spectrum of personal and political solutions.  Finally, it will showcase groups, like Growing Power and La Via Campesina, who are organizing for food justice and waging some of the biggest food fights history has ever seen.

EnvSt 283 Polar Literature
The Earth’s polar regions are today experiencing the greatest environmental change anywhere on earth. This course explores the literary and artistic works from places of great natural beauty and consequently of extremes: Accounts from the turn-of–the-century heroic expeditions; early to mid 20th century photographers, writers and scientists; and the works of contemporary artists, photographers, writers, film makers and scientists who depict conditions and change in the polar regions today. GE: ALS-L   Satisfies course in ES Humanities area.


Biology/ES 286: Tropical Ecology and Sustainable Land Use in Costa Rica
(Natural Science) - Kathy Shea