| Collaborating Programs and Departments Agriculture and Food Systems |
Welcome to Environmental Studies! Immerse yourself in an exciting academic adventure where you'll have the opportunity to design your own degree, delve into coursework from various departments across several schools, and make your college degree your own. From protecting wildlife to promoting sustainability, from understanding climate change to addressing environmental racism, our interdisciplinary approach offers endless possibilities for exploration and real impact on the world!
Students in our Environmental Studies program investigate a range of environmental concerns through coursework, field studies, and individual research, including:
- the implications of climate change
- water scarcity
- genetically modified organisms in food chains
- instabilities in the global energy market
- the deteriorating infrastructure of the urban built environment
- the uneven distribution of environmental costs along axes of inequality.
As environmental concerns increase in frequency and severity in the 21st century, we are all aware of the need to address underlying social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of environmental change. Yet, the relationships between humans and their environments have grown increasingly complex, and it is clear that no single approach is going to resolve any of these problems. Our Environmental Studies program goes beyond a narrow focus on the physical sciences or emphases on purely technological solutions to solve environmental problems, and recognizes that insights from the social sciences and humanities are not to be simply integrated into a physical science approach. Instead, the social sciences, physical sciences, and the humanities must each help form the foundation for how we answer questions and, indeed, which questions we should be asking in the first place.
Environmental Studies:
