In this course we will consider the historical, social, and political life of nature in its many guises and from an anthropological perspective. What is the relationship between resource control and the consolidation of power? How have social movements and development agencies mobilized ideas of participatory conservation to achieve their goals, and how have these same concepts been used to exclude or to reproduce inequality? We will explore themes such as the relationship between race, nature, and security; intellectual property and bioprospecting; and the lived effects of the many “green,” “sustainable,” and “eco-tourism” projects now attracting foreign travelers around the world. Additionally, the course will introduce students unfamiliar with socio-cultural anthropology to ethnographic research methods, ethical dilemmas, and the craft of ethnographic writing.

Exploring the relationship between art and the environment, this course will focus on the land of the United States as it has been shaped into forms ranging from landscape paintings to suburban lawns, national parks, and our own Wellesley College campus. Among the questions we will consider are: What is “nature”? What do we value in a landscape and why? How are artists, architects, and landscape designers responding to environmentalist concerns?

This course is a combination of “What's that wildflower?” and “Why does it grow over there and not here?” We begin by examining large-scale patterns of plant diversity from an evolutionary and phylogenetic perspective and then shift to an ecological perspective. Along the way, we zoom in to specific concepts and processes that help us understand overall patterns. Laboratories will primarily be taught in the field and greenhouses and will include plant identification, observational and experimental studies, and long-term study of forest communities on the Wellesley campus. Laboratories will also include aspects of experimental design and data analysis. The goal of the course is not only to train students in botany and plant ecology, but to engage them in the world of plants every time they step outside.

The emergent structure and function of ecosystems are regulated by feedbacks between biological and physical systems from the microscopic to the global scale. We will study how ecosystems cycle carbon and nutrients and how the energy balance of ecosystems influences climate. We will also examine the role that humans play in managing, creating, and using services from ecosystems in our current era of rapid global change. Synthesizing these concepts, we consider the role of protected areas in preserving ecosystem functioning. Students will develop statistical skills working with authentic long-term ecosystem ecology datasets. Students in this course will develop independent data analysis projects that include scientific communication through presentations, writing, and visual displays of data.

This course has a required co-requisite Laboratory - BISC 307L/ES 307L.

This is a required co-requisite laboratory for BISC 307/ES 307.

Tropical forests and coral reefs are among the most fascinating and diverse ecosystems, but unfortunately face multiple threats. In this seminar, brief lectures will provide a baseline understanding of these ecosystems and the key processes that shape them. However, the main focus will be the discussion of important papers in the field. Students will present papers from the primary literature that illustrate how these ecosystems function, why they are struggling and what can be done to preserve and restore them. We will pay particular attention to the observational, experimental and analytical approaches that are used in this field of study, and how science informs conservation decisions. The final project involves writing a research proposal.

This course will focus on the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. As greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased, the oceans have absorbed more than 93% of the excess heat and roughly ¼ of the carbon dioxide. The triple threat of warming temperatures, depletions in oxygen, and drops in ocean pH have led to dramatic effects on ocean ecosystems. Students will analyze the primary literature to examine 1) how these stressors are affecting physiology, demography, phenology, and distributions of marine species separately and when acting together, 2) the potential for adaptation/evolution, 3) what lessons can be learned from the paleorecord, and 4) the impacts on coastal communities and nations. The course incorporates student-led seminar-style discussions, and a final synthetic project where teams will present evidence for the impacts of climate change on a particular marine ecosystem.

Who else lives in human-dominated environments, and how do plants and animals interact with landscapes that people have modified or even completely restructured? How does the diversity and abundance of species in these habitats affect the health and resilience of these ecosystems, including the humans? And how might human interventions influence the persistence of other species in an area? In this course we will build our collective understanding of biodiversity and explore how this understanding can inform the design and management of spaces we share. We will consider habitats from agricultural landscapes to suburban parks to buildings, and connect directly with diverse species and habitats on our remarkable campus.

This course examines ecology’s intersection with cinema and media studies. Amidst climate change, ecological theorists have complicated boundaries between nature and technology and between humans and nonhumans. We will focus on the intersection of these ecological conversations with cinema and media studies. This course will consider a range of media, from mushrooms to cyborgs; explore cinematic innovations aimed at depicting nonhuman actors; discuss how media create their own environments; and cover topics like digital waste. Course readings will include a range of contemporary ecological perspectives, including texts from Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous Critical Theory. We will apply these ideas in discussions of recent films.

Elements and molecules interact with the environment producing global challenges such as climate change, ozone depletion, and heavy metal pollution. This course is a general introduction to the chemistry of such environmental problems, focusing on the chemical principles that regulate the effect, fate, and transport of chemicals in the environment. It explores how the structure of a chemical relates to its environmental impact and how interactions can be predicted through chemistry. Assignments will include working with real data-sets of elements in the environment, such as records of carbon in forests, oxygen in the ocean, and heavy metals in soils. Chem 103 is intended for students with very little prior chemistry experience. This course does not count towards the chemistry major or minor.

This course discusses the narrative challenges posed by the Anthropocene, the current era in history in which the impact of humans on the environment imperils the very future of our planet. Reading fictional and critical texts that have emerged in different parts of the world over the course of the last three decades, we will identify the fictional tools and aesthetic strategies that writers are exploring to address the climate catastrophe.  We will discuss what the traditions of writing about biocide are to which contemporary authors can turn when creating new narratives adequate to capture the environmental crisis. We will analyze the most prominent genres involved in “green writing” and will pay close attention to the ways authors deal with the tensions between the local and the global in their narratives.

When we talk about food, we think about personal passions, individual diets and eating behaviors, but we might also think about cultural traditions, consumption disparities and food insecurities, about public health and sustainability, animal rights, deforestation, and genome edited crops. Clearly, the topic challenges us to address difficult questions of intersectionality (of the personal and the political, the local and the global, the human and the non-human). In this seminar we will learn to translate academic discourses into public writing formats that might include op-eds, social media posts, (cook) book reviews, Wikipedia entries, restaurant reviews, and portraits of food activists.

This course considers the economic aspects of resource and environmental issues. After examining the concepts of externalities, public goods, and common property resources, we will discuss why traditional markets may fail and how to measure the cost and benefits of government intervention and environmental policy. Applications of these tools will be made to air and water pollution, renewable and nonrenewable resources, natural disasters, and global climate. We will compare various public policy responses, such as regulation, marketable permits, aid, and tax incentives. The course will include applications of these concepts to data from the real world.

Poor sanitation, inadequate waste management, contaminated water supplies and exposure to indoor air pollution affect millions of people in developing countries and pose continuing risks to their health. The objective of this course is to provide students with a set of theoretical, econometric and practical skills to estimate the causal impact of environmental policies and programs with a particular focus on less-developed countries. Examples from the readings will explore the effect of laws, NGO programs or natural experiments on environmental quality and sustainability. Students will learn to critically analyze existing studies and to gauge how convincingly the research identifies a causal impact. Students will use these skills to develop an evaluation plan for a topic of their choice at the end of the term.

From ancient pastoral to contemporary ecopoetry, how have literary texts made nature their subject? What can literature tell us about the diverse and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments? How do historical and cultural differences inflect writing about nature? Does the prospect of climate catastrophe impel writers to reimagine traditional genres? We’ll explore such questions through a broad selection of poetry and lyrical prose, countering circumscribed notions of environmental writing as a predominantly white or cis straight male realm and seeking to illuminate the vital connections between environmentalism and social and racial justice.

Readings from the English pastoral tradition and its classical roots; Shakespeare, the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins; foundational American poets Dickinson and Whitman; and a broad selection of 20th- and 21st-century poets such as Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, Audre Lorde, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Ed Roberson, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Pattian Rogers, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Annie Finch, dg nanouk okpik, Camille T. Dungy, Jennifer Chang, Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, Jericho Brown, and Tommy Pico. Prose by Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauret Savoy, and Helen Macdonald.

ENGR 121 engages students in understanding the applications of small-scale, sustainable energy technology in resource-limited regions where compact, robust, and low-cost systems for generating power are required. The technologies are focused primarily at the household level; students will explore the benefits and limitations of existing and proposed solutions. For each renewable energy technology studied, students will use hands-on lab experiences to deepen their understanding of the application’s function, gain an understanding of the fundamental physics governing them, and develop engineering estimation strategies to assess them. Methodologies for participatory development and co-creation will be explored in the context of evaluating the trade-offs for energy-related engineering projects. Students will learn to use life cycle assessment to analyze processes and products and look at energy infrastructure globally.

This course introduces environmental science through the lens of systems thinking. Given the staggering level of complexity found around us, a powerful approach in science is to simplify complex systems into key components that influence processes and provide predictive power. But how do we choose which factors to focus on? How disconnected are causes and effects? Although not a laboratory course, students will actively engage in data collection, analysis, and interpretation of systems ranging from energy in ecosystems to environmental toxins and human health. (Note that students may enroll in either ES 100 or ES 101, but not both.)

Environmental problems are some of the most complex issues that we face today, and addressing them requires skills and knowledge from a variety of scientific and non-scientific disciplines. This course seeks to provide the scientific foundation for approaching environmental problems. Using a systems-approach to problem formulation and solving, we will investigate environmental issues including soil degradation, human and natural energy flows, stratospheric ozone depletion, mercury pollution, and the conservation of biodiversity. The combined studio and laboratory format offers diverse approaches for understanding, applying, and constructing models to investigate the behavior of environmental systems as well as testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions.

This is a required co-requisite laboratory for ES 101.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Environmental Studies, with a focus on climate change. Major concepts that will be examined include: the state of scientific research, the role of science, politics, and economics in environmental decision-making, and the importance of history, ethics, and justice in approaching climate change. The central aim of the course is to help students develop the interdisciplinary research skills necessary to pose questions, investigate problems, and develop strategies that will help us address our relationship to the environment.

Geologic processes both rapid (earthquakes and landslides) and slow (mountain building and sea level rise) are intimately linked with sustaining the diversity of life on the planet. This course examines processes linked with the flow of energy and mass between the atmosphere, geosphere, and biosphere. Laboratory exercises, and field work provide authentic experiences to develop the skills needed to observe and model processes shaping our environment. Problem solving during class time fosters critical thinking and classroom debates between larger teams focus on research and communications skills by examining current issues in geosciences such as building and removing dams, and the science surrounding global climate change.

The humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences are indispensable to understanding the climate crisis. Drawing on perspectives from across the liberal arts, the course instructors will plumb the depths of the climate crisis and imagine the possible ways of responding to it. What can the role of climate in human history reveal about our uncertain future? How do social constructions, including race and gender, shape our understanding of this problem? How have diverse cultures of the world related to nature and climate and how can our own relationships to nature and climate inform our responses? Can the arts help us to reconceive the crisis? How can the sciences help us assess and adapt to our future climate? Can we leverage psychological processes to change individual attitudes toward the environment? By examining such questions, we aim for deeper knowledge, both of the climate crisis and of the power of liberal arts education.

Problems in environmental, health, and sustainability sciences are inherently transdisciplinary and require a diverse skill set to frame, analyze, and solve. This course will focus on developing a toolbox of skills including systems level thinking, field and analytical methods, biogeochemical analysis (natural waters, soils, and other environmental materials), and modeling with a goal of building a science-based foundation for the analysis of complex issues at the interface between humans and the environment. Students will conduct semester-long research projects and will present their results in a final poster session.

This course focuses on the social science explanations for why environmental problems are created, the impacts they have, the difficulties of addressing them, and the regulatory and other actions that succeed in mitigating them. Topics include: externalities and the politics of unpriced costs and benefits; collective action problems and interest-group theory; time horizons in decision-making; the politics of science, risk, and uncertainty; comparative political structures; and cooperation theory. Also addressed are different strategies for changing environmental behavior, including command and control measures, taxes, fees, and other market instruments, and voluntary approaches. These will all be examined across multiple countries and levels of governance.

Humans and their environment make up a complex and dynamic system. As with all ecological systems, key components are the availability and use of resources and the interactions with other species - both of which have important impacts on the nature and stability of the system itself. This course investigates these far-reaching concepts by examining topics such as the broad implications of thermodynamics, energy and material flows through human and natural systems, natural resource management, and the conservation of resources and biodiversity. We will also explore the role of science and technology in surmounting previous limits (e.g. energy use and agricultural yields), as well as the implications of inherent limits that may never be broken. Laboratory work will focus on quantitative skills and modeling tools used to examine a range of systems.

This course has a required co-requisite Laboratory - ES 220L.

Every religious culture regards the Earth as a site of sacrality, whether understood as the creation of the gods and thus intrinsically sacred, or as an entity through and with which the sacred interacts. In our time of escalating ecological disaster and runaway global heating, humans can claim these traditions as one way of placing our human wreckage of the planet into a larger critical perspective than the scientific warnings, corporate denials, and governmental temporizing that currently inform the environmental crisis. This course will introduce students to ideas of the terrestrial sacred and how humans should relate to it from a range of religious and spiritual traditions, including Native American, Biblical, Christian, Transcendentalist, and today’s ecological thinkers. Together we will assess the value and applicability of these diverse approaches to sacred earth for today’s ever more urgent crisis of global environmental disruption. No prior knowledge of or course work in Religious Studies is required.

This course will train students to use philosophical methods to engage in rigorous investigation of ethical issues concerning the environment. Topics may include the moral status of non-human entities, individual responsibility in the context of collective harms, climate grief, the ethics of parenthood during a climate crisis, and the ethics of environmental activism.

This course concerns a range of ethical and aesthetic questions about places, whether of natural or cultural significance. How should we understand the value of nature? Is it relative to human interests, or independent of them? What is nature in the first place, and how is it distinguished from culture? Is scientific or cultural knowledge relevant to the aesthetic experience of nature? Does “natural beauty” have a role to play in guiding environmental preservation? When we seek to preserve an ecosystem or a building, what exactly should we be aiming to preserve? Should the history of a place guide our interactions with it? How should we navigate conflicts between environmental and cultural preservation, especially as they intersect with issues of race and class? How should a changing climate affect our environmental values? We will investigate these questions, among others, in contexts from wilderness to parks, cities to ruins.

The Environmental Studies program runs a weekly reading group on changing topics. Readings will be chosen based on the interests of the participating students and faculty members. Students who enroll commit to coming to each week's discussion, preparing a set of responses to the week's reading, and, in collaboration with other group members, selecting some of the weekly topics and readings.

Addressing climate change means transitioning to a clean energy future by 2050. This course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study the prospects for such a transition. What technologies can pave the way to a clean energy future? What policies can hasten this transition and ensure it is advanced equitably? Can such a transition help pull people around the world out of poverty? What policies are necessary to ensure that a clean energy future also promotes energy democracy? Is there enough copper, lithium, and rare earth metals to support such a transition? Could growing dependency on these resources precipitate future conflicts over limited resources?

This course examines the relationship between nature and society in American history. The course will consider topics such as the decimation of the bison, the rise of Chicago, the history of natural disasters, and the environmental consequences of war. There are three goals for this course: First, we will examine how humans have interacted with nature over time and how nature, in turn, has shaped human society. Second, we will examine how attitudes toward nature have differed among peoples, places, and times, and we will consider how the meanings people give to nature inform their cultural and political activities. Third, we will study how these historical forces have combined to shape the American landscape and the human and natural communities to which it is home. While this course focuses on the past, an important goal is to understand the ways in which history shapes how we understand and value the environment as we do today.

An interdisciplinary seminar in which students work together in small groups to understand and develop solutions for current environmental problems. Each year, we focus on a given environmental issue of concern to our community, e.g., environmental implications of building design, energy use, or water quality. In particular, we work to understand its scientific background, the political processes that lead to potential solutions, and the ethical and environmental justice implications. Student-led research provides the bulk of the information about the issue and its role in our local environment; lectures and readings provide supplementary information about the local situation and the global context.

Social understandings of the relationship between human health and the environment are visible and malleable in moments of crisis, from industrial disasters, weather-related catastrophes, and political conflict, as everyday events like childbirth and routine sickness. But these understandings vary dramatically across time and community. This course addresses the complex dynamics at work in the representations of and responses to health and the environment that emerge during moments of crisis. By studying the way these constructions are shaped by social, political, technological, and moral contexts, we will analyze the role of nature, knowledge, ethics and power in such contemporary problems as human migration, hunger, debility, and disease.

The world around us is rich with aesthetic qualities. It is beautiful, awesome, enchanting, and sublime. Places have moods, vibes, atmospheres, and ambiances. How can we think rigorously and systematically about the aesthetics of the natural and built environment? What role, if any, should aesthetics play in environmentalism, environmental policy, and our relationship with the world we live in? This course will focus on contemporary philosophical work that seeks to answer these questions. Themes may include the place of science, imagination, history, and culture in aesthetic judgment, the role of aesthetics in conservation, and the relationship between aesthetics and climate change.

Focuses both on how to make and how to study environmental policy. Examines issues essential in understanding how environmental policy works and explores these topics in depth through case studies of current environmental policy issues. Students will also undertake an original research project and work in groups on influencing or creating local environmental policy.

For international environmental problems, widespread international cooperation is both important and quite difficult. Under what conditions have states been able to cooperate to solve international environmental problems? Most international efforts to address environmental problems involve international law-how does such law function? What types of issues can international environmental law address and what types can it not? This course addresses aspects of international environmental politics as a whole, with particular attention to the international legal structures used to deal with these environmental problems. Each student will additionally become an expert on one international environmental treaty to be researched throughout the course.

The stories we tell about the world make certain futures possible, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. This course reveals how Western historical, theoretical, and scientific ways of knowing understood both women and nature as inferior and thus needing to be controlled. Pushing back against the ideas of any inherent binary separations between sex/gender and nature/culture, we will examine feminist ecological possibilities for planetary futures. Learning from the intertwined histories of environment, race, and gender, that have led to both personal and global inequity and disaster, we will also engage solutions that imagine different futures. Recognizing that solutions to environmental problems require a feminist attunement, we can start to understand the implications that our ethical commitments have to the future of life on the planet.

Equine cultural studies has become one of the most exciting fields to emerge out of Critical Animal Studies for how it looks at the intersection of humans and horses across histories, cultures, and the humanities. This seminar will provide an introduction to Equine Cultural Studies through the lens of feminist studies in its focus on the boundaries between horses and humans. Some of the questions we explore include: Did Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) inspire the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention Against Cruelty to Animals as well as the backlash against Victorian women’s corsets? Is there a feminist way to ride a horse? How does feminist thought offer a unique interrogation of race, flesh, and femaleness that sheds new light on equine studies? How has the horse been an integral partner in therapeutic healing in both Native and Indigenous communities as well as in non-Native communities?

The first course in a two-semester investigation of a significant research project, culminating in the preparation of a thesis and defense of that thesis before a committee of faculty from the Environmental Studies department. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with thesis research (365) in the second semester. This route does not lead to departmental honors.

The second course in a two-semester investigation of a significant research project, culminating in the preparation of a thesis and defense of that thesis before a committee of faculty from the Environmental Studies department. This route does not lead to departmental honors.

This course examines the politics of environmental issues in the United States. The course has two primary goals: First, to introduce students to the institutions, stakeholders, and political processes important to debates over environmental policy at the federal level. Second, to develop and practice skills of analyzing and making decisions relevant to environmental politics and policy. Drawing on the literature of environmental politics and policy, this course will consider how environmental issues are framed in political discourse, various approaches to environmental advocacy and reform, and the contested role of science in environmental politics. The course will be organized around environmental case studies, including endangered species conservation, public lands management, air and water pollution, and toxics regulation.

Tax carbon? Label genetically modified crops? Ban endocrine disruptors? In this course, an interdisciplinary capstone experience for the ES major, we will engage with such questions and related environmental sustainability issues as public writers. Students will choose one environmental issue, which will be the focus of their environmental “beat” during the semester. They will draw on an interdisciplinary toolset from environmental studies to analyze and communicate the scientific, economic, political, and ethical dimensions of pressing policy issues. Students will conduct independent research to produce weekly articles, such as op-eds, blog posts, press releases, book reviews, policy memos, and interviews with environmental professionals. Class sessions will be organized as writing workshops focused on the interdisciplinary analysis and content of student work.