In this course, students examine the Earth as a system of integrated biogeochemical cycles (such as water, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur). Students come to understand these cycles by integrating relevant aspects of biology, geology, chemistry, and physics. Students learn how human activities can affect these natural biogeochemical cycles and inquire into potential system reactions to such impacts. This course also introduces students to the ways in which science is integrated into the interdisciplinary process of environmental studies.

This is the required introductory course for the Environmental Policy and Decision Making minor/major, an interdisciplinary program designed to help students integrate their major area of study with an understanding of how individual and collective decisions interact with the environment. The course uses approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to introduce the ways in which human social, political, economic, and cultural systems interact with systems in the non-human environment. The concept of "sustainability" is explored by considering the tension between the limiting principles in our world and competing human values over the question of what should be sustained for the future.

This course provides a foundation for upper-level policy electives in the Environmental Policy and Decision-Making Program by focusing on institutions and participation in environmental policy. Students examine both domestic and international arenas, with particular attention to the ways in which citizens engage with environmental issues in both familiar and unfamiliar places. Students in the course also learn tools and strategies for understanding environmental issues in diverse contexts, including discussion of different values and perspectives as well as changes in policies over time.

This course, using a tools-focused approach, provides a foundation in basic environmental sciences. The course emphasizes the following concepts: field skills, environmental sampling, data collection, data analysis, and development of scientific questions. Students gain experience applying these concepts in lab and field-based settings. For example, experiential opportunities may include air quality monitoring, water sampling, ecosystem characterization, biodiversity assessment, and spatial analysis. This course is intended for students not majoring in mathematics or the natural sciences.

Writing and presenting science clearly means thinking clearly about science. This course addresses the two main challenges of science literacy: (1) the struggle to understand, and (2) the struggle to communicate that understanding. This course provides students the opportunity to engage with the primary, scientific literature on a range of current interdisciplinary topics relevant to environmental science. Each topic is explored via case studies and review articles. In order to understand and discuss topics and readings, students apply environmental science methods and tools.

Most of human learning occurs across the lifespan and takes place outside of school settings. Schools are but one part of a large educational infrastructure that includes informal learning environments such as families and friends, libraries, museums, the outdoors, workplaces, community-based organizations, the media, and the Internet. Informal learning environments are powerful sites for learning because they support rich social interactions and allow people to engage their own learning goals and generate their own highly personalized understandings. Nearby nature sites like parks, green spaces and gardens can support exploration, restoration, and civic action. Students in this course examine learning and teaching in informal learning environments, in particular in nearby nature settings. Students critically examine how their own experiences and beliefs impact their engagement in nearby nature settings and how they view and define "nature."

This course provides a basic introduction to environmental policymaking in the U.S. system of government, which includes the processes by which laws, rules and regulations, agency guidelines, court decisions, and international agreements are established. The course explores several major areas of environmental concern. For each area, the class considers the human environmental impacts of concern, the political and policy history causing and addressing the concern, the way in which the current policies in this area work at various levels of government, and the way in which new legal interpretations and other forms of policy change might develop. Special attention is given to the way in which policy affects local and regional environmental issues here in the Pacific Northwest. Field trips and guest speakers are often incorporated into this class.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) comprises a complex system of tools that facilitate the collection, display and analysis of geospatial (location-based) data. A GIS is effective in supporting work across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Specific applications include environmental sciences, public health, urban planning, conservation biology, geology, digital humanities, military and education, and continues to increase as technology advances. This course is designed for students who have little or no experience with GIS and want to gain an understanding of the technology. In this course, students gain a deeper understanding of the core concepts of the field and learn how to apply them in specialized areas of study. This course will use ArcGIS for Desktop software and include an introduction to ArcGIS Online tools to support project-based exercises in a hands-on lab environment. No previous experience with GIS is required.

This course explores current real world problems of environmental justice -- the struggle of marginalized communities to manage profound environmental problems in ways that are often rendered invisible in the broader political landscape. The focus of the course will vary each time it is offered, depending on current debates and issues of concern in the greater Tacoma area and further afield. Consistently, it will explore the ways in which poverty and racism interact with problems of natural resource use, extraction, and management. This will include, but is not limited to, air and water pollution, toxic chemicals, infrastructure, human and environmental health, and land rights. To do this, the course draws on community-based and interdisciplinary expertise to enrich understanding of these complex issues from multiple perspectives and through different kinds of knowledge. It will also address strategies for activism and involvement in environmental issues.

Environmental justice can only occur with rich and complex understandings of the intersections of culture, ecology, politics, history, and community. This course seeks to understand the persistence of environmental racism in an inclusive and historicized landscape, one that considers multiple forms of knowledge and expertise and embodies the idea that imagining a more equitable, sustainable future is not possible without a grounded notion of the past and its present articulations. The course will use transdisciplinary perspectives to trace economic and environmental processes over time, situate them within rich cultural bodies of knowledge, and consider the differential impacts of inequalities on a range of regions and peoples. Students will undertake place-based case studies, examinations of broad patterns, commodity- and resource-specific process tracing, and engage with the surrounding human and natural environment. Consequently, this course demands a full critical engagement across disciplines and landscapes, and with each other and the local community.

Detailed study of agents, processes, and products involved in landscape development and water movement at the Earth's surface. Special emphasis is on the effect of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) climate on landforms.

This course focuses on the decision making processes that shape the implementation of environmental policy in the United States. Environmental decisions are no longer the exclusive province of technical experts employed by government bureaucracies. Pioneering efforts to involve groups of environmental stakeholders (such as environmental groups, property owners, business interests, tribes, and officials at all levels of government) in environmental decision making began 30 years ago. Now environmental decisions are often held to a legal and public expectation that deliberations will be public and participatory. Students in this course will develop an understanding of the institutions shaping these decisions, the theory behind various decision making approaches, the relative effectiveness of different approaches, and the skills needed to make decisions in these complex policy contexts. This class includes group work on case-based projects and policy simulations.

This course surveys the wide range of modern energy sources, and considers the prospects for their future supply and availability. Each energy source is explored from a wide range of perspectives, including: its origin, geographic distribution, energy density, energy "type" (gravity, chemical, radioactive, solar), processing, refining, or transformation from one form of mass or energy to another, transport (both pre- and post- processing/transformation), environmental costs (upstream and downstream- lifecycle considerations), and economic costs (cost/unit of energy produced). As ongoing events dictate, energy topics in the news are also considered, including economic, political, and environmental issues of the day.

This course provides an introduction to the study of a variety of the Earth's natural resources, and the environmental impacts of their extraction and use. The course focuses on the origin of different types of resources including metallic and non-metallic mineral deposits, and building stone. A discussion/lab session is scheduled for in-class activities, labs and field trips. Course readings center around case studies from the primary scientific literature.

This course will prepare students for a trip to sites in the Columbia River basin of significance to environmental policy decisions and future of salmon and guided rafting trip on the Middle Fork Salmon River. The partial credit course will cover safety issues, outline pertinent environmental discussions, and promote bonding.

This course focuses on the management of water resources. More specifically, it addresses the tensions and interactions between hydrological principles, economics, and politics during water management decision making processes. This course challenges students to develop an understanding of the interrelationship between different disciplinary fields of knowledge, including those in the physical and social sciences. Students learn about a wide variety of natural processes that determine the distribution and quality of the world's freshwater resources. Students also learn about the many ways that freshwater resources are affected by human activities at a global, national and local scale.

A broad review of quantitative and qualitative biogeochemical methods used in the study of environmental science. The course will focus on isotopic and elemental analyses of geological and biological materials with applications to a range of questions. Examples include; energy flow, nutrient cycling, animal migration, and paleoceanographic conditions. The course readings will draw heavily upon case studies from the primary scientific literature.

Cross-listed as ENVR/GEOL 324.

This course is a survey of natural and human-influenced geological "catastrophes," and focuses primarily on four hazards that are relevant to the Puget Sound region: (1) volcanic eruptions, (2) earthquakes, (3) floods, (4) landslides. It examines the relationship of science and other fields, including economics and politics, in the development of policy to help us cope with potential catastrophes. The course reviews some of the scientific literature bearing on each disaster, discusses points of controversy with the scientific community, and considers ways in which our society - primarily government - uses this information to develop hazard mitigation strategies and regulations. Each unit concludes with analysis and discussion of one or more case studies.

Conserving wild places through the creation of national parks is not only a reflection of environmental priorities, but a profoundly political undertaking that can bring significant changes to local landscapes. This course examines the intersection of protected areas and political priorities in local, regional, and global context, including discussion of issues such as tourism, human-wildlife conflict, forced displacement, and community-based conservation.

Global climate change is considered by many to be the most significant environmental challenge of the 21st century. Unchecked, the continued accumulation of greenhouse gases over this century is projected to eventually warm the planet by about 6 to 14 °F, with associated impacts on the environment, economy, and society. This course explores the economic characteristics of the climate change problem, assesses national and international policy design and implementation issues, and provides a survey of the economic tools necessary to evaluate climate change policies. It is largely discussion-oriented and thus requires a high degree of participation by students in the classroom. Cross-listed as ECON/ENVR 327.

This course examines the history of the Cold War era nuclear testing and uranium extraction in the American West, in order to understand the environmental, cultural, political, and health ramifications of these activities. Using nuclear history as a case study, it explores interdisciplinary methodologies for gathering and studying narratives about human relationships with the environment.

This course examines the effects of water use, dams, and habitat on salmon in the Columbia basin through multi-disciplinary perspectives including art, history, policy, and ecology. Water and Wild Nature in the Columbia Basin begins in the summer. A series of readings will prepare students for a two week summer study away component and optional one week rafting trip on the Middle Fork Salmon river. Pacific Northwest history, identity, Lower and Upper Columbia tribes' cultural practices, climate change, and ecology will inform this course's content.

The preservation of biodiversity--of the variety of living organisms here on Earth--has recently become a major focus of scientific and environmental concern and policy. This course draws on perspectives from history, ethics, environmental studies, and conservation biology to explore the ways in which ideas and values have shaped scientific approaches to biodiversity and to the current biodiversity crisis.

This course examines the wide variety of geologic, physical, chemical, and biologic evidence for the nature, duration, timing, and causes of climate change throughout the long history of our planet. In general, the course proceeds chronologically through geologic time. As the course approaches the modern world, students examine the paleoclimate record in progressively greater detail, and consider increasingly complex explanations for the patterns seen. Because of the great breadth (interdisciplinary range) and great depth (wide range of time periods) of the topics considered, students use a wide range of sources, including semi-popular articles, textbooks, and primary literature. The lab focuses on examining a variety of primary sources of paleoclimatic information and techniques of data analysis, such as tree rings, pollen, and stable isotopes.

This course combines a field-based learning opportunity in conservation and development with training in how to conduct research on environmental issues in diverse cultural contexts. This means students will gain exposure to both scientific and social scientific fieldwork on environmental issues at the intersection of conservation and development. The course will include classroom meetings and preparatory research prior to spending 2-3 weeks at a field site of the instructor's choosing.

This course examines the intersections of a Buddhist worldview with environmentalism, broadly understood. It asks what affitnities exist between the two, and what the implications of such affinities might be for engendering a sense of both place and engagement in environmental context. The course explores these intersections both philosophically and experientially, engaging with local nature and Buddhist practice, to deepen the possibilities of understanding shared ground between the two.

Investigating issues related to environmental policy and decision-making requires a varied toolkit of interdisciplinary research and analysis methodologies that can be applied at the community level. This course introduces students to major social science methodologies and explores their applicability for EPDM research, including: historical and archival research, folkloric and narrative analysis, community based participatory research, and cultural geography. Each student designs and implements their own community-based field research project, making use of at least two of the methods introduced in the course.

This course familiarizes students with the variety of ways citizens engage in public decision making on environmental issues central to the health of Puget Sound. The course combines nearly 24 hours of class and field experience over the course of a single weekend (Friday evening to Sunday evening) with additional meeting hours during three weeknight meetings. Students study a single regional watershed from source to mouth, gaining an understanding of the role citizens play in shaping the environmental policy of a particular place. The class employs written case materials developed to highlight particularly successful examples of citizen engagement in environmental policy in the watershed, mini-lectures by academic experts on the relevant political and environmental contexts of the cases, discussion panels with key stakeholders and decision makers on these issues, and field experiences designed to reveal the applied context of the issues under consideration. A select number of local community members may participate in the class on a non-credit basis.

This course is designed to familiarize students with environmental laws and land use designations governing selected environmental issues central to the health of Puget Sound. The course combines nearly 24 hours of class and field experience over the course of a single weekend with additional meeting hours during three weeknight meetings. Students study a single regional watershed from source to mouth to gain a place-based appreciation for the effects of laws and land use designations on the environment. The class employs written case materials developed to highlight particular environmental issues in the watershed, mini-lectures by academic experts on the relevant legal and environmental contexts, discussion panels with key stakeholders and decision makers on these issues, and field experiences designed to reveal the applied context of the issues under consideration. A select number of local community members may participate in the class on a non-credit basis.

This course is designed to familiarize students with the variety of ways individuals and communities can make choices and take actions that lead to environmental and social improvements in our surroundings. The course includes five 2-hour discussion sessions on sustainability topics, one weekend field trip and one major written project. These sessions include shared readings, facilitated discussion, mini-lectures by guest speakers, and even hands-on applications. Puget Sound students in this class will be joined by a select number of local community members who will participate in the class on a non-credit basis.

This course provides students with opportunities to interact with environmental professionals during on-campus panels and job site visits. The course also provides context for reflection on these experiences in ways that link professional development to academic study in environmentally related fields. Class readings and discussion examine the many forces shaping not only opportunities for "green jobs," but also our views on work and its meaning. Workshops for this course help students develop professional networks as well as job seeking skills and materials.

This course explores the ways in which different spiritual traditions (both secular and religious) consider and practice with the human relationship to the natural environment. In this light, nature is a space worth exploring in both intellectual and experiential ways, and offers the opportunity to consider how connections and relationships are formed between people and the places in which they live.

This course examines examples of ways in which different religions and spiritual systems think about nature as a resource, place, and context for beliefs and practices. How do organized belief systems relate to the natural environment, and what does this mean for the place of humans within it?

This quarter credit activity course is designed to give students the opportunity to gain knowledge in a variety of topics related to gardening and food production. It meets for 2 hours each week beginning three weeks into the semester, 24 contact hours over the entire course. Students also spend an hour each week independently in the garden, gaining further experience and maintaining the plants for which the course is responsible. Contact hours are divided between knowledge sharing, hands-on experience, and field trips to gardens in Tacoma. The course is student led, allowing for a peer-to-peer spread of knowledge, and gives students the opportunity to foster a sense of independence and accountability. Students who participate in the course one year have the opportunity to lead it in future years under the supervision of a knowledgeable faculty member. A select number of local community members may participate in the class on a non-credit basis.

This course facilitates student teams competing in the Environmental Challenge (EC) program, a student competition to prepare and present an optimal solution to a complex "true to life" environmental problem. The EC is part of the conference hosted by the Pacific Northwest International Section (PNWIS) of the Air and Waste Management Association (AWMA), a professional organization of environmental professionals. The course requires teams of 3-5 students to submit a written proposal addressing the EC question, participation in the PNWIS three-day conference, and oral presentation and defense of the proposal at the conference. The proposals are evaluated by environmental professionals from industrial, regulatory, consulting, and academic fields. The EC problem is of current value, representative of the location of the conference, and requires a multidisciplinary approach for success. To be successful in the EC teams must seek technical and scientific analyses as well as solutions with appropriate regulatory compliance and resolution with political and community stakeholders. To be successful at the competition, student teams must research the problem background, as well as the technical, social, economic, and political aspects of the situation while staying apprised of ongoing current events related to the problem. A diversity of student backgrounds and majors are encouraged to enroll and often produce the most successful teams.

Meditation in many forms is practiced in many religious and secular traditions around the world. In this course, students explore the intersections of mindfulness and awareness, contemplation, and meditative walking and observation as a way to become more aware of their own internal thought processes. Meditation can also help students to be more focused, less stressed, and more aware of others and the place in which they reside.

Eating food is critical to everyday life, and yet many have the luxury to treat daily sustenance as an afterthought. For some, the connections between food and the larger environmental and social systems that sustain human life are largely invisible. This experiential course explores these interactions through an extensive and intensive investigation of the Northwest food system from farm to fork. For three weeks, the course travels among the campuses of Whitman College, the University of Puget Sound, and Willamette University, tracing the themes of soil, labor, and money across the Northwest foodscape. Beginning at Whitman, students focus on the political economy of the food system, training a global lens on the industrial wheat farms, chicken processing plants, and large-scale dairy operations of the Walla Walla Valley. At the University of Puget Sound, the focus shifts to urban agriculture and food justice, tracing the three themes through questions of poverty and access to food, urban planning, and the challenges of growing food in the city of Tacoma. Finally, the course concludes at Willamette where students will live and work at Zena Forest and Farm, putting the methods of sustainable agriculture into practice and exploring the opportunities and obstacles associated with smaller-scale organic agriculture in the Willamette Valley.

Crosslisted as IPE/ENVR 360.

The course examines the intersection of environmental issues with politics and policy-making on a global as well as a local scale. It explores international structures and efforts to deal with environmental problems, a wide range of particular environmental challenges such as climate change and conservation, and the different experiences of individual countries in trying to use and manage their natural resources. Throughout, the relationships between political and natural systems are explored, with a particular focus on the ways in which politics and policy can both produce effective strategies and new difficulties for handling environmental challenges.

This course is designed to provide a general overview of natural history museum uses and practices. Natural history museums were the primary locus for biological research in the 18th and 19th centuries. They represent invaluable archives of Earth's biodiversity; their vast collections of specimens provide a temporal and geographic record of life unmatched by written or illustrated accounts. They document variation -- the foundation of evolution -- in time and space and allow biologists to make comparisons that are difficult or impossible to observe in the field. Natural history museums are an incredible resource for researchers with interests in evolution, ecology, zoology, botany and environmental change. They are phenomenal venues for teaching and engaging students ranging from young children to senior citizens. And they are sources of inspiration for scientists and artists. In this course students learn the history of natural history collections, engage in the practices of natural history museums, learn the myriad ways that natural specimens have been used in research, and do an independent project.

This course analyzes one current environmental issue from the perspectives of the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Students collectively examine the case from different disciplinary perspectives in an attempt to understand issues in their full complexity. Students conduct an in-depth research project on issues and present their findings in an open forum. Students formulate their own problem-solving approach to environmental problems and recognize how their approach connects to the work of others.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Work experience related to an academic program in environmental studies. Actual placements are determined by mutual agreement between the student and program faculty.

Work experience related to an academic program in environmental studies. Actual placements are determined by mutual agreement between the student and program faculty.