ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE
Sustainability is a powerful framework for thinking about business, economics, politics and environmental impacts. An overview course, Environmental Policy & Governance will focus specifically on the policy elements of sustainability. With an emphasis on the American political system, the course will begin by exploring the way the American bureaucracy addresses environmental challenges. We will then use the foundations established through our understanding of the US system to study sustainable governance at the international level. With both US and international perspectives in place, we will then address a range of specific sustainability issues including land use, climate change, food and agriculture, air quality, water quality, and energy. Over the course of the semester, we will study current events through the lens of sustainability policy to help illustrate course concepts and theories.
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Instructor:
Christine Appah-Gyamfi
Info - 3 points
WORKSHOP IN SUSTAINABLE DEVPT
The upper level undergraduate Sustainable Development Workshop will be modeled on client based graduate-level workshops, but with more time devoted to methods of applied policy analysis and issues in Sustainable Development. The heart of the course is the group project on an issue of sustainable development with a faculty advisor providing guidance and ultimately grading student performance. Students would receive instruction on methodology, group work, communication and the context of policy analysis. Much of the reading in the course would be project-specific and identified by the student research teams. Offered in Fall and Spring.
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Instructor:
Jenna M Lawrence
CULPA: 6
Info
- 4 points
ETHICS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVPT
Aiming to improve human conditions within many diverse environments, sustainable development seeks to create, increase and perpetuate benefit and to cease, rectify and reverse harm. Sustainable development is consequently inextricable from the fabric of ethics, woven with determinations of benefit and harm to the existence and well-being of both humans and nonhumans. Underlying such determinations are those of self- and other-regarding motivation and behavior; and underlying these are still others, of sensitivity and rationality in decision-making, whether individual, social or public. Sustainable development is interlaced with and contingent upon all these determinations, at once prescriptive and judgmental, which can be called the ethics of sustainable development. This course is divided into four main sections, of which two are intended to show the ethical fallacies of unsustainable development, and two, the ethical pathways of sustainable development. The first section focuses upon ethically problematic basic assumptions, including human (species) hegemony, happy (hedonic) materialism, and selective (data) denial. The second focuses upon ethically problematic ensuing rationalizations, including those pertaining to damages, victims, consequences and situations of climatic, chemical, biological and ecological harm. The third section responds to these rationalizations with ethically vital considerations of earth justice, environmental justice, culturally-based ethics, and sector-based ethics (water, food, place and climate ethics). Finally, the fourth section responds to the initial, longstanding problematic assumptions with a newly emergent ethical paradigm, comprising biotic wholeness, environmental integrity and the deliberative zero-goal. Tying all sections together is the central theme: to be sustainable, development must be ethical. Reflecting the collaborative quality of the field of sustainable development, the course extends to readings whose authors have all pursued their work at intersections of science and ethics, environment and ethics, policy and ethics, business and ethics, and sustainable development and ethics.
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Instructor:
Adela J Gondek
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
DISASTERS AND DEVELOPMENT
Prerequisites: EESC 2330; SDEV W2300. Human welfare status is very unevenly distributed throughout the globe - some of us live very comfortable lives, others remain in desperate poverty showing little progress away from their condition. Between are countries that are rapidly developing and converging toward the welfare of the richest. At all levels of economic development human activities place significant pressure on the environment and threatens all of Earth’s vital functions and support systems for human life. This challenge requires timely responses based on solid understanding of the human/environment interface, technological and economic approaches to mitigate adverse effects on the environment, and routes to understanding the complex dynamics of the coupled human/natural systems that can chart a pathway to improvement in the lives of the poorest and continued well-being for those who have achieved prosperity without forcing natural systems into decline or massive fluctuation. This course offers undergraduate students, for the first time, a comprehensive course on the link between natural disaster events and human development at all levels of welfare. It explores the role that natural disasters might have and have had in modulating development prospects. Any student seriously interested in sustainable development, especially in light of climate change, must study the nature of extreme events - their causes, global distribution and likelihood of future change. This course will cover not only the nature of extreme events, including earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts but also their transformation into disaster through social processes. It will ultimately help students to understand the link between such extreme events, the economic/social shock they represent and development outcomes. The course will combine careful analysis of the natural and social systems dynamics that give rise to disasters and examine through group learning case studies from the many disasters that have occurred in the first decade of the 21st century. Offered in the Spring (odd years only).
- 3 points
ENERGY LAW
This course concerns the regulation of energy, energy resources, and energy facilities. Among the topics will be the regulation of rates and services; the roles of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the state public utility commissions; and the interaction with environmental law. Attention will be devoted to energy resources (such as oil, natural gas and coal) and to generating, transmission and distribution facilities. The current and future roles of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and nuclear energy will receive special attention, as will the regulation and deregulation of electricity.
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Instructor:
Michael Gerrard
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
GIS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMNT
This course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical concepts underlying GIS systems and to give students a strong set of practical skills to use GIS for sustainable development research. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a system of computer software, data and analysis methods used to create, store, manage, digital information that allow us to create maps and dynamic models to analyze the physical and social processes of the world. Through a mixture of lectures, readings, focused discussions, and hands-on exercises, students will acquire an understanding of the variety and structure of spatial data and databases, gain knowledge of the principles behind raster and vector based spatial analysis, and learn basic cartographic principles for producing maps that effectively communicate a message. Student will also learn to use newly emerging web based mapping tools such as Google Earth, Google Maps and similar tools to develop on-line interactive maps and graphics. The use of other geospatial technologies such as the Global Positioning System will also be explored in this class. Case studies examined in class will draw examples from a wide ranges of GIS applications developed to assist in the development, implementation and evaluation of sustainable development projects and programs. On completion of the course, students will: 1. use a variety of GIS software programs to create maps and reports; 2. develop a sound knowledge of methods to search, obtain, and evaluate a wide variety of spatial data resources; 3. develop skills needed to determine best practices for managing spatial data resources; 4. use GIS to analyze the economic, social and environmental processes underlying the concept of building a sustainable world; 5. Gain an understanding of the limits of these technologies and make assessments of uncertainty associated with spatial data and spatial analysis models. Offered in the fall and spring.
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Instructor:
Linda I Pistolesi
Info - 3 points
SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH
Sustainable development majors and special concentrators must register for this independent study to use internship hours for the practicum credit. Students must consult with their program adviser and department before registering. Offered fall, spring and summer.
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Instructor:
Adela J Gondek
CULPA: 2 Info - 1-3 points
QUAL RESEARCH METHODS SDEV
Students of sustainable development are faced with an array of global challenges that warrant scholarly inquiry. Social science questions are particularly well suited for qualitative research. This course will provide an overview of social science research methods, with a focus on building a toolkit for undergraduate students. We begin with an overview of the science of knowing. How do we generate scientific hypotheses in the social sciences, and then how can we find out whether those hypotheses are accurate? An exploration of a range of qualitative research methods will occupy the majority of our class time, including interviewing, case studies, questionnaires, surveys, coding, and participant observation. Toward the end of the course we consider how mixed methods allow for the integration of quantitative tools in the social sciences. Throughout, students will both study and practice these research methods, experimenting to better understand the strengths and challenges associated with each approach. The course will end with poster presentations in which students share their own research and justify the methods they have employed.
The New York City Watershed: From Commun
The NYC Watershed
The New York City Watershed: From Community Displacement to
Collaboration and Climate Adaptation
brings students to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to learn first hand from researchers and practitioners who help supply over ten million New Yorkers with safe and abundant drinking water while also working to build social, economic and environmental capital in the towns and villages located in the watershed surrounding the city’s reservoirs – all against a backdrop of increasing climate-related disruption.
The class will learn how New York City and a coalition of upstate watershed communities worked to end nearly a century of mutual resentment, displacement and extraction by entering into the
Watershed Agreement of 1997
, which has become a widely renowned model for collaborative and equitable water resources management planning in the twenty-five years since its completion. Students will engage with several of the Watershed Agreement’s original negotiators and with the local elected officials, agency staff and non-profit leaders who implement its signature “
multi-barrier
” strategy for drinking water protection through open space preservation, support for sustainable farming practices and investments in clean water infrastructure and sustainable economic growth in watershed communities. They will also learn how increases in storm intensity and warming driven by climate change threaten to upset the delicate balance between New York City’s need for safe drinking water and the socio-economic interests of upstate watershed communities.
Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, multi-stakeholder plans for water resource management and host community benefits in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world.
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Instructor:
Marcia N Macedo
Info - 1 points
Building Climate Justice: Co-Creative Co
BUILDING CLIMATE JUSTICE
This course will educate students and support effective coastal resilience planning and climate justice through social and data science learning and data acquisition and analysis, making use of emerging technologies and best practices for collaboration with environmental and climate justice practitioners.
Instruction is provided in two areas: i. Climate adaptation planning & climate justice; and, ii. Data science: acquisition, analysis and visualization. Students and instructors will work with participating community-based climate and environmental justice organizations to collect and analyze biological, geographic and socio-economic data relevant to local resilience needs. Once this data has been acquired or generated and quality-assured, the students and community partner organizations will prepare it for presentation to federal, state and local planning officials, to help ensure that the resilience goals and related concerns identified by our community partners will be fully reflected in future planning by those officials.
Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, data-informed, multi-stakeholder plans for coastal resilience and ecosystem restoration in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world. Successful completion of this course will partially fulfill the
Analysis and Solutions to Complex Problems
coursework requirement within the Undergraduate Major in Sustainable Development.
- 3 points