2010-2011 Academic Catalog

Feb 05, 2025

2010-2011 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

EN 101 - Sustainability Science: Environment, Society and Technology

Sustainability science, an emerging field focused on the dynamic interactions between humans and the environment, is defined by the urgent problems it addresses rather than the multiple disciplines it employs. Urgency for a socio-technical transition to a more sustainable society is increasing as risks associated with climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and other types of environmental degradation are increasingly threatening human well-being, destabilizing human society’s and disrupting the earth’s systems. Despite this urgency, the complexity and varying scales of the interconnected human-environment systems are preventing society from implementing social change to effectively confront these problems and transition toward sustainability. This transdisciplinary science course examines this complexity by focusing on scientific and societal linkages among environmental science, technological development, and attempts to reduce environmental impacts. By integrating many different perspectives, this course is interdisciplinary, intersectoral, international, intergenerational, interracial, and interscalar. Among the interconnected problems to be examined are: (1) climate change, energy, and associated anthropogenic disruption of the carbon cycle (2) agriculture, food production, land-use decisions, and human alteration of the nitrogen cycle, and (3) growing disruptions in the hydrologic cycle resulting in increasingly daunting challenges of water resource management. A required lab/field-trip/discussion section provides students with opportunities for observing and applying sustainability science issues in and around the Clark/Worcester community. This is a required course for all Environmental Science majors and minors, and this course requires an additional weekly laboratory session.

Instructor: Ms. Stephens

When Offered: Offered every spring semester

Faculty: Jennie Stephens, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of International Development, Community, and Environment