Environmental Studies

Think about all of your encounters with animals in the last 24 hours. Did you pet one? See one? Eat one? Watch one on YouTube? Read about one? Imagine one? Our encounters with animals occur all the time, and the bonds between humans and animals touch on nearly every aspect of human society. In this First Year Seminar, we will explore human-animal relationships from the perspectives of our shared histories, environments, communications, places of interaction, and more! Key assignments ask students to conduct research about human-animal interactions on topics of their choice; field trips and course events invite students to observe and interact with animals and their caregivers.

This is an intensive two-week field-based course focusing on the San Juan Mountain Range in Southwest Colorado. Students participate in home stays, service-learning activities, and other field-based projects to examine regional social-environmental relations from diverse multi-cultural, institutional, and political-economic perspectives. In this way, students develop a critical place-based understanding of how recent "New West" socio-economic changes are impacting these relations, including new efforts to achieve ecologically sustainable and socially just solutions to land management problems.

Every day, hundreds of earth observation satellites pass overhead collecting imagery of our planet’s forests, urban areas, glaciers, oceans, and more. In this class we learn how to process and interpret this imagery to study environmental change. The class includes a student-designed final project and a field trip to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center outside of Washington DC.