Photography and Remembrance
Course number: HACU 0293
Professor: Sandra Matthews
Campus: Hampshire College
Roland Barthes called a photograph “this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.” Throughout its history, photography has been closely linked with memory. Through viewing images, reading, writing, research and discussion we will investigate the ways in which photographs have been used to memorialize people, places and events. Themes will include landscape photographs as sites of memory, photographs of or relating to death, still lives, and portraits made for personal or institutional recordkeeping, among others. We will explore the spectrum of sentiment in photography, and the relationship between photographs and history. This course is affiliated with the Sites of Memory project.
Landscape Studies Introductory Studio
Course number: ARS 386 01
Professor: Jeffrey Blankendship
Campus: Smith College
This hands-on studio will ask students to consider the landscape a location of evolving cultural and ecological patterns, processes and histories. Beginning from this set of assumptions, students will work through a series of projects (research, interpretive, documentary, as well as proposal-based), that encourage an engagement with the landscape, prodding us to critically consider the environment as a socially and culturally constructed space/place as well as a manageable resource. We will work in a variety of media including drawing, writing, photography, and digital image manipulation.
Ecology
Course number: Biol 23 1
Professor: Ethan J. Temples
Campus: Amherst College
A study of the relationships of plants and animals (including humans) to each other and to their environment. We'll start by considering the decisions an individual makes in its daily life concerning its use of resources, such as what to eat and where to live, and whether to defend such resources. We'll then move on to populations of individuals, and investigate species population growth, limits to population growth, and why some species are so successful as to become pests whereas others are on the road to extinction. The next level will address communities, and how interactions among populations, such as competition, predation, parasitism, and mutualism, affect the organization and diversity of species within communities. The final stage of the course will focus on ecosytems, and the effects of humans and other organisms on population, community, and global stability.
Biodiversity
Course number: Biology 108
Professor: Peter W. Houlihan
Campus:UMASS
For non-science or science majors; not for Biology major credit. This course will explore the evolution, extinction, and conservation of biodiversity on earth. We will survey the diversity of both ecosystems and organisms found throughout the globe. The generation of biodiversity will be explained by both ecological and genetic approaches to evolution. The loss of biodiversity due to historic extinctions and current human activity will be examined. We will use examples from all over the world, but will focus on many examples from New England and Massachusetts. One section will survey the history of wildlife in Massachusetts since European colonization.
Introduction to Environmental Studies
Course number:Environmental Studies 100
Professor: Beth Hooker
Campus: Mount Holyoke College
This course uses films, discussions, and field trips to introduce students to the complexity of selected environmental problems, attempts to foster an understanding of their origins, and discusses potential solutions. In addition, it introduces basic ecological principles, economic, political, and cultural concepts, and their importance to understanding and solving environmental problems.
Environmental Science
Course number:Environmental Studies 200
Professor: Jill Bubier
Campus: Mount Holyoke College
Most of our society's environmental problems are complex and interdisciplinary in nature. Environmental science is a course designed to teach integrative thinking, the "scientific method," and problem solving. Lectures will be drawn from a variety of scientific fields including ecology, hydrology, chemistry, geology, and biology with an emphasis on ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. The course will use case studies of regional environmental problems, practical hands-on problem solving, and landscape analysis. Training in field and laboratory techniques is an integral part of the course. Priority given to environmental studies majors.
Conference Courses in Environmental Studies: Enironmental Justice: Theory and Practice
Course number:Environmental Studies 321
Professor: Giovanna Di Chiro
Campus: Mount Holyoke College
Examines the historical, theoretical, and political foundations of environmental justice. Drawing connections between the exploitation of the environment and broader social dynamics of inequality, environmental justice link concerns with ecological degradation and sustainability with social issues such as civil rights, socio-economic inequalities. Uses interdisciplinary approaches from geography, anthropology, history, and political economy to explore diverse environmental justice struggles in both U.S. and international contexts. Examines interconnections between environmental justice theory and practice in contemporary issues focusing on health, livelihood, and community sustainability.
Environmental Science
Course number: Geol 91
Professor: Anna M. Martini
Campus: Amherst College
Industrialized society has been a major agent of environmental change. In this course, we will examine environmental issues by first examining processes that operate in natural systems and then assessing how we have modified such systems. Analysis of several environmental case studies will be used as a vehicle to understand the scientific issues associated with environmental change. Topics will include pollution, natural resources, global warming, landscape denudation, and habitat change. Data from the scientific literature will be emphasized.
Groundwater Geology
Course number: Geo 309 01 Lec
Professor: Robert Newton
Campus: Smith College
A study of the occurrence, movement, and exploitation of water in geologic materials. Topics include well hydraulics, groundwater chemistry, the relationship of geology to groundwater occurrence, basin-wide groundwater development, and groundwater contamination. A class project will involve studying a local groundwater problem.
The Human Landscape
Course number: Geo-Sci 102
Professor: Rutherford H. Platt
Campus: UMASS
A wide-ranging introduction to the ways people shape the world they live in. We will study the themes and concepts of human geography through the current issues and large questions, which guide them. Lectures and reading will focus on the geographic aspects of cultural diversity, population issues, states vs. nations, the global economy, development, urbanization and the human transformation of the earth. We will cover major subdivisions of human geography including cultural geography, population geography, economic geography, social geography, urban geography and political geography.
Introduction to Environmental History
Course number: History 2
Professor: John Broich
Campus: Amherst College
Environmental history is the study of how humans have influenced the environments around them and how the environment itself has influenced the course of human societies. This course provides students with the skill to identify and analyze these interactions. It introduces course participants to the main themes of environmental history literature and the driving questions guiding environmental history research by examining case studies drawn from around the globe, including pre-Columbian America, medieval Japan, and colonial Africa. This course will help participants recognize the important patterns and developments that have led to present day human-environment relationships.
Introduction to Environmental History
Course number: History 2
Professor: John Broich
Campus: Amherst College
Environmental history is the study of how humans have influenced the environments around them and how the environment itself has influenced the course of human societies. This course provides students with the skill to identify and analyze these interactions. It introduces course participants to the main themes of environmental history literature and the driving questions guiding environmental history research by examining case studies drawn from around the globe, including pre-Columbian America, medieval Japan, and colonial Africa. This course will help participants recognize the important patterns and developments that have led to present day human-environment relationships.
Interpreting Nature: Ecological Thinking and Practice in Europe, 1500 to the Present
Course number: History 256
Professor: Robert Schwartz
Campus: Mount Holyoke College
Studies European views of nature and the natural world from the late middle ages to the present. A case study of environmental change investigates the impact of industrialization and the railway system on the human and physical environments in nineteenth-century Britain. Central to this part of the course will be a hands-on introduction to new methods of computer-assisted mapping and data analysis known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Suburbia: the Middle Landscape
Course number: LSS 210 01 Col
Professor: Nina Antonetti
Campus: Smith College
Rural and urban landscapes are ancient, but suburban ones are modern. This course will explore suburbia as its own landscape and as a borderland between countryside and city. From the nineteenth-century town-planning initiatives in England to today's sprawl in America, we will consider such communities as Port Sunlight near Liverpool, England; Shaker Heights, Ohio; Levittown, New York; Columbia, Maryland; and Celebration, Florida. Readings on culture, politics, economics, and regional planning will highlight some of the contradictions that plague the conception, development, and future of suburbia, most notably transportation/isolation, homogeneity/inclusion, safety/security, historicism/utopianism, biophilia/biophobia, conformity/comfort, and capitalism/pastoral aesthetic.
Society & Environment
Course number: NRC 100
Professor: Robin A. Harrington
Campus: UMASS
Conservation principles and their application to problems in soils, water, forests, wildlife, mineral, and general landscape resources; relationship of conservation to national and international environmental issues.
ST- Conservation in the US
Course number: NRC 197 A
Professor: Micheal R. Ross
Campus: UMASS
The origins of conservation in the United States, and how it evolved to current times. Focus will be on people who provided pivotal influence on the conservation movement, and how we view the landscape. Contemporary issues will also be covered.
Environmental Politics in America
Course number: Politics 266f
Professor: Douglas Amy
Campus: Mount Holyoke College
This course offers a critical investigation of the questions of power, politics, and principles surrounding environmental issues in the United States. Topics include a history of U.S. environmental policy and an analysis of the workings of our major environmental policy-making institutions: Congress, the executive branch, the courts, and private corporations. A variety of approaches to environmental activism are also examined, including mainstream environmentalism, grassroots activism, and deep ecology.
Environmental History of North America
Course number: SS 0261
Professor: Robert Rakoff
Campus: Hampshire College
This course examines the historical forces that have shaped the human transformation of the environments of North America since the 16th century. We will analyze the impact of European settlement, colonialism and westward expansion, agricultural and industrial capitalism, and urbanization on our uses of nature and our ideas of and narratives about the natural world. We will pay special attention to the rise of the conservation and environmental movements and their impact on wilderness, economic production, public policy, and everyday life and culture. Students will undertake research on the environmental history of specific places.
