An interdisciplinary study comparing conventional and alternative land management practices, using an agroecosystem analysis approach.

Paradigms and concepts in ecological anthropology with an emphasis on adaptation and resilience.

Critical evaluation of the nexus between space, society and environment. An interdisciplinary approach to studying the ways biological, material, historical, political-economic and cultural processes combine to shape human-environment relationships in place-based contexts.

How policies are crafted to effectively address social issues, especially for agriculture and the environment, and how they impact society.

Theory, methods, and policy in environmental and natural resource economics.

Advanced theory, methods, and literature in natural resource economics, including dynamic programming and optimal control.

Advanced theory, methods, and literature in environmental economics.

This course provides an overview of sea level rise (SLR), with lectures on basic geophysics of SLR, the projected future impacts from climate models, and uncertainty around these projections. The impacts of SLR are discussed in a historical, present, and future context, focusing on social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions. This course is highly interdisciplinary and is designed to be accessible and engaging to students from across the university. Instructor: Patrick Keys

Introduction to the climate system and its modification by human activities, different potential climate intervention methods, and the social, legal and political issues salient to the topic.

Ambient air pollution is a burden that is not evenly shared. This graduate course is centered on a service learning project where students partner with a community to design, plan, and execute a hypothesis-driven air pollution measurement campaign over the course of the semester. Through this exercise, students will examine environmental injustice in an air pollution context, and gain an in-depth understanding of a particular environmental justice case in Colorado. They will learn to design, propose, and execute community-centered air pollution research, gain familiarity with multiple new low-cost air pollution monitoring technologies, and learn to communicate scientific findings centered on community concerns.

Presents entrepreneurs and innovators as powerful agents who can drive our movement to a sustainable economy and environment. Integrates intellectual foundations of economics with entrepreneurial thinking and applied knowledge of the energy industry. Through simulations, readings, examples and assignments, focuses on specific venture strategies that are being utilized to capture economic opportunities in various sectors.

Explore the ethical rationale for a sustainable economy and sustainable business. Discuss philosophical, economic, and business perspectives on sustainability ethics. Analyze the ethical underpinnings of sustainability and the implications for a sustainable economy. Examine prominent business ethic instruments that drive sustainable business practices.

The central role of chemistry for achieving sustainability in key areas including chemicals and materials, energy, and environment.

Management and planning of natural and constructed water systems. Integrated management and case studies of water use and environmental resources.

Infrastructure and utility planning, management, and security. Systems approach to life cycle management. Problems, analysis, decision support systems. 

Issues and state-of-the-art resources needed to construct, remodel/retrofit, operate and maintain the built environment (buildings and infrastructure). Specifically, resources will include major materials, components and technologies, as well as energy and water resources are needed in the different life-cycle phases of the building or infrastructure project.

Literary, critical, and theoretical representations of nature, animals, human-environment relations.

Professor Joanne Burgess Barbier is leading this course after being awarded a Sustainability Curriculum Innovation Grant from SoGES.

Professor Joanne Burgess Barbier is leading this course after being awarded a Sustainability Curriculum Innovation Grant from SoGES.

This course is designed for students from diverse backgrounds, providing a foundation in biological and clinical concepts relevant to public health and epidemiology.

Issues in environmental and occupational health sciences in the context of public health and regulatory concerns.

This course introduces Health Impact Assessment (HIA), emphasizing health equity and practical application across various sectors. 

Principles of ecosystem sustainability and threats to sustainability. Students will investigate and develop case studies.

Preparation for international climate negotiations including the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Conference of the Parties (COP) in locations around the world. Explore environmental sustainability issues on international teams with peers from other institutions. Teams examine environmental issues/policies through a research project, and have the opportunity to prepare for actual climate action negotiations.

Provides hands-on experience in international climate negotiations including the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Conference of the Parties (COP) in locations around the world through virtual participation. Explore environmental sustainability issues on international teams with peers from other institutions. Teams examine environmental issues/policies through a research project, and have the opportunity to participate in actual climate action negotiations..

Overview on i) the unequal distribution of the benefits of natural resource use and the burdens of environmental degradation across spatiotemporal scales, and ii) the role of policy tools and approaches in creating, exacerbating, or addressing those inequalities. Examine environmental and climate justice (EJ/CJ) concepts, recognize environmental and climate inequalities, and learn how to integrate EJ/CJ considerations in policy analysis and review.

Provides hands-on experience in international climate negotiations including the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Conference of the Parties (COP). Explore environmental sustainability issues on international teams with peers from institutions around the world. Teams examine environmental issues/policies through a research project, and have the opportunity to participate in actual climate action negotiations at the UN Climate Conference.

How the world's poor and minorities self-empower to challenge institutional racism and government apathy in order to secure basic environmental goods. 

Climate change necessitates a critical perspective on forms of social configuration and worldly lives. Students will study the intense and intimate entanglements of race and sex with climate change. Race and sex are embroiled within Climate Change in explicit forms of access to resources and health, but also in terms of racial capitalism, human/non-human matterings, and the (im)possibilities of queer forms of life and death.

Critical examination of history, public policy, and tribal strategies for economic development and natural resource management in Indian country. 

Historical and contemporary examination of the intersections between disability, race, and gender within environmental histories, discourses, and movements. 

Laws and policies impacting indigenous women, children, families, and communities in North America, New Zealand, and Australia.

Critical disability studies focusing on the social and cultural constructions of disability within intersectional frameworks.

Principles and geospatial tools to explore conservation science and practice through diverse social and cultural perspectives. Through discussions and hands-on mapping exercises, develop a spatial understanding of diverse perspectives and social justice issues in conservation, including mapping local ecological knowledge, patterns of environmental injustice, hotspots of biological and cultural diversity, human-wildlife conflict, and non-colonialist geographies. No GIS experience required. Instructor: Sara Bombaci

Analysis of the different major dimensions/definitions of sustainability in current issues involving environmental, social and economic systems.

A broad overview of Food/Energy/Water (FEW) nexus issues, including the science underpinning FEW and the trade-offs, socio-economic constraints, and policy limitations inherent in FEW challenges. Introduction to tools that enhance systems-level thinking and problem solving.

Major works in the field of world environmental history and the major historiographical debates.

Techniques for effective sustainability assessment of engineering process and products, including factors such as upstream energy and material burdens, model boundaries, sensitivity analysis, end of life, material and energy recycling, scalability, and optimization. Engineering process models will be used to assess technologies through economic feasibility and life cycle impacts.

History, theory, practice, and evaluation of community-based natural resource management.

Explores the origins of political ecology and evolution of decolonial feminist political ecology scholarship that interrogates historical and current colonial processes and structures, drawing from the scholarship of color.

Major concepts, methodologies and issues in the field of environmental public health.

Current public health issues related to interactions among people, animals, and our environment.

Aesthetic appreciation of nature, duties concerning fauna, flora, endangered species, ecosystems.

Examines procedural environmental injustice, as defined by the exclusion of marginalized groups from decision-making processes and the underenforcement of environmentally protective regulations in marginalized communities. Exploration of the degree to which power, equity and inclusion in policy processes create and perpetuate marginalization, weaving a single case study throughout the semester for illustration.

Examines environmental politics in developing countries and evaluates climate change, natural resource governance, and environmental justice. 

Public and private policies to promote sustainability and social justice in a globalizing world.

Domestic, international, and comparative dimensions of environment and natural resource politics and policy.

Examines research related to the key themes of power, development, democracy, inequality, justice, labor/work, and social transformation. Analyze themes through a variety of theoretical literatures and practical examples.

This seminar explores questions of social and environmental justice during green/sustainability transitions through the lens of the concept of just transition. A just transition is one that is socially and ecologically just towards the people and natures affected by a transition. In this seminar, in fact, we will expand the universe of transitions in a variety of ways, particularly to reflect your interests. First we will assume that all social transitions are also environmental and all environmental transitions are also social. Second, we will move beyond energy to address a range of sociotechnical transitions, including  transitions in the organization of production and consumptions and the nature of work (The Future of Work). Third, we will also focus on social transitions, whether related to gender, race, ethnicity or class. Finally, because of the foundational significance of global social divisions of labor, this seminar will be particularly attune to questions of positionality across and within borders. Thus this is not a seminar exclusively and narrowly on just green transitions but, rather, uses the concept to explore broader debates in green political economy and political ecology with particular attention to socioecological justice, power and democracy. Instructor Dimitris Stevis. 

Selected primary materials on governmental performance, groups, and mass public in American environmental politics.

Political thought applied to questions of the environment.

Theories and methodologies used in analyzing international environmental politics and policy.

Application of comparative political theory to analysis of environmental politics.

Effects of regulation, intergovernmental relations, and resource availability on federal environmental programs in U.S.

The course is designed to critically evaluate the complex interaction between social systems and the environment. In doing so, pressing environmental issues are investigated using environmental sociological theories. The primary goal of the course is to examine why and how environmental benefits and burdens are unequally distributed among different classes, races, genders, and nationalities and what are the consequences of the unequal distribution. Identifying and investigating possible solutions to the problems is also one of the major goals of the course. - Instructor, Azmal Hossan

Roles of government and civil society in creating environmental problems and in developing effective responses to those problems. 

Investigates the institutional drivers and social experiences of inequities in the food system. Examines how the food justice movement responds by organizing for grassroots, community, and global, as well as cultural, economic, and political change. 

Technology as a social phenomenon interacting with social organization and the natural environment.

Analyzes how human societies interact with and depend upon water with attention to institutions and inequalities. Examines various power dynamics of water access, control, rights, and management, and sustainable and just solutions to complex water problems.

Determinants and consequences of behavior and response to environmental extremes including floods, earthquakes, wind, severe storms, and technological emergencies.

“Food is necessary for human survival.” We hear this hackneyed axiom regularly. But what does this mean? In and of itself, it masks the social with an appeal to the biological and overlooks the ecological as an invisible prerequisite. In the spirit of unmasking the complexities of food systems this course delves into why food matters to society beyond the obvious need for sustenance. We investigate the economic, political, and social underpinnings of food and agricultural systems as well as ecological and non-human animal entanglements to better understand entrenched problems. Turn on the television or dive down a web portal and you are inundated with a barrage of information and lurking ideologies to sway your views. Debates rage over how to amply remunerate food chain workers, stave off the environmental degradation associated with industrial capitalist agriculture, use mechanical- and bio-technologies, solve global hunger and obesity, respect cultural foods and culinary traditions, reimagine gendered divisions of food labor, re-center the production of food within cities, and so on. In the mix are food social movements that navigate the complicated terrains of colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, institutional racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression as they struggle for different food futures. In brief, we foster a sociological imagination on the matrices of power that weave their way through and into food. Topically, food is noteworthy. Sociologically, food systems become an analytical framework for understanding the uneven relationship people have with this vital life source. Roll up your sleeves and dig in. You are about to cultivate new insights and tools to unpack the ongoing transformation of food and agricultural systems. Instructor- Joshua Sbicca

This graduate level course examines the unequal distributions of environmental risks, benefits, policies and regulatory practices across different populations. The course explores the meaning of social justice, environmental justice, environmental quality and environmental equity and examines the history of the environmental justice movement and evidence of environmental injustices. Processes of social control in response to environmental harms and policies that address environmental inequities are considered as well as political economic explanations of injustices.

Connections between social organizations, the environment, and science and technology.