Explore Environmental Courses for Earth Day
In celebration of Earth Day, we’re highlighting a few of our many CLA courses that engage with environmental topics. Each course draws on the college’s interdisciplinary strengths, exploring key themes through its field of study while building skills and offering meaningful insight into today’s environmental challenges.
This course examines American Indian environmental issues in the U.S. and Canada, including the social, political, economic, and legal forces that shape them. Emphasizes colonial histories, ecological perspectives, and tribal sovereignty.
How do artists use creativity to work across disciplines to address ecological concerns? Explore the history, theory, and contemporary practice of artists engaged with ecological issues.
This course examines the historical, cultural, and material contexts of environmental communication. Develops understanding of how environmental messages are created and received, and builds communication strategies that support more sustainable social practices, institutions, and systems.
This course explores scientific and cultural theories about nature and human nature, and their influence on ethics, religion, politics, economics, civics, and environmental thought across Western and other civilizations.
This course examines how environmental futures are imagined in contemporary nonfiction writing. Focuses on food, climate, and decolonization, exploring how writers envision ecological crises and more just futures. Readings include essays and journalism on topics such as climate justice, Slow Food, and plant-based eating.
This course examines how political and economic systems have driven global environmental destruction, especially in the Global South. Topics include fisheries, forests, water scarcity, and individual and collective responsibility for environmental change.
This course explores how environmental thinking emerged as a social and political force through German literature and culture, with comparisons to developments in the U.S. and globally.
This course examines links between science, global inequality, and commodification. Topics include food insecurity, pollution, antibiotic resistance, climate change, and unequal access to innovations.
This course examines human–environment interactions and how environmental factors have shaped world history from c. 1000 CE to the present. Topics include climate, volcanic eruptions, landscapes, plants, animals, disease, energy, and technology, emphasizing the evolving relationship between human societies and the natural world.
This course examines climate change as a global crisis and why international responses have been slow. It covers causes, consequences, and solutions, including political and economic barriers to agreements.
This course explores competing systems of knowledge about nature and humanity in the medieval Iberian world and the Americas. It examines Muslim, Christian, and Indigenous cosmovisions and their approaches to environment, agriculture, health, and society.
This course examines how city streets have been designed and redesigned for walking and biking. It explores why active transportation matters for sustainability, safety, and public health.
