Sustainability, Society and Change I

Catalog description

As the first course in a two-course sequence, this course is an introduction to defining principles of environmental management and sustainability in the context of complex coupled social-ecological systems (SES) and the interdependence of people and nature at a variety of nested scales. Through examples, students analyze interactions between humans and their landscapes over time using different SES frameworks and related concepts, including planetary boundaries, resilience, robustness, ecosystem services and panarchy. The crucial role of personal ethical decision-making frameworks will be further analyzed, exploring the moral dimensions of a number of sustainability-related decision-making situations.