Sustainability 101

Catalog description

Modern global industrial civilization has reached a crossroads with the planetary limits of the global ecosystem including climate change, environmental contamination and mass species extinction with profound implications for the future quality and viability of life. This course examines the roots of unsustainable human behavior and the trends leading toward ecological overshoot. Students will learn about the emerging responses to these challenges and the multiple initiatives across sectors aimed at shifting humanity to a sustainable mode of existence. The course will explore the prospects for a Sustainability Revolution across geographies and scales and extrapolate future possible scenarios that will define the fate of the earth and the quality of life for future generations. The course is organized into 3 independent modules allowing the number of modules covered to reflect the number of credits the course is offered in a given semester.