Introduction to Sustainability

Catalog description

How, why, and to what extent have human societies become unsustainable, and how might they be made more sustainable? This course introduces students to some of the complexities of these questions. Through a variety of approaches and perspectives, students explore sustainability in the context of human societies, other human systems, and the environmental systems with which human systems interact. Students learn to apply holistic thinking to identify situations that might make a society unsustainable, to reveal system interactions that contribute to the complexity of those situations, and to identify possible opportunities for making progress toward transforming unsustainable societies into sustainable ones. Course section themes will vary, and each will offer students a unique lens on the same problem: unsustainable human societies.