Environmental Studies

This course provides a sociological perspective on economic, social, and political processes, focusing especially on global social change and sustainable development. Students acquire the knowledge required to understand and critically examine the discussions pursued about the global social change that marks modernity, focusing especially on the post-war period. The course includes 4 modules: Classical and Modern Social Analysis; Contemporary Sociological Perspectives on Global Development; Global Sustainability and Environmental Sociology; and Social Sciences Methods.

The goal of this course is to enable students to apply the main instruments of impact assessment and mitigation in practical planning situations based on fundamental knowledge provided in the bachelor's degree program; to gain expertise about the contents and planning processes of instruments such as the German Impact Mitigation Regulation, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), EU Habitat Regulations Assessment (HRA) and Protected Species Assessment, as well as U.S.-American Wetland Mitigation and Endangered Species Mitigation; to recognize environmental and social needs and plan accordingly, and to identify interfaces with natural and social sciences; to apply planning instruments both in domestic as well international arenas; to judge the different instruments in their effectiveness and know how to generate appropriate research when needed and to identify and formulate research approaches for the further development of planning instruments, and; to identify and analyze aspects of gender mainstreaming in planning processes.

The course introduces students to different types and sources of pollution and their distribution and control methods, and students explore risk assessment strategies and the source-pathway-receptor framework to assess their risks to human and environmental health.

This interdisciplinary course provides students with the opportunity to address complex problems identified by industry, community, and government organizations, and gain valuable experience in working across disciplinary boundaries. In collaboration with a
major industry partner and an academic lead, students integrate their academic skills and knowledge by working in teams with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This experience allows students to research, analyze and present solutions to a real-world problem, and to build on their interpersonal and transferable skills by engaging with and learning from industry experts and presenting their ideas and solutions to the industry partner.

Ecology explores how organisms interact with each other and their environment at the molecular, individual, population, community, ecosystem, and global levels.  This introductory course covers basic ecological concepts and their applications in conservation, agriculture, habitat/ecosystem management, and climate change mitigation. Led by multiple professors with their extensive expertise in ecology, the course instructs on why ecology is the "user manual of the Earth" (Ho 2018) and how ecological processes play their role in maintaining biodiversity richness, ecosystem functions, and the overall health of our planet.  

In this course students learn about the atmosphere, ocean, and land components of the carbon cycle. The course covers global issues such as ocean acidification and how to get off our fossil fuel "addiction," as well as how to deal with climate change denialists.

This course equips students to understand causes, effects, framings of, and responses to climate change and related phenomena around the world, from a critical social science perspective. Building on anthropology's long-standing engagement with social transformation and human-environment relations, and more recent environmental turns across social sciences and humanities, students explore how recent identifications of climate crisis and debates around the Anthropocene are situated in longer histories of environmental change and social injustice, as well as their contemporary manifestations and politics. The course is grounded in empirical, ethnographic work that explores what environmental and social changes mean and entail for people, communities, organizations, and nations around the world - across Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Its approach to questions of climate and environment emerges from sustained attention to the afterlives of empire and ongoing colonial relations between Global North and South. Through a genuine engagement with decolonial and indigenous scholarship, as well as critical studies emerging from the Global South, the course offers students a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse range of analyses and discussions pertaining to the environment and climate change. 

This course examines the primacy of aesthetics in comprehending and responding to environmental crises by considering the role of the arts in addressing environmental disasters;  whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be grounded in scientific understanding; and the aesthetic dimensions of climate change, wastelands, wetlands, and wilderness. Attending the connection between historical conditions and philosophical notions, the course explores the emergence of environmental aesthetics within the European philosophical tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, concurrent with the first industrial revolution and rise of capitalism. It reviews classical and contemporary texts (from Immanuel Kant and Alexander Baumgarten to Peter Sloterdijk, Sianne Ngai, and Yuriko Saito), and introduces key categories: the beautiful, sublime and picturesque; landscape, scenery, environment; atmosphere, climate; Nature, the Anthropocene–and its critical alternatives. Deploying these concepts, the course analyzes contemporary works of art and literature grounded in awareness of ecological conditions quite different from older traditions (e.g. of landscape painting and nature poetry), examining the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and his former students, and science fiction writers from Mary Shelley to Kim Stanley Robinson. Finally, this course derives an important lesson from the history of aesthetics and its engagement with the environs: the aesthetic pertains as much to the background as to foreground of attention; to ambient conditions of everyday life as to works of art and unique sites. Thus, the course moves in the direction of a revaluation of our modes of life, with particular attention to our homely environmental aesthetics: the banal, quotidian, routine, and habitual aspects of our lives, homes, and streets. This is the arena in which the impact of environmental crises–and efforts to remediate them–is felt most acutely: in our patterns of consumption of energy and materials, how we dress, do chores, feed ourselves, transport, and communicate. Through these intimate investigations, the course considers how contemporary ideas of the environment call for a rethinking of aesthetics, as well as aesthetic approaches to environmental remediation. 

This course focuses on the estuarine, coastal, and marine processes and morphological features that determine the morphodynamic behavior of coastal systems. Coastal morphodynamics is defined as the mutual co-adjustment of coastal landforms and processes. Emphasis is on the behavior of sedimentary coastal systems, such as beaches and dune coasts, barrier island systems, tidal inlets, estuaries, and deltas. It includes the behavior of both sandy and muddy coasts. The time scales involved vary from less than a second (e.g., intra-wave processes; short-term) to decades (e.g., the coastal response to sea level rise; long-term). The course starts with the dynamics of wave-, tide- and current-driven processes and the effect on sediment transport processes and associated morphological change. The second part of the course deals with the morphodynamic character of different types of coastal systems. This is analyzed by discussing, evaluating, and quantifying the dominant processes, the relevant morphological features, and sedimentary products. Exercises, papers, and case studies are an integral part of the course and are used to develop skills in analyzing and solving coastal problems. The course also contains several lectures on coastal instrumentation (for example, remote sensing) and on the societal relevance of coastal processes in mitigating coastal erosion.

This course examines the economics of climate change. Topics include technology and the history of economic thought, the economic evaluation of climate change, and climate change and public policy instruments.