Environmental Studies

Climate Intervention describes a set of ideas to cool the planet by increasing the amount of light the Earth reflects. The leading proposal is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, an idea which aims to mimic the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions, which research suggests would be fast, cheap, and imperfect. This idea offers the potential to arrest global warming and potentially greatly reduce the risks of climate change but presents a host of challenges, risks, and ethical questions. We could stop climate change early, but should we? This course provides students with the context to understand this controversial, emerging issue, the space to develop an informed opinion, and to develop the skills to express their view persuasively. 

In this course, students explore the debate over the onset of the Anthropocene, and the unique contribution that human geographers can make to it. Students gain a firm grasp on how the idea of the Anthropocene is re-shaping geographical thought, and encounter concepts and methods from across the field of human geography which can help us to think in new ways about the past, present, and future of human-environment relationships. 

While potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They are not equal to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the variety of barriers and their complex interactions including people’s perception, personal conditions, and institutional frames make this subject fuzzy and difficult to operationalize for planning purposes. Given the importance of barriers for decision-making of people, this class will conceptualize different barriers on realizing recreational benefits of urban green spaces within the frame of environmental justice. Studying multidimensional barriers allows for a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ decisions in terms of accessing recreational benefits and a discussion of planning responses. Based on theoretical insights and local examples, the focus will be on qualitative and quantitative assessments methods for studying barriers, as well as on potential planning pathways for mitigating or minimizing barriers.

Meat consumption has long been an emotionally charged issue, but contemporary debates over the ethics of eating animals are growing increasingly heated, fueled by the fact that modern livestock agriculture is held responsible for approximately twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This system's aim has always been to profitably produce an abundance of animal protein and it does so with tremendous efficiency; humans eat so many chickens today that chicken bones are considered one of the primary geological markers of the Anthropocene. Although this plenty provides essential protein for human diets, it also comes at an immense cost to environments, laborers, and the animals themselves and has resulted in the dramatic restructuring of lands, markets, and culinary practice worldwide. This course helps students understand how and why large-scale meat production became a central part of today's global food system. To do so, it combines approaches from environmental, economic, and culinary history and focuses primarily on the agricultural exchanges between Great Britain, Continental Europe, and the United States, both of which had outsized influence in shaping the contours of food production worldwide. The course develops a greater knowledge of the histories of agriculture, food commodity markets, and individual consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course provides a broad and coherent understanding of sediment transport, geomorphological processes, coastal deposits, and landforms in coastal environments. It builds an understanding and appreciation of coastal development over both short and long time spans and how (and why) changing boundary conditions (climate change; sea level change) affect these landscapes in the long term. This includes an appreciation of risks related to climate change along with possible adaptation strategies and measures. Topics include waves and currents; erosion and transport of sediments; beach and shoreface morphology; conceptual morphological models; stratigraphy and formation of coastal landscapes; beach erosion/accretion; coastal response to changes in sea-level, sediment supply and climate change.

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 four modules, this is the second module: Contemporary Sociological Perspectives on Global Development. The second module focuses on contemporary challenges to development in different parts of the world. It adopts both a macro and a micro perspective reviewing changes regarding the role of the state, labor markets, population structures, and families. Sociological theories and concepts are used to highlight how inequality is created and maintained by different power structures with regard to, for example, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, and intersections between them. The module focuses on contemporary economic and political sociology and feminist theory.

The Individual Research Training Senior (IRT Senior) Course is an advanced course of the Individual Research Training A (IRT A) course in the Tohoku University Junior Year Program in English (JYPE) in the fall semester. Though short-term international exchange students are not degree candidates at Tohoku University, a similar experience is offered by special arrangement. Students are required to submit: an abstract concerning the results of their IRT Senior project, a paper (A4, 20-30 pages) on their research at the end of the exchange term, and an oral presentation on the results of their IRT Senior project near the end of the term.

This course provides an overview of fisheries science. It focuses on the fundamentals of fisheries science as it relates broadly to marine biology, from molecules to ecosystems. The course is divided into two sections: Topics on Marine Ecology and Oceanography, and Topics on Physiology, Biochemistry and Genetics of Aquatic organisms.

This course examines environmental history worldwide. Through selected topics, it explores how human society and technology have shaped the environment through centuries, emphasizing the major changes of the past hundred years. As part of the methodology, Barbados will be examined as a microcosm of the global concern with human impact in the environment.